"Foreword" [2019] ELECD 923; 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

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 inter-
national 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 ...