"Foreword" [2019] ELECD 489; in Bailliet, M. Cecilia (ed), "Research Handbook on International Law and Peace" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2019) xiv

Book Title: Research Handbook on International Law and Peace

Editor(s): Bailliet, M. Cecilia

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN: 9781788117463

Section Title: Foreword

Number of pages: 5

Extract:

Foreword Asbjørn Eide
It is a great pleasure to write the Foreword to this Research Handbook on International Law and Peace in which the contributors examine the main avenues through international law towards sustainable peace, exploring its variety of meanings and priorities. This Foreword draws on the approach to peace used in the recent UN Declaration on the Right to Peace (A/res. 71/189) adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 19 December 2016. That Declaration states in its operative Article 1 that `Everyone has the right to enjoy peace such that all human rights are promoted and protected and development is fully realized.' As a former Secretary-General of the International Peace Research Association and one of the founders of the Norwegian Centre for Human Rights at the University of Oslo, I warmly endorse this understanding of the essential substance of the right to peace. Equating `peace' with the promotion and protection of all human rights has a long and constructive legacy in the UN. Its roots go back to the dramatic years before the UN was established. It might indeed be argued that the conception used in the Declaration on the Right to Peace was already laid on January 6, 1941, through the State of the Union Address to the US Congress by the US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It is therefore useful to place this in a historical context, going back to the profound crisis in the world system in the early years of ...