CYIL 2012

SŁAWOMIR REDO

CYIL 3 (2012)

(termed “criminal justice”) is a branch of a stand-alone “justice”, and an inner part of a separate “rule of law”. Functionally, in 1946, the Programme has not had any role in the Charter’s implementation. Today, the Programme is a functional part of the United Nations Justice and Security Sector Reform (Security Sector Reform/SSR), a major global criminal policy overhaul in 193 Member States of the Organization, and a functional part of several other peace-related UN functions, including peace education or “UN Peace” 36 (contributing to the United Nations Studies). 4. The intergenerational transmission of United Nations values Regarding those general Studies (an academic concept), and the United Nations Criminal Justice Studies specifically, in their interest and the interest of delivering the United Nations criminological message on the threats to peace caused by war and other forms of violent conflict, now considered as the “UN Peace”, this essay will now contribute to (a) clarifying, (b) reconnecting and (c) streamlining this message in terms of its intergenerational transmission. Regarding clarifying, one of the reasons for the above is the recent diplomatic gaffe of Mr. Barack Obama, the U.S. President. In 2012, in awarding a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom to Jan Karski, a Polish Second World War resistance hero who delivered to the U.K. and U.S. governments his personal eyewitness accounts from a death camp of the Holocaust, the President referred to the death camp as “Polish” 37 rather than as a Nazi Germany-operated camp in wartime occupied Poland. In the Polish diplomatic opinion, the above error amounted to “ignorance and incompetence.” 38 An outraged reader added a comment on a journalist’s blog: “[the President’s]Ivy League education is clearly a waste of money”. 39 Such critical comments have their point. Virginia Gildersleeve’s dream that every school child in the world could commit to memory the UN Charter’s Preamble on the scourge of war and the Preamble’s text could be framed and hung in every cottage on the globe, has not yet come true. There is a confusion, if not already a memory gap, among the post-Second World War generation about the role of history in the life of succeeding generations. Therefore, in the interest of: (a) promoting evidence-based thinking (see the Preamble’s text on the sorrowful war experience of the two world wars); 36 Ibid., p. 314. 37 President Obama Presents Jan Karski with the Medal of Freedom, http://www.stateondemand.state. gov/Regional-Issues/president-obama-presents-jan-karski-with-the-medal-of-freedom/s/4feba2c3 82bc-4c1d-a1d0-839662495593 . 38 http://seeingredaz.wordpress.com/2012/05/30/poland-obamas-comment-shows-ignorance incompetence/. 39 http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/05/president-obama-causes-outrage-with-reference-to polish-death-camp/.

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