Let us rise to the challenge; let us go back to this rich repository of ancient wisdom which is there for the seeking and which we have neglected for centuries; let us go to it again and make the law, once more, worthy of its mission.
The following essay based on a lecture by C. G. Weeramantry, former President of the International Association of Lawyers against Nuclear Arms. He was a Sri Lankan lawyer who was a Judge of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) from 1991 to 2000, serving as its vice-president from 1997 to 2000. Judge Weeramantry passed away in 2017
by Judge Weeramantry
Thank you very much for organizing this lecture. It gives me great pleasure to be able to speak to a group of Sri Lankan lawyers, law students, and others on a topic which, of course, is not very often considered either in legal curricular or in judgments. People often ask me how I became interested in this wider range of knowledge. I have been thinking about it and what happened was that I was, as you know for many years, a practitioner and a judge in Sri Lanka but as a judge, in Sri Lanka, I could not travel overseas. I used to receive invitations to give lectures in different countries but I could not do that because each time I left the country I would have judicial work to attend to and I would have to get permission from the governor-general, so I could do that only once a year at the most. Then what happened was that I had an attractive offer as a lecturer in law from Monash University in Australia, and I took that and that opened the doors to me to the wider world. This was because in the university when you receive invitations to lecture at various places they encourage you to go and even assist you to go. The whole world opened up to me through that; the whole world would have been closed to me if I continued as a Supreme Judge in Sri Lanka.
Let me also tell you something of what the Holy Prophet* said in regard to what humanity is doing to itself, this is so relevant I think everybody should know it. Those of you who are not Muslim will not be aware that apart from Quran, which of course is the word of God, there is a collection of the Hadith or the sayings of the Prophet*, because for almost a hundred years after he died if the scholars heard that there was a man in China who was the second cousin of a friend of a companion of the Prophet*, they would send somebody there to see if there was a tradition in those circles of what the Prophet* had said or done and there was about a 100,000 of these were collected and brought back. The scholars went through everyone meticulously and weeded out about 95,000 or more saying that links in the chain were not absolutely clear but 3,000-4,000 of these are preserved as Hadiths. One of them is the hadith of the two-deck boat which is a wonderful statement of what humanity is doing to itself which applies here and now as vividly as when the Prophet* said it. He*said: imagine there is a boat with two decks. There is the upper deck and the lower deck. As is the human custom, quarrels break out on the upper deck, and as is the human custom quarrels break out on the lower deck; people have a tendency to quarrel with each other. Then what is worse, there is a big quarrel between the lower deck and the upper deck. So what can you do? The lower deck can’t have any interaction with the upper deck but now a situation arises where the lower deck desperately wants water. They can only get that water if they go to the upper deck but they can’t go to the upper deck because of the quarrel. So there is a huge discussion on the lower deck about what to do about this and then a hot head in the lower deck says: “if the water is what you want I will get you any amount of it”. He takes a pickaxe and is about to make a hole in the bottom of the boat. So he says that is what humanity is doing itself. Isn’t that a beautiful description of the nuclear bomb of today? We have huge quarrels between different sections of the world and brilliant people who will say they will solve it, and how will they solve it? With a pickaxe and the drown everybody. So that is the situation in which humanity is placed today. Why? Because we are not taking heed of the teachings of the great religions. Why? Because we are not interlinking this with international law; so international law remains an avid discipline: just the letter of the law and does not have the spirit of the law, the wisdom, the mercy, the justice, all of which can be brought into it by religion.
These are the reasons why I think we must mount a crusade and we lawyers, I think, are the people to blame. If you look at the history of the legal profession, I think it is a rather dismal history. Take Christian legal systems with highfalutin legal professionals, for generations they tolerated slavery. How could slavery have existed in a Christian society with the lawyers not putting their feet down on it and stamping it out saying we cannot have this. But not only did they permit it, the approved of it, they participated in it, they sent people to slavery, and not only that but imperialism, conquering of territories of poor people, acquisition of those territories, taking captives and making slaves of them, all of this the legal profession approved. They sent people to Australia for life-long servitude for stealing a loaf of bread. Why? Because the law is equal; the law treats everybody equally and everybody, equally, is prohibited from sleeping under the bridges and stealing bread. So if anybody steals bread he will be sent to servitude: if the duke’s son steals bread he will be sent to penal servitude but of course, the duke’s son does not need to steal bread. Thus the law has been totally neglectful of these various insights and Jesus was the person who most tellingly and emphatically warned the legal profession to go beyond the letter of the law to the spirit of the law but we are not doing that. We should be giving leadership to show the world how these things can be brought into the domain of law. I have always thought that legal education is far too narrow; before we get to the nuts and bolts of the law we should teach them history, sociology, philosophy, linguistics, economics, and all the various aspects of human knowledge which have a bearing on legal decisions. We do not do that and the result is that they become very legalistic lawyers and the nets are swallowed but the camels go free. All of this is because the law is so tight to the letter of the language in which the law is drafted but we have to go beyond that. We are the people with leadership but we are not giving that leadership, we are defaulting in our trust and the judiciaries of the world also ought to become leaders in this.
It so happened that I had the privilege recently of chairing a committee of chief justices of the world to try to work out a code for judicial ethics for the whole world. So we had sittings in various capitals all over the world and we have worked out a code of universal judicial ethics for the whole world and they draw upon the high standard of conduct expected of judges all over the world even from the time of the Egyptian pharaohs. One of the Egyptian pharaohs three thousand years ago had told Ramses’ chief justice: “remember, the court of justice is the center of the administration of my kingdom. If you do not do your work properly there then the whole kingdom goes that way. Every tradition has stories about this. I told you about the laws of Manu and the judge extracting the dirt from the wound and in Islamic tradition, there is this wonderful story. There is this tradition of the just Caliphs; those who conducted themselves righteously. One of the just Caliphs had lent a suit of armor to one of his subjects and the subject was not returning it. So the Caliph wanted to get this suit of armor back and he could have sent one of his officials to seize the suit of armor but he didn’t do that. Instead, he filed an action in the court of law as an ordinary subject asking for the return of the suit of armor. On the day of the trial, he walked into the court as an ordinary litigant. The judge, seeing the Caliph come in, rose in his seat deferentially. The Caliph looked at him and said: “This man is not fit to be a judge; he does not know that all litigants before him are equal. I may be the sovereign of this country but when I come into court I come in as the equal to everybody else”. He then removed the case from that judge and had it before another judge. Now, the standard of things like that you will find in every tradition and we incorporated all of that into a code of universal judicial ethics which has now been adopted by 50 or 60 countries around the world.
That is a very brief resume of the linkage between religion and law; the way in which we can use religion to make the law a leader of society. Law is taking a backward place and we are just doing what the letter of the law says without thinking of the high principles behind the law. Let us rise to the challenge; let us go back to this rich repository of ancient wisdom which is there for the seeking and which we have neglected for centuries; let us go to it again and make the law, once more, worthy of its mission.
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