THE LONDON DECLARATION OF (TRANSNATIONAL) JUSTICE A Collective Manifesto Developed at the Transnational Law Summit, 10-13 April 2018. Presented by the KTLS18 Programme Committee.
Questions, so many questions.
Answers, so few.
Where to begin the development of impactful interventions?
With friends.
We have been thinking, listening, formula5ng. This is what we have come up with. Together .
THE LONDON DECLARATION of TRANSNATIONAL JUSTICE A COLLECTIVE MANIFESTO. #KTLS18. 13 April 2018.
A PLURIVERSE, AND YET. 1. Humans inhabit a pluriverse of values and ways of being. But, they live in a world of division, exclusion and violence. Law plays a crucial part in sustaining and reinforcing, but also in invisibilising these divisions. So, do lawyers.
RETRAINING COMPETENCES. 2. Lawyers must learn to grasp the world in its manifestations and their complexity. In order to craft impactful legal tools, which are responsive, inclusive and transformative, lawyers must recognize law‘s embeddedness in evolving normative regimes. Lawyers can be agents change or defenders of still- stand. They can justify or challenge the reasons and desired outcomes of legal action.
LAW IS PART OF & MAKES OUR WORLD 3. Law is embedded in a comprehensive and interdisciplinary quest for knowledge. This quest engages law‘s analytical tools, perception lenses and interpretative frameworks. We need a critique of understanding which is at the heart of social / cultural theory, political philosophy and post-colonial studies today. Lawyers (and, law students) should know that.
LAW: GOVERNANCE TOOL & SOCIAL THEORY 4. By placing “law“ in the context of social theory and the critique of rights, power and violence, we deny law any privileged place. Instead we critically re-appropriate it as space, as critique, as technique, as tool. We need to acknowledge law‘s inherent normative claim, but not to take it for granted or deem it universal. Law will seek expression in different ways. “LAW“ should not make us blind or mute for these.
LAW: ITS EVOLVING ACTORS, NORMS & PROCESSES 5. The struggle for law and justice today is transnational. We need to relearn what we know about “law” and critically engage with the evolution of new legal Actors, Norms and Processes on every level of human society – around the world.
THE SEDUCTION OF NUMBERS
RESIST QUANTIFICATION. 6. We need to engage and learn to resist our belief in progress and growth and in limitless opportunities. But, ‘No Growth‘ is not the Answer. In a universe of ‘rankings’, algorithms and the ‘quantification of everything’, we must break the spell of numbers, and shift our gaze to the mess, to the disorder, the unique and the plural.
WE ALL HURT. 7. We must learn how to see, to hear, to touch and to feel – the materiality of a volatile world and its hurting inhabitants. Therefore, we say: Allow yourself to feel pain, your pain and distress, your sentiments of being lost. Open yourself to others and their distress. And, be mindful of your deafness, blindness and insensibility.
CRITICAL MEASUREMENTS OF POWER & JUSTICE. 8. Move from quantities to qualities. Use ‘alternative‘ methods of analysis, of mapping and representing qualities of poverty, physical & mental illness, inequality, social exclusion and marginalisation. Facilitate, support and disseminate new modes of voice, imagery, sound and emotion. But, pay attention to the generation and implementation of power and “law”/law through different media.
CONNECT THE ISSUES. CONNECT THE ACTIONS. 9. None of the problems facing the world can be understood or addressed in isolation. While being grave and overwhelming in their own right, they are systemic and need systemic and interconnected responses.
TAKE BACK THE MARKET
ENGAGE A SOCIO-LEGAL CRITIQUE OF MARKET FUNCTIONS, ACTORS & NORMS. 10. Property Rights are not natural, and neither are markets in the legal sense. Markets are constituted by the allocation of rights, but these are often tied to implicit and naturalised pre-conceptions of ‘functioning markets’, from which understandings of economic & political agency are derived. By de-objectifying markets, property rights can be reconceptualised as platforms and as invokable claims of socio- economic emancipation in step with political rights.
THE LARGER CRISIS BEHIND THE CRISIS OF LABOUR. 11. Labour law is in crisis, and this crisis is driven by external forces. The financialization of the past decades continues to strain and to exhaust many of the institutional and procedural ties that used to support collective systems of social protection. The transnationalization of the economy through a global division of labour, ‘branding’ and global supply chains erodes traditional forms of labour organization and employees’ rights protection.
DISPLACE THE “FORMAL” LABOUR PARADIGM. 12. If labour rights are connected to formal work most working people in the world are excluded. While the crisis in unionism, worker rights protection and labour law must revisit the struggle for and the seemingly irreversible loss of the welfare state, this ‘rise-and-fall‘ is incomplete. A forward-going, transformative narrative of labour-oriented economic justice must be co -generated from within the vast sphere of informal work in the South and the North, not from a universalized, but only local Western experience.
TOWARDS TRANSNATIONAL ECONOMIC JUSTICE. 13. The decline in workers’ protection and state-backed organisation is part of a comprehensive shift in political preferences and modes of economic governance. Political and socio-economic agency, based on gender equality, is key. This struggle – embedded in different ‘labour histories’ and experiences around the world – is a transnational one for economic justice. The crisis of ‘work’ and labour law will only be resolved through a transnational engagement for social, economic and political rights.
INEQUALITY & BASIC INCOME. 14. The more unequal a society the greater the social pathologies. Social pathologies come from and increase with a loss of collective empathy. We must come together do counter the falling apart of society, of the communities that we could build and that will hold and sustain us.
FINANCIALIZATION & DEMOCRACY 15. “Scarce capital” is a myth. Capital is produced by private banks and backed by our/the public’s creditworthiness. Let’s think of the public as the franchisor of banks. Our call is one for the democratization of finance from within the economic system, not from the outside. The volatilities, uncertainties and new vulnerabilities brought about by a globally financialized economy requires critical and transformative concepts, that must be developed and tested. Let’s engage in earnest experiments with financial institutions (e.g. job guarantee, basic income, complementary currencies) to reflect social relations and produce the social relations we desire.
THE FIGHT FOR TAX JUSTICE. START. 16. An international tax system which permits corporate entities essentially to float above countries, never once taking root in the fiscal responsibilities that ground communities and contribute to civic sustainability, has become banal - all too commonplace, expected, and ultimately condoned. The legal focus on the difference between tax ‘avoidance’ and ‘evasion’ distracts from pragmatic efforts to build the international tax system we would like to see. The international tax system began in Somerset House - where the first model double taxation convention was agreed - a century ago – and today’s home of The Dickson Poon School of Law of King’s College.
THE FIGHT FOR TAX JUSTICE. RE-START. 17. It is time to fashion a transnational tax system for this century. The international tax system of today was founded so as to allow capital to move around the world, and to prevent it from stagnating in wealthy countries - as its founders believed, to turn debtors into customers. Today criminal law, taxation law, trade law, human rights law, and activism all focus on pragmatic solutions to bring money back onshore, and to counter the false temptations of ‘races to the bottom’, and economic "efficiency" and attractiveness.
ROBOTS. MADE BY US – TO REPLACE US? 18. We live in a world of machines. We need to define our relation to these machines, which we designed and which challenge our most fundamental conceptions of personal – and, collective – political and moral responsibility. As the design, use and functionality of robots evolve, we need to revisit and challenge the transformation of work into ‘jobs’, the erosion of a legally institutionalized system of employment and social fabric, in which so many humans have become dis- empowered, precariarized tools in a globally integrated economy – not much unlike robots, really.
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