French Supreme Court Attorney Outlines Hopeful Vision for EU
LAW & JUSTICE, SOCIETY & CULTURE, SECURITY
Saturday, November 21, 2009
François-Henri Briard
Attorney for the Conseil d'Etat and the Cour de cassation of France
Président, Institut Vergennes
Excerpts from a Speech to
The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies
National Lawyers Convention
Washington D.C.
13 November 2009
International law needs the agreement of authentic actors, on common values, to generate a real and binding rule of law. As a laboratory for the integration of national legal cultures, the European Union experience is the "embryo" for the future of international law. Europe remains a work in progress, and it has not reached its definitive shape, neither in its geographical dimension, nor in its political ambition.
However, with the ratification of the Treaty of Lisbon and the election of EU executive officers, everything seems to converge, stepwise, in this European upward walking toward a more and more advanced harmonization that, most probably, will soon conduct us to a special form of federalism. But, this federalism must be based on common values.
A certain conception of Freedom and Justice, Peace and Democracy, are those common values that were born in Europe. To be complete, Legitimacy must be added as a value, which is more and more needed.
Globalization accelerates time and creates the need to strengthen our fundamental values in order that diversity be transcended in such a “community of nations” brought together by the same vision.
The need for a clear expression of our fundamental values is necessary because globalization vastly intensifies the impact of economic and financial movement, making of those criterions the illusions that they are the most important.
Two reefs should be avoided. The first consists in a useless accumulation of international law; and the second is the risk of taking advantage of that law, just as if it was a tool at the disposition of each party. Those two reefs accentuate the necessity to focus on and consolidate our common values.
Human rights are an apodictic example. In the past, human rights were invoked to justify colonization as well as decolonization.. Today, Fidel Castro proclaimed “human rights, that’s me” and Mouammar Khadafi created the “Khadafi human rights prize.” We can obviously see here two examples of caricatural distortion. And those examples illustrate that human rights have no value in those two respective countries. And notwithstanding the atrociousness of the political manipulations of various dictators, this is the core of the problem.
A continuous debate about collective values, regional or universal, is a permanent necessity in order to make emerge the awareness of the fact that on questions like human rights, national security, environmental goods or international migrations, purely national responses are no longer adequate.
Common values, in their precise meaning, are then the reason for us to be interdependent, and to materialize this interdependence in a solid rule of law. Such a debate will allow us to define the common goods that we would like to promote and defend collectively at the global scale. Once we have identified and agreed on core values, we need to ensure that we stand together in their application to concrete cases.
Ultimately, Justice, and its respect, must irrigate the EU and international law experiences.
Because, as some authors have observed, globalization, at least for the moment, "is not keeping its promises," the international organizations that participate in the development of international law must promote authentic Justice. If they do not overcome their limits,
as time passes by, the value of Justice of which they were granted will slowly move away from them.
France and the EU, by pursuing a regional integration that is legitimately rooted in the common values of Freedom and Justice, Peace and Democracy, can give birth to a method of developing international law that portends a limited role for global governance. The key is to not short-circuit this important regional process to satisfy demands to remedy the economic inequities of globalization with illegitimate, undemocratic, and arbitrary international soft law norms.
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