Students, human rights activists, and members of the public gathered at Osgoode Hall at York University on January 17 and 18 to commemorate the life of Raoul Wallenberg. Wallenberg was a Swedish diplomat who used his status to issue temporary Swedish “protective passports” to Hungarian Jews during the later stages of World War II. In doing so, he is thought to have saved the lives of between 20,000 and 100,000 Jews. Osgoode Hall Law School held the Raoul Wallenberg Day International Human Rights Symposium on January 17 and 18 in his honour.

Professor William Schabas, a U of T alumnus and now an academic at the National University of Ireland, gave a speech titled, “Why Have We Failed, and What Have We Learned From Our Failure?”

“But who’s ‘we?'” Professor Schabas asked. “Who are we talking about when we refer to the word ‘we?'” Had Wallenberg still been alive, said Professor Schabas, he would have regarded we as the commonly held community of views shared by people in different countries-today’s “international community”.

In Wallenberg’s time, said Professor Schabas, the spokesman of this collective we would have been Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Today, however, Professor Schabas argued, that community of views has become unhinged. In the 1970s, Schabas said, the international community was on the same wavelength in many important ways. However, on a number of crucial issues today, he said-including capital punishment, the International Criminal Court and even economic and social rights-Canada, Sweden, France, Ireland and the UK have all chosen to go one way, and the United States another. The collective we has become unhinged, and has instead developed a rift.

“But is it a sign of failure that we have this rift in human rights?” asked Schabas. “How do we quantify-how do we measure-failure in human rights?”

On this point, Schabas was pessimistic.

“If you could quantify racism, equality for women, and torture,” Schabas said, “you’d see the same measurement today as you would have in 1945.”

If Wallenberg were alive today, concluded Schabas, and if you asked him to compare where the world is today with where it was in 1945, he would say that the biggest success in 60 years is that we have not had a world war.

Despite this rift in the international community, the world has not lately seen a truly terrible war, said Schabas, while Wallenberg saw two of them in his lifetime. Schabas refuted those who say that conflicts today are much worse than ever before, however: “A lot more people died in the 30 years before 1945 than have died since then”.

Professor Schabas reminded the audience that the world has had “60 years of relative peace,” and that this was a sign of success, not of failure.