Lawless World

On this 60th anniversary of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and 1st anniversary of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, one might ask why it took an additional 59 years for indigenous peoples to be considered human beings, but leaving that aside for the moment, one might well ask what went wrong with the whole noble enterprise initiated in 1948? For the answer to that all-encompassing question for humanity, one might very well begin by reading Lawless World by Philippe Sands. If nothing else, one will begin to be able to get one’s mind around the fact that the United States — which played host to the delegates in 1948 — over the last 30 years has become the largest threat to human rights aspirations in the world.