Toespraak van Timmermans bij het 100-jarig bestaan van het Vredespaleis

Toespraak | 30-08-2013

Mr Secretary-General, Your Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen,

I greatly appreciate the presence here today of UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and Mrs Ban, at a time when the UN system and international law are again being put to the test. I also welcome President Tomka, Secretary-General Siblesz, Legal Counsel O’Brien, Chair of the Carnegie Foundation Bernard Bot, Judge Seifi and Mayor Van Aartsen. I’m really looking forward to the debate that we are going to have this afternoon.

If you look back on the era in which the Peace Palace was opened, you might be surprised that it was opened at all. Indeed, the signs at the time were very mixed:

The period between the first Hague Peace Conference in 1899 and the opening of the Peace Palace in 1913 was one in which statesmen, diplomats and lawyers were grappling with the codification and renewal of international law. It was a time when the heads of state of Russia and the United States gave interstate cooperation an unparalleled boost: Tsar Nicholas II and President Theodore Roosevelt helped make both peace conferences a reality. And it was a time when private enterprise went hand in hand with public leadership, as witnessed by Andrew Carnegie’s gift to the international community: the building next door [the Peace Palace].

But it was also a period of continual conflict. In Europe, tensions were brewing that would culminate in the battlefields of the First World War, whose outbreak the world will commemorate next year. And while the economy back then displayed a degree of globalisation that now seems commonplace, the business of warfare was globalising rapidly too. The 19th century had already shown that modern warfare was no longer a European monopoly. There were hundreds of thousands of casualties in wars across the Atlantic, like the American Civil War, the War of the Pacific between Chile, Bolivia and Peru, and the Paraguayan War. The colonial project in Africa and Asia reached its climax, too. European powers learned that colonialism was not without risks, and that there were limits to the expansion of empire. And apparently sometimes there were no limits to European cruelty in those parts of the world.

New technologies for waging war emerged, like the aeroplane and the submarine, raising new questions for the law of war. New phenomena like civilian internment and ethnic cleansing foreshadowed alarming developments. This seems to be something that we see in all times, that the law always lags behind military developments. For instance, now we have to think about ways of handling the new element in warfare which is the drone. Here too the law is still under development, and we need to develop it further.

In short, diplomacy aimed at promoting peace went hand in hand with the steady dehumanisation of war, at strategic, tactical and operational level. To quote Charles Dickens: ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness.’ 

It is no less surprising that the Peace Palace survived the Second World War intact. After all, the evacuated Palace was a site of resistance activity, which in fact was at odds with the Court’s neutrality. The surrounding area was also used as a missile launch site and suffered bombardment itself:

• Resistance worker Cock van Paaschen printed the underground newspaper Je Maintiendrai on mimeograph machines in the Peace Palace.
• Another resistance fighter, Wim Berssenbrugge, photographed a V2 rocket in the gardens of the Peace Palace, ready to be launched at Britain. 
• And on 11 April 1944 the Palace was on the flight path of an Allied precision bombing campaign against the Central Population Register, located in the Villa Kleykamp, only 200 metres away (now the site of NIBC Bank).

So looking back on the past one hundred years, it’s both surprising and gratifying that the Peace Palace itself and the ideas of its founders are still alive and well. In the context of the time, the initiative by the Russians and Americans was truly visionary. They knew that the proliferation of new weapon technologies alongside rising defence budgets would pose inherent dangers, fuel international tensions, remove barriers to war and make warfare more horrible than ever. They believed that stricter and more systematic rules for the law of war – accompanied by a system for the peaceful settlement of disputes – could keep these dangers in check.

It is worth observing here that both the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) work on the basis of very old but very sound instruments. For the PCA, it is the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907. The ICJ is governed by the Statute annexed to the UN Charter, which corresponds closely with the 1922 Statute of its predecessor, the Permanent Court of International Justice.

Fortunately, we can see that these instruments have withstood the test of time without any problems. And other methods for the peaceful settlement of disputes included in the UN Charter, such as mediation, are still alive and well. The instruments we have are good. The point is that the world needs to make more use of them. And we must continually make sure that the system can respond adequately to the problems we face today.

At the end of the day it comes down to a lack of political will, not a lack of instruments. Look at Syria: as long as atrocities continue to take place, we have to be honest and admit that we are not there yet. The people of Syria dream of a life in peace, and we need to continue our joint efforts to help them achieve this.

The Netherlands is committed to a peaceful future for Syria. I think all of us are facing at home the questions of our children when they see the atrocities on television and ask us, ‘What are you doing about this?’ Of course action should not be inspired by the simple need for action per se. It should be inspired by the wish to provide for the children of Syria the same peaceful environment that our children take for granted and accept as a reality from day to day. I believe this wish should inspire us to look for ways of solving this problem.

I know extremely well that there can only be a negotiated solution to the fundamental problems we face in Syria. But I also know that an international legal order that is incapable of action when there are such flagrant violations of its most fundamental principles will weaken itself not by action, but by inaction. And we have to be very aware of this when considering the steps we need to take.

And I will repeat here what I just said in the press conference: I applaud the leadership of Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. He was courageous last week. He pulled it off when he got the inspectors a mandate to go to Syria to conduct this investigation. And I think we owe it to the Secretary-General, we owe it to the UN system and we owe it to the international legal order to let the inspectors do their job and report to the international community. Then we can take it from there.
I think we still need, as we move forward, to improve the mechanisms for peaceful settlement of conflicts, and I hope we can talk about this today. The world is indeed a village, but it is not a village where the rules apply in the same way to all people. I see three ways forward:

• We need to encourage countries to recognise the ICJ’s compulsory jurisdiction. As members of the United Nations we recognise the ICJ as a principal organ of the United Nations. In our view, recognising its jurisdiction is a logical and necessary next step.
• Second, we must help countries realise how useful and flexible arbitration is as a way of settling disputes. The Security Council and the General Assembly could draw parties’ attention to this instrument more often, and perhaps we should also advocate it more in the public debate.
•  Finally, we must reduce the obstacles to the peaceful settlement of disputes by making alternatives, like mediation, available. That is why the Netherlands is enthusiastic in its support for the UN’s Department of Political Affairs and for NGOs that promote mediation.

Of course, we won’t achieve our goals with these steps alone. As I said before, simply promoting these mechanisms is not enough. Elihu Root, Theodore Roosevelt’s Secretary of State, once said and I quote: ‘The matters in dispute between nations are nothing; the spirit which deals with them is everything.’  It is that spirit which we must cherish and encourage.
Mr Secretary-General, let me reiterate: I’m deeply honoured by your presence. In the past year you have put the peaceful settlement of disputes back on the agenda. Please let me join you now in signing the statement.