On the featured image: Taken by the author – The never ending emergence of new from the old

“Die Menschlichkeit ist da, wo Du und ich und jeder sonst sie leben. Daher ist sie da, auch wenn sie grad weint und sich geschlagen und getreten und geprügelt in einer Ecke verkriecht. Wir pflegen sie, wir lieben sie, wir stehen ihr bei und für sie ein.”

I wrote this to a dearest friend. She currently works in New York, as part of a national mechanism constituting the overarching work of the U.N. Security Council. The mandate of this national mechanism in this collective endeavor comes to an end by the end of this year, by natural rotation to another Member State. Over the past two years, this dearest friend of mine has invested her work into upholding, maintaining, extending, deepening the awareness for gender issues. For the promotion of female rights. For the promotion of protecting women against domestic and gender-specific violence. For the context between this work and the work on protecting the rights of children. Often enough, inextricably intertwined with the work on protecting minorities.

Two years of her life she invested into this high-power exercise. She wrote about her exhaustion at the end, taking the never-ending frustration into account which roots in the ability of some of the members of the Security Council to block everything by a Veto. These five permanent members of the Security Council, of course, established the possibility of vetoing each and any proposed decision of the Council both for reasons of national interests of the most powerful States post World War II, but also for other reasons, such as being able to maintain an orderly course of this highest body of the World with responsibility for Peace and Security, in light of the rotation of non-permanent Members in and out, which always includes great opportunities combined with some risks, and equally important in light of that those who constitute the P5 are not a uniform quintuplet. May be it was the combination of a will to trust with keeping a system of checks and balances running which motivated those founders, too.

Some of these risks we see these days: As the U.N. Charta promotes fundamental rights, including the universal requirement to adhere to respecting Human Rights, and also fundamental safeguards, including the prohibition of a War of Aggression, and the adherence to International Law such as the Law on Armed Conflicts protecting civilians, a violation of these laws and principles by the Council’s very own members becomes a stress test for the principles on which the U.N. is founded. It becomes an existential threat when some of the most powerful members of the Security Council, the “Permanent Five or P5” both violate the principles which they are upholding, and when they permanently exercise their right to veto for no other reasons than pure national selfishness.

This process is not new, it has a long history, and no member of the Security Council could safely say that they NEVER exercised their veto rights as a consequence of national deliberations. I also believe in that the world is not black and white, so in each of these cases vetoing parties will also often quote reasons which made them exercising their veto, reasons which somewhat can be understood on a more political level.

Anyhow, this history partly also is a shameful history. And beyond that, in each case where the Council failed, and fails, to address core interests of humanity and humankind, the constituting principles get eroded. I have personal exposure to that during my time in New York. In several prominent cases this incapacitated our joint desire to help, when help was most needed by people in the middle of a storm. I won’t shame and blame, therefore I’ll keep it with a general statement like this.

Next, I would point to that the use of vetoing for national and selfish reasons has proliferated over the last years to an extent one can only label as “endemic”, in ways which paralyse the work of the U.N. Security Council. As all self-fulfilling prophecies go, the inability to act collectively, as Security Council and as all depending bodies of the United Nations, being it the Secretariat, or it’s Agencies, the incapacitation leads to a progressive disregard of their very own raison d’etre. Which may be, I can not help but saying, part of the strategy of some which are represented in the Council: “Use it, don’t make it strong except when you can control it, otherwise weaken it.”

So my friend experiences this exhaustion, and it was against the background of what I wrote in “Shutting Down” that we had this conversation in which she asked the rhetorical question where “Menschlichkeit”, or “humanity” has lost, along that trajectory.

Here my answer again, translated into English:

“Humanity can be found where you and I and everyone else is living it. Humanity exists, therefore, even at times like right now, when she cries and feels beaten-up and bruised, cowering in a corner. We take care of her, we love her, and we stand in for her.”

Between my writing “Shutting down” and today I got news about some more people who I know who have shut down, have allowed to go astray, broken by the onslaught. I had conversations about it. We stay positive. We emphasize empathy.

And we exercise no-tolerance. Meaning we do not condone people in public functions, public officials or people exercising functions which are funded with public money, veering off course, embarking on bias and intolerance. We nurture messages of compassion and empathy. And we do not become complicit to messages of hate. It has consequences.

Which is reminding me that I still have not managed to continue my next instalment on “Integrity” within the “essays on policing”.