Roosevelt's treaty left in tatters (Sydney Morning Herald)

[undeterred]

http://smh.com.au/news/World/Roosevelts-treaty-left-in-tatters/2005/06/16/1118869045129.html?oneclick=true

A British barrister and writer believes George Bush is destroying the global order formed after World War II, writes James Button. The Nazis were already in Vienna when Leon Buchholz fled, his six-month-old daughter Ruth in his arms. When the Germans marched into Paris the father and daughter, as Jews, were forced to hide. They were separated for five years.

Ruth saw her father and mother - who had managed to hide in Vienna - only after the war. Her son, Philippe Sands, grew up in London astonished by his family's story. As a young man, he was drawn to the law. He was fascinated by "the dreadful things large groups could do to minorities and what the law could do to prevent them". He learnt that in the 1930s states did whatever they wanted to their minority populations, with no fear of sanction. But in August 1941, on a warship off the Newfoundland coast, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill drew up a charter for a different world.

The Atlantic Charter envisaged a global order based on free trade, human rights and the abandonment of war. It helped give birth to the United Nations in 1945, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, and a host of other bodies, treaties and agreements that came to define modern international law. And it has inspired Philippe Sands.
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When those planes hit the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001, Sands was not much more than a kilometre away, giving a seminar at New York University. He came out of his class to pandemonium: it seemed as if the world had been transformed. Whether it was or not is the subject of his book Lawless World - America and the Making and Breaking of Global Rules. Sands, 44, is a professor of law at University College, London, and one of Britain's leading barristers in international law. He has represented one of Britain's Guantanamo Bay detainees and countries from Croatia to Congo. With other barristers, he also shares his chambers with Cherie Blair, wife of the British Prime Minister.