Alfred de Zayas: Threats to Peace & How to Fix the UN
Geopolitics & Empire
Geopolitics & Empire
4.2 • 568 Ratings
🗓️ 1 June 2016
⏱️ 14 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEkI6FALU-s
What are the greatest threats to civilization today? Why are the TTP and TTIP dangerous to democracy? How do states misbehave at the United Nations? How do we fix the United Nations? What human rights do whistleblowers such as Julian Assange and Edward Snowden have? What are the responsibilites of governments and citizens in global civil society?
Websites
https://twitter.com/alfreddezayas
https://dezayasalfred.wordpress.com
http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/IntOrder/Pages/AlfredDeZayas.aspx
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred-Maurice_de_Zayas
http://alfreddezayas.com
About Alfred de Zayas
Alfred-Maurice de Zayas studied history and law at Harvard, where he obtained his J.D. He practiced corporate law with the New York law firm Simpson Thacher and Bartlett and is a retired member of the New York and Florida Bar. He obtained a doctorate in history for the University of Göttingen in Germany.
Mr. de Zayas has been visiting professor of law at numerous universities including the University of British Columbia in Canada, the Graduate Institute of the University of Geneva, the DePaul University Law School (Chicago), the Human Rights Institute at the Irish National University (Galway)and the University of Trier (Germany). At present he teaches international law at the Geneva School of Diplomacy.
In 2009 de Zayas was a member of the UN workshop that drafted a report on the human right to peace, which was subsequently discussed and further elaborated by the Advisory Committee of the Human Rights Council. He is also a signatory of the Declaración de Bilbao and Declaración de Santiago de Compostela on the Human Right to Peace. He served as a consultant to the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights on the issue of mercenaries. De Zayas is an expert for civil and political rights and has published nine books on a variety of legal and historical issues, including “United Nations Human Rights Committee Case Law” (together with Jakob th. Möller, N.P. Engel 2009), and has been co-author and co-editor of numerous other books, including “International Human Rights Monitoring Mechanisms” (together with Gudmundur Alfredsson and Bertrand Ramcharan). His scholarly articles in the Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law, Oxford Encyclopedia of Human Rights and Macmillan Encyclopedia of Genocide, encompass the prohibition of aggression, universal jurisdiction, the right to the homeland, mass population transfers, minority rights, refugee law, repatriation, legal aspects of the Spanish Civil War, indefinite detention, Guantanamo and the right to peace. He is fluent in six languages and has published a book of Rilke translations with commentary (“Larenopfer”, Red Hen Press 2008) and is completing the translation of Hermann Hesse’s “Das Lied des Lebens”.
From 2002-2006 he was Secretary-General, from 2006-2010 President of PEN International, Centre Suisse romand. He was member of several advisory boards, including of the International Society of Human Rights (Frankfurt a.M.), Zentrum gegen Vertreibungen (Berlin), the International Human Rights Association of American Minorities (Canada) and of the conseil scientifique of the Académie International de droit constitutionnel (Tunis). He has received several awards, most recently the “Educators Award 2011” of Canadians for Genocide Education.
*Podcast intro music is from the song “The Queens Jig” by “Musicke & Mirth” from their album “Music for Two Lyra Viols”: http://musicke-mirth.de/en/recordings.html (available on iTunes or Amazon)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | What are the greatest threats to civilization today? |
| 0:14.0 | There are too many major threats. |
| 0:18.0 | Let me name five. Extreme poverty and pandemics plague our world. But instead of |
| 0:26.6 | addressing these problems honestly and expeditiously, governments are engaged in needless wars |
| 0:33.5 | fed by the military industrial complex. Some countries spend 40% of their budgets in war and war-related |
| 0:44.9 | activities. This is obscene. A second concern is the challenge to global governance |
| 0:53.5 | posed by investors and transnational corporations |
| 0:57.0 | whose only interest is short-term profit and not development or human rights. |
| 1:04.0 | Current trade agreements do not ensure the primacy of human rights |
| 1:09.0 | and actually stand in the way of their implementation. |
| 1:12.6 | The so-called investor-state dispute mechanism ISDS has led to egregious arbitral awards. |
| 1:21.6 | Now, pursuant to Article 103 of the UN Charter, the Supremacy Clause, all treaties, including |
| 1:31.4 | trade agreements, must conform to the United Nations Charter. |
| 1:36.6 | If they don't, they are invalid. |
| 1:40.7 | But this conclusion must be formulated not by me, a special rapporteur, but by the International |
| 1:48.8 | Court of Justice. |
| 1:50.0 | A third major concern is debt restructuring. |
| 1:54.8 | The special rapporteurs Cephalumina and Juan Pablo Boslowski have written excellent reports with pragmatic recommendations. |
| 2:06.4 | But financial institutions and vulture funds are still causing huge damage to human rights |
| 2:12.2 | in many countries, primarily developing economies in Latin America, Africa and Asia. |
| 2:19.3 | A fourth problem is the existence of tax havens. |
| 2:23.3 | These must end. |
... |
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