What is Justice?
POETRY FORMAT, 18 Mar 2019
Gregory Stanton – TRANSCEND Media Service
What is justice to a woman who’s children were slaughtered just before she was raped?
What is justice to a bride who’s last caress was the last she will ever know?
What is justice to a woman who will never trust a man again?
What is justice to an orphan in a refugee camp?
What is justice to lawyers who still won’t call it Genocide?
Justice is the spirit of the law.
Without justice law is dead, like an empty skull.
Without justice there can be no reconciliation.
Without justice love cannot re-weave the social fabric.
Without justice hope dies.
Without justice death conquers life.
Justice establishes the truth.
Justice restores dignity to the victim.
Justice recognizes a widow’s grief.
Justice is digging up the bones and giving them proper burial.
Justice is telling the stories of suffering to someone who really listens.
Justice is confession that your country was responsible.
Justice is always having to say you’re sorry.
Justice is the struggle to understand why people do such evil.
Justice affirms that the rule of law is stronger than rule by force.
Justice says murderers cannot get away with Genocide.
Justice is the antidote to abandonment.
Justice is reconnection with the human race.
Justice restores social order and rebalances the moral universe.
Justice is God’s force socially expressed.
Love is God’s force personally expressed.
With justice and love hope may return.
And hope is the assurance that life will triumph over death.”
____________________________________________
Gregory H. Stanton is the President of Genocide Watch. He is the Research Professor in Genocide Studies and Prevention at the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution of George Mason University. Dr. Stanton founded Genocide Watch in 1999, was the founder (1981) and director of the Cambodian Genocide Project, and is the founder (1999) and Chair of the International Alliance to End Genocide, the world’s first anti-genocide coalition. From 2007–2009, he was the President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars. Dr. Stanton served in the State Department (1992-1999), where he drafted the United Nations Security Council resolutions that created the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the Burundi Commission of Inquiry, and the Central African Arms Flow Commission. He also drafted the U.N. Peacekeeping Operations resolutions that helped bring about an end to the Mozambique civil war. In 1994, Stanton won the American Foreign Service Association’s prestigious W. Averell Harriman award for “extraordinary contributions to the practice of diplomacy exemplifying intellectual courage,” based on his dissent from U.S. policy on the Rwandan genocide. He wrote the State Department options paper on ways to bring the Khmer Rouge to justice in Cambodia. More…
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 18 Mar 2019.
Anticopyright: Editorials and articles originated on TMS may be freely reprinted, disseminated, translated and used as background material, provided an acknowledgement and link to the source, TMS: What is Justice?, is included. Thank you.
If you enjoyed this article, please donate to TMS to join the growing list of TMS Supporters.
This work is licensed under a CC BY-NC 4.0 License.