UNITED NATIONS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 937, 26 July 1957, Page 11

UNITED NATIONS

Sir,-Your correspondent Norman Walwyn writes: "Law requires, however, that each individual or group shall keep the peace or respect the rights of others, and it is this law which our police force is designed to uphold." He then asks: "Is an international police force the proper instrument of a similar law between nations?" The answer to this question would depend entirely upon the nature, functions and powers of the international police force and the structure of the agency controlling it. A police force in British countries and those with similar political concepts is understood to be a civil force responsible for maintaining public order. It is concerned with the enforcement of established law and it has power to arrest and bring to trial indivicuals who have violated the law. Its function is neither punishment nor repression, but the prevention and detection of crime. An international police force similarly designed and empowered could menace individual or group rights only if the world laws were unjust or repressive. If the world government controlling the world police force were so constructed as to ensure that its laws were just, representative and strictly limited to the spheres delegated to it by the national governments and their peoples then the answer to Mr Walwyn’s question would be very definitely in the affirmative. A world police force will not come into existence except as part of a general plan of world security, which would include national disarmament. The world police force would reach its maximum strength when the nations had disarmed to the level necessary for the maintenance of domestic orcer. In such circumstances the world police force would not be the massive body that would be required to keep the peace among nations armed to their present level. A force such as this would not be matched against the combined strength of the national governments, and this fact wou!d effectively restrain the world police or government from invading the reserved rights of the nations. When hydrogen bombs and inter-con-tinental missiles have been developed to

the point where a nation’s survival will be decided in the first few minutes of a war, and where the odds will be all in favour of the nation that strikes first, there will be no room for public or parliamentary discussion of the question of war or peace. It is to prevent this final and complete elimination of democratic control of national governments that the World Federalists propose the establishment of a cemocratic world federal government through amendment of the United Nations Charter,

G. C.

TITMAN

(Auckland).

(fhis correspondence is now closed.--Ed.)