CYIL 2012

SŁAWOMIR REDO

CYIL 3 (2012)

1. Introduction The Preamble in the Charter of the United Nations declares: “We the Peoples of the United Nations determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind” … and “to unite our strength to maintain international peace and security” . 1 Virginia Gildersleeve, a U.S. professor of literature and the most senior member of the US delegation at the San Francisco Conference that drafted the UN Charter, felt that its Preamble should be short, moving and beautiful. She believed that its text should be “something simple that every school child in the world could commit to memory and that could hang, framed, in every cottage on the globe” . 2 The drafting Committee concurred and emphasized that the Preamble “should have the harmony in ideas, the tone in words, and the light, which can awaken the imagination of men to the points at issue, kindle their feelings, and move them” . 3 Consequently, such text was adopted, as quoted above, whereby its seven first words were patterned after the opening of the U.S. Constitution. 4 In all fairness, save her dedicated involvement and two incidental interventions by other U.S. delegation members, other UN Charter framers had neither “the faintest interest” 5 in its Preamble nor, let alone, in the two words therein that form the focus of this essay. They all were involved in elaborating the “control” part of the Charter, i.e. in its international machinery aiming at maintaining global peace and security. However, it is exactly from those two words that various demographic and hereditary implications may be drawn for international peace education, including the United Nations Criminal Justice Studies. In those Studies’context, only 45 years later the concept of “succeeding generations” (up to that point faintly related to war prevention) did receive some more attention, when the 1990 “United Nations Guidelines for the Prevention of Juvenile Delinquency 1 Originally written by Jan Smuts, the South African veteran Field Marshal, as: “The High Contracting Parties, determined to prevent a recurrence of the fratricidal strife which twice in our generation has brought untold sorrow and loss upon mankind…” which would have been similar to the opening lines of the Covenant of the League of Nations. The text was criticized by the U.S. delegate for its “clumsiness”, as “lacking any soul” and“a literary and intellectual abortion” (Schlesinger, S. E., Act of Creation: The Founding of the United Nations: A Story of Superpowers, Secret Agents, Wartime Allies and Enemies, and Their Quest for a Peaceful World , Westview, Perseus Books Group,Cambridge, MA, 2004, p. 236). Regarding the letter and spirit of the United Nations language and the difficulties in its intercultural comprehension, see: S. Redo, Blue Criminology. The Power of United Nations Ideas to Counter Crime Globally. A Monographic Study , The European Institute for Crime Prevention and Control, affiliated with the United Nations, Helsinki, 2012, pp. 44 & 209-211. 2 Schlesinger, op.cit., p. 237. 3 Doc. 885 I/1/34, Report of Rapporteur of Committee 1 to Commission I, at p. 5, in: Documents of the United Nations Conference on International Organization , San Francisco, 1945, Volume VI, Commission I, General Provisions, London-New York, United Nations Information Organizations 1945, p. 390. 4 Ibid., p. 391. 5 Schlesinger, op. cit., p. 237.

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