Give judgment for me, O God

4 December 2005

Government according to the rule of law, OK - but not government according to corrupt law

The Prime Minister of Singapore's government never tired of repeating that Singapore and the rest of the world must follow the rule of law. By this he meant, of course, Singapore's law. People must respect, he asserted, Singapore's sovereignty particularly in the matter of its law. Nobody had a right to intervene. It was Singapore's business, and its alone, what it was to do with Nguyen Tuong Van.

In the previous comment, I mentioned that the United Nations in practice certainly does not think that each country has a right to generate any old arbitrary law that contravenes the basic principles of justice. Crimes against humanity fall into this category and the world through the agency of the United Nations is ready to intervene when such crimes occur. Former President of Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic, will testify to this from the seclusion of his silent cell in The Hague. 

Thus, despite the wild relativist discourse that seems to flow from UN bodies and its representatives on occasions, the claim that there exists certain crimes regardless of the time and place, and the person/people committing them, implies the existence of an immutable moral framework. This has been called through the centuries The Natural Law. The Natural Law - the laws of God - must be presupposed in the generation of any legislation. Without that, legal provisions composed by bodies who call themselves governments are not legitimised and those governments function in reality as brigand governments.

It is clear when members of Singapore's oligarchy talk about law they mean that their law is synonymous with their will. It's up to the world to have the resolution to teach them otherwise.

It's an irony that that great Irish member of the British parliament, Edmund Burke, instigated impeachment proceedings against Warren Hastings, the former governor of India - a country very close to Singapore - on these very grounds. It was the mother of all trials in late 18th century Britain.

Burke accused Hastings of overseeing, as Governor-General of Bengal and representative of the British Empire in India through the East India Company, the rape, pillage and oppression of the Indian people. Hastings answered these charges by claiming an 'arbitrary' competence that could not be 'too despotic' under the terms of the East India Charter. In other words, he was justifying his regime in India by appealing to the geographic situation of his rule, the nature of the people involved, and the 'rights' given him in the East India Charter. Burke fell back time and again on the Natural Law to demonstrate the corrupt nature of Hastings' defence. Here is just one of those passages in his address to the impeachment panel:

Will you ever hear the rights of mankind made subservient to the practice of government? It will be your lordships' duty and joy - it will be your pride and triumph, to teach men, that they are to conform their practice to principles, and not to derive their principles from the wicked, corrupt, and abominable practices of any man whatever. Where is the man that ever before dared to mention the practice of all the villains, of all the notorious depredators, as his justification? To gather up, and put it all in one code, and call it the duty of the British governor? I believe so audacious a thing was never before attempted by man. 'He have arbitrary power!' My Lords, the East India Company have not arbitrary power to give him. The King has no arbitrary power to give. Neither your lordships, nor the Commons, nor the whole legislature, have arbitrary power to give. My Lords, no man can govern himself by his own will; much less can he be governed by the will of others. We are all born - high as well as low - governors as well as governed - in subjection to one great, immutable, pre-existing law, a law prior to all our devices and all our conspiracies, paramount to our feelings, by which we are connected in the eternal frame of the universe, and out of which we cannot stir. This great law does not arise from our combinations and compacts; on the contrary, it gives to them all the sanctions they can have. Every perfect gift is of God: all power is of God; and He has given the power, and from whom alone it originates, will never suffer it to be corrupted. Therefore, my Lords, if this be true - if this great gift of government be the greatest and best that was ever given by God to mankind, will He suffer it to be the plaything of man, who would place his own feeble and ridiculous will on the throne of divine justice