Remarks by the Australian High Commissioner, HE Robyn Mudie, at the launch of the Second volume of the Memoirs of Judge C.G Weeramantry, ‘Towards One World: The Australian Years’.
Tuesday, 24 September 2013
Good afternoon distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen.
Welcome to the launch of the second volume of the memoirs of eminent Judge C.G Weeramantry, ‘Towards One World: The Australian Years”.
Anyone who knows Judge Weeramantry and his long list of achievements and experiences will understand why he needs several volumes of memoirs to cover his life.
The first volume covered his distinguished career in Sri Lanka as a lawyer and Supreme Court Judge.
I have the privilege of launching this second volume because it outlines Judge Weeramantry’s many years living and working in Australia.
Judge Weeramantry’s third volume of memoirs will be on his election by the United Nations General Assembly and Security Council as Judge of the International Court of Justice (ICJ 1991 – 2000) and the years beyond.
This volume was first launched in Australia in September last year. It describes Judge Weeramantry’s years in Australia, many of which were spent as an academic at Monash University. Judge Weeramantry was, according to Monash’s current Vice-Chancellor, one of their best regarded academics.
I think anyone who reads this volume will be struck by the fact that Judge Weeramantry has lived his life on a very broad canvas. He has achieved more in one life than would be within the grasp of most ordinary people if they lived their lives several times over. The Judge has five Higher Doctorates. He has written over 20 books as well as 250 articles which have been published in all the leading law journals from various parts of the world. He has travelled extensively as a guest lecturer and key note speaker at numerous international events reflecting the broad reach of his academic knowledge and the regard with which he and his views are held by the legal profession the world over.
While it’s impossible to do justice to all of this at today’s event, I hope the following summary will give some flavour of the extent and impact of the Judge’s career and work.
Judge Weeramantry took oaths as a lawyer in 1948, the year Sri Lanka gained its independence.
He had a fruitful career in the private bar before joining the judiciary. He was the youngest judge to be appointed to the Supreme Court at the age of 42 in 1967.
Changing course in 1972, Judge Weeramantry moved to Australia with his wife Rosemary and young family of five children. He settled in Melbourne, where he joined Monash University as a visiting professor of law.
This move marked a significant change in direction in what was already a distinguished legal career. Had the Judge stayed in Sri Lanka he would, undoubtedly, have gone on to even greater things in the legal world.
As he describes it, the move into academia was for Judge Weeramantry a plunge into the unknown. It was an opportunity for him to move away from nearly a quarter of a century of immersion in the practical aspects of law into “an exhilarating world where there was much concern for research and for the development of the law, as opposed to success in individual cases”.
The move to Monash was the beginning of a quite extraordinary journey in which Judge Weeramantry would progressively expand his expertise from contract and comparative law, to international and human rights law, to environmental law, to the emerging area of law, science and technology to name just a few areas.
One of Judge Weeramantry’s key strengths is his ability to understand and explore the linkages between the law and new and emerging global issues. As Sir Gerard Brennan, former Chief Justice of Australia writes in the introduction, the Monash years gave the Judge opportunities to develop his vision of the law as a normative influence in society, not by philosophical reflection alone but by observing sensitively and insightfully, social phenomena which illustrated the informing values of the law.
A hallmark of his approach to his work was his insatiable interest in the world around him. This prompted him to move from one major emerging legal field to the next, and it is reflected in the number and scope of the areas in which he made his mark. To name but a few of these;
In 1975 Professor Weeramantry wrote The Law in Crisis: Bridges of Understanding, a significant volume in the annals of law which addressed his concern with the growing distance between the law and the layman, and between lawyers and the public they serve.
The book inspired the establishment of “Law Week” in Australia, an event that is now an annual feature in the legal calendar and whose aim is bring the law and legal procedure in closer contact with the general public. Today, this event is marked in many countries across the world including Sri Lanka. It has been held in Australia each year for more than 30 years.
In 1976, America celebrated its bicentennial. To mark this occasion, the International Association for the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy held the World Conference on Equality and Freedom, in order to highlight these central values from the American constitution and their integral value to the world.
Judge Weeramantry’s presentation to this conference, on the Third World perspective, broke new ground in drawing attention to the rich traditions of equality in Hindu, Buddhist and Islamic thought. Commentary at the time referred to his paper as “a Magna Carta for the Third World.”.
In 1979, Judge Weeramantry’s expertise in Roman Dutch law, along with his work on the Law in Crisis led to him being invited to a Visiting Professorship at Stellenbosch University in South Africa. This was, as the book notes, almost inconceivable. Stellenbosch was recognised as being at the apex of the world of white South Africa and the invitation came at a time when apartheid was seen as one of the world’s most intractable human rights problems.
Judge Weeramantry accepted the invitation on condition that he could speak and move freely. In addition to his lectures, he used the opportunity to explore with white students the whole question of apartheid and its infringement on human rights. He recorded his views, including a series of “heads of action” in a book entitled, Apartheid – the closing phases. The book was launched in Australia by Bob Hawke, who later went on to become Prime Minister of Australia. The book was banned in South Africa, but it was twice published secretly in the country. It was recognised as having made an important contribution to the anti-apartheid movement.
A recurring theme in this memoir is Judge Weeramantry’s abiding interest in the relationship between law and human rights. When he first took up his position at Monash in 1972, human rights were still very much in the category of “soft law”. Judge Weeramantry took a leading role in designing and teaching one of the first courses on human rights in Australia. Over the years he made significant contributions to discussions on the translation of human rights to “hard law” as well as to the intersection between ethics, human rights and modern scientific advances.
This was the theme of his seminal work The Slumbering Sentinels: Law and Human Rights in the Wake of Technology” which was referred to in a memorandum to the 1992 World Conference on Human Rights by the then UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros Ghali. The Secretary-General’s strong endorsement of the work prompted a new focus by the UN on this important emerging area.
Judge Weeramantry’s increasing stature on the international stage led to his 1987 appointment as the Chairman of the Commission of Inquiry into the Worked Out Phosphate Lands of Nauru. The Commission was an important final step in resolving the final vestiges of UN trusteeship over Nauru, which had achieved independence in 1968. The Commission’s findings laid the basis for a claim by Nauru against Australia, as a former trustee power, in the International Court of Justice.
The Nauru Commission case made Professor Weeramantry a household name among jurists worldwide and prompted his eventual nomination and selection to the International Court of Justice in 1990. In a somewhat ironic twist, he was a member of the Court when the Nauru case was heard, and the Court ruled against Australia.
For over a decade at the ICJ, Judge Weeramantry would be part of the international body that set some of the most significant legal precedence of our time, eventually becoming Vice President. But this is a subject for another volume of memoirs!
After retirement, the Judge returned to Sri Lanka and in 2002 set up the Weeramantry International Centre for Peace Education and Research. In addition to legal research, the centre held workshops that brought together students from all parts of Sri Lanka to foster inter-cultural understanding. The networks that these workshops created continue to engage in their communities in various parts of the country.
Judge Weeramantry is the recipient of many awards for his services and contributions. His birth country has bestowed on him its highest honour of “Sri Lanka Abhimana” (Pride of Sri Lanka). In 2003 he was appointed as a member of the Order of Australia for his services to the law. As Former Australian Chief Justice Sir Gerard Brenann said, in fact “his service is truly to the whole human family". He is also the recipient of the UNESCO Prize for Peace Education in 2006 and the Right to Livelihood Award by the World Future Council for his advocacy of the rights of future generations.
In recognition of his extraordinary contributions to the life of the university and its body of academic work and teaching, Monash University keeps an office available for Judge Weeramantry where he continues to be a visiting Emeritus Professor
As I said earlier, this memoir covers an extraordinary range of academic and legal achievement. It documents just one chapter of a life lived on a very broad canvas and which has been marked by the ceaseless pursuit of more knowledge.
As Judge Weeramantry himself puts it: “The range of experiences to which I was exposed, during my Australian years, bring to mind the observation of Socrates that “I know nothing except the fact of my own ignorance”. The more information one acquires, the more one realises the truth of this observation, for every new fact one learns makes one aware of a hundred new questions to which does not know the answers.
In reading the book myself, I was struck by a key theme - how easy it is to lose sight of the bigger picture when you are focused on the minutiae of your daily endeavours. While Judge Weeramantry makes this point in relation to the law, it applies equally to any profession or discipline.
At its core, Judge Weeramantry’s memoir contains a resounding call to the legal profession to lift its gaze and seek a broader perspective so that the value and order of the law can be brought to bear across the global spectrum. I think it’s fair to say that all of us would benefit from applying this principle to our own lives and pursuits.
As the Judge observes, “life is the story of a constant quest for knowledge and the more one knows the more the wonder grows”.
We and countless others who have benefited from his work are very fortunate that Judge Weeramantry has managed to both live life according to this maxim, but also to document the results of his work and his experiences, so that others can benefit from his quest for knowledge, and share in the wonder it has brought.
On that note, it gives me great pleasure to launch this volume “The Memoirs of Judge CG Weeramantry, Volume II: The Australian Years” here in Sri Lanka.
Thank you.