Grand Design

While U.N. and Katangese troops fiercely battled in the Congo, a conference in Nigeria last week stubbornly insisted that man's conflicts may ultimately be solved by law rather than war. Chief advocate of that "grand design": Washington Lawyer Charles S. Rhyne, onetime president of the American Bar Association and now chairman of its special Committee on World Peace Through the Rule of Law. Said Rhyne: "We must do the seemingly impossible by turning the opinion of most men from the view that our task is Utopian and beyond reach into the view that if man can split the atom and conquer outer space, he can also develop law rules and institutions to achieve and maintain world order."

At the conference in Nigeria's gleaming new Federal Palace Hotel, lawyers and jurists from 33 African and Middle East nations unanimously adopted an eight-page document known as the Consensus of Lagos. Most significant proposal: to establish a permanent Organization of African States for the peaceful settlement of disputes, such as the Congo's civil war. As a model for the organization, Lawyer Rhyne pointed to the European Court of Justice, the forum for adjudication of trade conflicts within the European Common Market whose decisions are binding on member states. In the past six months, said Rhyne, the European Court has settled more cases than the International Court of Justice at The Hague has resolved in 15 years. It is "erroneous" to object that such supranational institutions infringe on national sovereignty, Rhyne reasoned, since actually, they are "not a diminution but an exercise of sovereignty designed to acquire something a nation needs rather than to give up something it already has."

Last week's conference was the third of four regional gatherings at which lawyers of all nations are to lay the groundwork for a grand "summit" meeting of world law tentatively scheduled for New Delhi next year. Among other proposals of particular relevance to Africa, the Consensus of Lagos urged:

>Guarantee by incorporation into international law of the right of all nations to self-determination.

>"Effective legal protection of fundamental and inalienable human rights without distinction as to race, religion or belief"--a resolution that was aimed as much at Kwame Nkrumah's Ghana as at apartheid-ruled South Africa.

>Enlargement of the U.N. Security Council in proportion to the number of new nations, mostly African, that have become U.N. members: "a strong, independent U.N. Secretariat; and continued development of the U.N. peace force."

While most young African nations are critically short of native-born lawyers--newly independent Tanganyika has two, both of whom attended the conference--the meeting in Lagos showed them to be as eager to extend the rule of law as their counterparts anywhere in the world. Said Nigeria's Chief Justice Sir Adetokunbo Ademola: "This is a world conference, not a conference of Western powers. The world is interested in peace, and this is the only way to ensure it."

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