Articles - From the Vicar

November 1999

The Dutch lawyer and theologian Hugo Grotius (1583 - 1645) was something of a child prodigy: he entered university at the age of eleven and was practising as a lawyer by the age of sixteen. Of more significance to future generations, however, was Grotius’s contribution to the development of a theory of natural rights, a theory which, in a modified and revised form, played an important part in the drawing up of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights after the second world war (almost exactly 300 years after Grotius’s death). Grotius has become known as the ‘father of international law’: believing that human beings were born free and equal, he saw it as the job of human laws and institutions to ensure that this ‘natural’ state of affairs was protected. There is a distant echo of this view in the various United Nations resolutions that have established peacekeeping forces around the world, most recently in East Timor.

The Universal Declaration assumes that the legitimacy of any government may be, in large part, determined by its attitude to human rights. The sanctioning of arbitrary arrest, torture and extra-judicial killing as well as the banning of open political debate are some of the characteristics shared by governments that sit lightly to human rights. Whilst the international community might not always be consistent in its attitudes to such governments, the Universal Declaration does at least constitute some kind of yardstick against which governments can be measured.

Judged by this yardstick the military government of Augusto Pinochet in Chile lacked legitimacy. It assumed power after a violent coup against Salvador Allende’s democratically elected regime and abused the human rights of large numbers of Chile’s citizens, forcing many of them into exile. But it is because of evidence that the military government also abused the human rights of non-Chilean citizens that Augusto Pinochet is now under house arrest in the UK, awaiting the outcome of an extradition request made by Spain twenty six years after the coup that brought him to power. As we approach Remembrance Sunday, and reflect once more on the cost of the fight against this century’s totalitarian regimes, I feel thankfulness - and some pride - in living in a country that will apply the rule of law even to former Heads of State.

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