WINNING THE PEACE

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 2, Issue 181, 3 July 1940, Page 6

WINNING THE PEACE

law amongst nations must BE ESTABLISHED AFTER WAR PUNISHING AGGRESSOR The necessity of winning the peace as well as the war, and reorganising the League of Nations with the lessons learnt from the bitter experience of the past, was stressed by Mr D. Campbell,•, a visiting Australian University student, when addressing the Rotorua Rotary Club at the weekly luncheon. He contended that whatever the faults of the league had been, it was obvious that some council of | the nations was necessary where international law could be exercised. A warning against the excess of sentimentality following the Great War was also issued. "Law is not worth the paper it is written on unless there is the certainty that anyone breaking the law will be punished," Mr Campbell asserted, in pointing out that the failudc of the League might be attributed largely to the fact that the sanctions clauses had proved inadequate. The only obligations of the member States of the League of Nations had been moral ones. t In tracing the development of international law from medieval times until it was formulated first in the 17th century and later codified at conventions at The Hague in 1899 and 1907, the speaker stated that there were grounds for both optimism and pessimism. Although the system of international law had made slow progress over the years, it was obviously futile to trust any longer in international goodwill. The basis if the system was the belief that no state existed supreme to itself and that there must be some custom regulating the intercourse of nations. "It is significant that the two great challenges to international law have come from the same nation, first under the Holienzollerns and then under Hitler. In infamy triumphs, there will be no future for international law, because ler has broken every recognised rule governing the relations of states. Despite this, I believe that there is, no other study which offers such scope for original and constructive thought," Mr Campbell stated.