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THE LONDON DECLARATION OF (TRANSNATIONAL) JUSTICE

A Collective Manifesto

Developed at the Transnational Law Summit, 10-13 April 2018. Presented by the KTLS18 Programme Committee.

Questions, so many questions.

Answers, so few.

Where to begin the development

• f impactful interventions?

With friends.

We have been thinking, listening, formula5ng.

This is what we have come up with. Together.

THE LONDON DECLARATION of TRANSNATIONAL JUSTICE

A COLLECTIVE MANIFESTO.

#KTLS18. 13 April 2018.

A PLURIVERSE, AND YET.

1.

Humans inhabit a pluriverse of values and ways of being. But, they live in a world of division, exclusion and violence. Law plays a crucial part in sustaining and reinforcing, but also in invisibilising these divisions. So, do lawyers.

RETRAINING COMPETENCES.

2.

Lawyers must learn to grasp the world in its manifestations and their complexity. In order to craft impactful legal tools, which are responsive, inclusive and transformative, lawyers must recognize law‘s embeddedness in evolving normative regimes. Lawyers can be agents change or defenders of still-

• stand. They can justify or challenge the reasons and

desired outcomes of legal action.

LAW IS PART OF & MAKES OUR WORLD

3.

Law is embedded in a comprehensive and interdisciplinary quest for knowledge. This quest engages law‘s analytical tools, perception lenses and interpretative frameworks. We need a critique of understanding which is at the heart of social / cultural theory, political philosophy and post-colonial studies today. Lawyers (and, law students) should know that.

LAW: GOVERNANCE TOOL & SOCIAL THEORY

4.

By placing “law“ in the context of social theory and the critique of rights, power and violence, we deny law any privileged place. Instead we critically re-appropriate it as space, as critique, as technique, as tool. We need to acknowledge law‘s inherent normative claim, but not to take it for granted or deem it universal. Law will seek expression in different ways. “LAW“ should not make us blind or mute for these.

LAW: ITS EVOLVING ACTORS, NORMS & PROCESSES

5.

The struggle for law and justice today is transnational. We need to relearn what we know about “law” and critically engage with the evolution of new legal Actors, Norms and Processes on every level of human society – around the world.

THE SEDUCTION OF NUMBERS

RESIST QUANTIFICATION.

6.

We need to engage and learn to resist our belief in progress and growth and in limitless opportunities. But, ‘No Growth‘ is not the Answer. In a universe of ‘rankings’, algorithms and the ‘quantification of everything’, we must break the spell of numbers, and shift our gaze to the mess, to the disorder, the unique and the plural.

WE ALL HURT.

7.

We must learn how to see, to hear, to touch and to feel – the materiality of a volatile world and its hurting inhabitants. Therefore, we say: Allow yourself to feel pain, your pain and distress, your sentiments of being lost. Open yourself to others and their distress. And, be mindful of your deafness, blindness and insensibility.

CRITICAL MEASUREMENTS OF POWER & JUSTICE.

8.

Move from quantities to qualities. Use ‘alternative‘ methods of analysis, of mapping and representing qualities of poverty, physical & mental illness, inequality, social exclusion and marginalisation. Facilitate, support and disseminate new modes of voice, imagery, sound and emotion. But, pay attention to the generation and implementation of power and “law”/law through different media.

CONNECT THE ISSUES. CONNECT THE ACTIONS.

9.

None of the problems facing the world can be understood

• r addressed in isolation.

While being grave and overwhelming in their own right, they are systemic and need systemic and interconnected responses.

TAKE BACK THE MARKET

ENGAGE A SOCIO-LEGAL CRITIQUE OF MARKET FUNCTIONS, ACTORS & NORMS.

10.

Property Rights are not natural, and neither are markets in the legal sense. Markets are constituted by the allocation of rights, but these are

• ften tied to implicit and naturalised pre-conceptions of

‘functioning markets’, from which understandings of economic & political agency are derived. By de-objectifying markets, property rights can be reconceptualised as platforms and as invokable claims of socio- economic emancipation in step with political rights.

THE LARGER CRISIS BEHIND THE CRISIS OF LABOUR.

11.

Labour law is in crisis, and this crisis is driven by external forces. The financialization of the past decades continues to strain and to exhaust many of the institutional and procedural ties that used to support collective systems of social protection. The transnationalization of the economy through a global division of labour, ‘branding’ and global supply chains erodes traditional forms of labour organization and employees’ rights protection.

DISPLACE THE “FORMAL” LABOUR PARADIGM.

12.

If labour rights are connected to formal work most working people in the world are excluded. While the crisis in unionism, worker rights protection and labour law must revisit the struggle for and the seemingly irreversible loss of the welfare state, this ‘rise-and-fall‘ is incomplete. A forward-going, transformative narrative of labour-oriented economic justice must be co -generated from within the vast sphere

• f informal work in the South and the North, not from a universalized,

but only local Western experience.

TOWARDS TRANSNATIONAL ECONOMIC JUSTICE.

13.

The decline in workers’ protection and state-backed

• rganisation is part of a comprehensive shift in political

preferences and modes of economic governance. Political and socio-economic agency, based on gender equality, is key. This struggle – embedded in different ‘labour histories’ and experiences around the world – is a transnational

• ne for economic justice. The crisis of ‘work’ and labour law will
• nly be resolved through a transnational engagement for

social, economic and political rights.

INEQUALITY & BASIC INCOME.

14.

The more unequal a society the greater the social

• pathologies. Social pathologies come from and

increase with a loss of collective empathy. We must come together do counter the falling apart

• f society, of the communities that we could build and

that will hold and sustain us.

FINANCIALIZATION & DEMOCRACY

15.

“Scarce capital” is a myth. Capital is produced by private banks and backed by our/the public’s creditworthiness. Let’s think of the public as the franchisor of banks. Our call is one for the democratization of finance from within the economic system, not from the outside. The volatilities, uncertainties and new vulnerabilities brought about by a globally financialized economy requires critical and transformative concepts, that must be developed and tested. Let’s engage in earnest experiments with financial institutions (e.g. job guarantee, basic income, complementary currencies) to reflect social relations and produce the social relations we desire.

THE FIGHT FOR TAX JUSTICE. START.

16.

An international tax system which permits corporate entities essentially to float above countries, never once taking root in the fiscal responsibilities that ground communities and contribute to civic sustainability, has become banal - all too commonplace, expected, and ultimately condoned. The legal focus on the difference between tax ‘avoidance’ and ‘evasion’ distracts from pragmatic efforts to build the international tax system we would like to see. The international tax system began in Somerset House - where the first model double taxation convention was agreed - a century ago – and today’s home of The Dickson Poon School of Law of King’s College.

THE FIGHT FOR TAX JUSTICE. RE-START.

17.

It is time to fashion a transnational tax system for this century. The international tax system of today was founded so as to allow capital to move around the world, and to prevent it from stagnating in wealthy countries - as its founders believed, to turn debtors into customers. Today criminal law, taxation law, trade law, human rights law, and activism all focus on pragmatic solutions to bring money back onshore, and to counter the false temptations of ‘races to the bottom’, and economic "efficiency" and attractiveness.

• ROBOTS. MADE BY US – TO

REPLACE US?

18.

We live in a world of machines. We need to define our relation to these machines, which we designed and which challenge our most fundamental conceptions of personal – and, collective – political and moral responsibility. As the design, use and functionality of robots evolve, we need to revisit and challenge the transformation of work into ‘jobs’, the erosion of a legally institutionalized system of employment and social fabric, in which so many humans have become dis- empowered, precariarized tools in a globally integrated economy – not much unlike robots, really.

THE PERSISTING LURE OF

TECHNOLOGY.

19.

The technological achievement embodied in artificial Intelligence challenges our ethical stance on the power of the human mind. A mind, that uses technology, based on an inclusive, democratic process of risk assessment, rather than being used by it. While we have the technology to change civilization, do we have the models to do it? How can we resist the thrust of change driven by what is possible and, instead, fight for the world we want? For us, worldwide. For us, today, and tomorrow.

KNOW YOURSELF. EVERYONE (ELSE) DOES.

20.

We live in a world of more and ‘better’ data. But, as technological collection & storage capacities grow, both conceptual competences and legal regulation are lagging

• behind. Citizens are not in charge of what is known about

them and what is put to commercial, political and security use. Our data are everywhere and yet not in our control, data from the most mundane to the very intimate.

IN SEARCH OF TRANSNATIONAL DATA JUSTICE

21.

Data customers are also data objects. While data can inform and improve regulation for positive social change, they are – in the wrong hands – a threat to the creation and protection of democratic communities. The uncontrolled use of data places the recreation and survival

• f legally empowered, inclusive communities at existential risk.

This is the basis for our call for Transnational Data Justice.

DATA DEMOCRACY AS A HUMAN RIGHT.

22.

Transnational Data Justice is a core pillar of an adequate and renewed concept of Human Rights. The variety of data reflect the multiplicity and complexity of human life. But, legal protection of our digital selves is insufficient and as such a vital threat to democracy. Data consumers have to emancipate into ‘citizens’. Answers need to be generated across national and transnational public and private platforms.

PROTECT AND RECREATE PLACES & BODIES OF DWELLING.

THE WORLD. BROKEN DOWN. TO BE RE- CREATED.

THE PLANET. BECAUSE IT IS OURS, IT NEEDS US TO ACT IN ITS NAME.

CELEBRATE LIFE, NOT DEATH.

TOGETHER.

23.

In spite of oppression, plundering and abandonment, we respond with life. Neither floods nor plagues, famines nor cataclysms, nor even the eternal wars

• f century upon century, have been able to subdue the persistent advantage of

life over death. An advantage that grows and quickens: every year, there are seventy-four million more births than deaths, a sufficient number of new lives to multiply, each year, the population of New York sevenfold. Most of these births occur in the countries of least resources - including, of course, those of Latin America. Conversely, the most prosperous countries have succeeded in accumulating powers of destruction to annihilate, a hundred times over, not only all the human beings that have existed to this day, but also the totality of all living beings that have ever drawn breath on this planet.

CLIMATE CHANGE. IT ‘CHANGES EVERYTHING’.

24.

How does the planet live? How can our world survive? Climate change is an existential threat to the survival

• f humanity and the planet which houses us.

Climate change governance is not just emergency and crisis governance. It is about a global reflection

• n how we live.

ACTING ON A CRISIS. AGAIN. AND AGAIN.

25.

We can learn from past crises and how we responded to them. For that, we must appreciate the particular quality of each ‘crisis’, who is affected by it and what its ‘origins’ were and its drivers. We must assess what we understood and what we failed to grasp. Echoing the global, comprehensive and transformative scope of climate change, our response must occur throughout our lives, our institutions and political processes. We need to unlearn everything we learnt about the way we govern the planet. We see young generations leading in a movement towards transnational environmental justice, and we need to follow.

HUMAN AT PLAY. HUMANS AT RISK.

26.

Transnational Environmental Justice requires both urgency and endurance. Transnational Environmental Justice is a personal and collective concern and responsibility. It is neither a hysterical grab for attention nor a token in political short-termism.

THE BODY.

HEALTH JUSTICE THROUGH SOCIAL JUSTICE.

27.

In 1948, World Health Organization famously defined health in its constitution as "a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease

• r infirmity." Seventy years later this vision has yet to realize.

Now, as then, profound inequalities exist in the extent to which individuals are able to enjoy the right to health. ‘Health’, which at first glance might seem relatively narrow, is a profoundly complex subject that implicates a host of considerations.

HEALTHY, EMPOWERED &

PROTECTED.

28.

Modern public health in inclusive societies is a pillar of social justice. Health, and not just health but the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health, is a fundamental human right. Its effective protection and realization is further shaped by and dependent on gender, socio-economic and cultural equality, universally accessible education, and affordable housing. Health is a right that is critical to the realization of other human rights.

HEALTHY, EMPOWERED &

PROTECTED.

29.

Medicine, which must be geared towards physical and mental as well as emotional health, is not just bioscience, but a social science. Without public health shifting to a more inclusive approach that addresses other civil, political, social and economic human rights, it will be impossible to live up to the promise made seventy years ago.

HOUSING.

HOUSING AS A HUMAN RIGHT.

30.

How do we live? When is housing legally recognized as ‘housing’? In order to understand how and where we live around the world, we need to abandon the formal/ informal divide. The legal fiction

• f the “informal” housing sector invisibilizes world-wide

experiences of people’s local existence, including continued and expanding disenfranchisement. It the flies in the face of governments exploiting, taxing “informal” dwellers, leaving them disenfranchised and excluding from the citizenry to which they belong, who they are.

• HOUSING. BEYOND

‘FORMAL’/’INFORMAL’.

31.

Any reform of inadequate, precarious, financialized housing requires meaningful participation. Having a say in one’s

• wn community and housing design is essential to being

able to exercise the full rights of citizenship. Housing Rights require Visible Solidarity. A Transnational solidarity around housing can be built, perhaps by having a day of protest in order to recognize a human right to housing as enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

HOUSING JUSTICE. LOCAL.

TRANSNATIONAL.

32.

Housing rights are woven into the fabric of social and political protection. Violating these rights, such as taxing “informal” dwellers while engaging in urban displacement for lack of ‘title’ deepens disenfranchisement and exclusion from the citizenry to which we all belong, and who we are. Housing Rights require Visible Solidarity. A Transnational solidarity around housing emerges through joined efforts and resounding voices. We propose A Global Day of Housing in order to recognize a human right to housing as enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

BORDERS.

FROM INJUSTICE TO INJUSTICE.

33.

People, oftentimes, flee from Injustice. They hope to arrive in Justice. This Justice must be upheld by rights that were previously denied, abused or inexistent. Often, however, arriving migrants are met with rejection, discrimination, and violence at their destination. With the majority of global migration not occurring in Europe but in places with scant, occasionalized media coverage, it is our duty to help acknowledge, visualise and amplify migration experiences.

TRANSNATIONAL MIGRATION MUST BE ACCOMPANIED BY ADEQUATE LEGAL PROTECTION.

34.

The global stratification of international migration is embedded in the unequal distribution of rights, goods, wealth and entitlements. We demand that all people have a right to freedom of

• movement. State immigration laws need to reflect the

needs of people globally to enjoy decent livelihoods and belong to communities in which they live, irrespective of migration status, gender, race or age.

FOR A TRANSNATIONAL COMMUNITY.

35.

Current migration regimes are based on destructive logics of cost-benefit calculation and rights-violating deportation. We envision COMMUNITY as a project of living with

• thers in all of our diversity and plurality. We demand

that refugees and people seeking asylum are treated as integral members of this transnational community.

WHAT (DO) WE KNOW.

KNOWLEDGE FOR JUSTICE.

36.

Action must come from knowledge and must be shaped and fuelled by it. The achievement of Transnational Justice requires an epistemological revolution. A revolution of knowledges and prejudices. A revolution of perspectives and habits. And, a revolution of what is the norm and for whom, what is tradition and why. It must be a revolution of open eyes, minds and hearts.

IGNORANCE IS VIOLENCE.

37.

As powerful leaders continue to advise other peoples and their governments, they must appreciate the possible inadequacy and incompatibility of their ‘advice’, their intervention, their violence. Solitude and misunderstanding are borne out of the immeasurable pain of many people’s histories – histories of age-old inequities and untold bitterness. We must critically challenge and overcome our selective approach to

• thers. Why is the originality so readily granted to authors associated

in ‘world literature’ so mistrustfully denied to their authors in their difficult attempts at social change?

KNOW, WHAT YOU DON‘T KNOW.

38.

We do what we do, we are who we are. Or, are we? Seeking out and engaging with non-mainstream perspectives, narratives and epistemologies bears the

• pportunity to break down and transform conventional

legal paradigms and dominant discourses. This is required for the creation of justice and equality.

A PLATFORM FOR NEW KNOWLEDGE.

39.

‘The literature was the place were the political and the personal converged’. Saleem Haddad Activists, writers, poets and journalists are leaders in the effort to foster transnational knowledges. Events such as www.transnationallawsummit.org create a viable and crucial platform for the cross-cultural, border-crossing and interdisciplinary engagement with people’s experiences, their stories, their images, their voices.

AN EPISTOMOLOGY & ADVOCACY FOR CHANGE.

40.

We seek to facilitate the creation of an inclusive transnational space to challenge current affairs and injustice through E.A.F.C., an Epistemology and Advocacy For Change. Through such interactions we hope to learn from each other how different works, from a legal brief to a transformative poem, from a protest song to a poignant photography, from a musical score to a film script, an art exhibition and a new curriculum can have real social impact.

SEARCHING FOR JUSTICE.

DEVELOPING A DIFFERENT LAW.

THE DARK PLACES OF LAW’S ABSENCE.

41.

The violence of Law‘s absence and silence, but also its ill-conceived, ineffective and dividing effects often

• ccur in the dark.

But, in those ‘dark’ places, away from the blinding brightness of the mainstream, the belch of over- consumption and the buzz of self-indulgence, this violence tastes acidly and reinforces vulnerability.

LET THERE BE A SPARK. FOR ALL.

42.

Law, its critique, its re-imagination and its re- creation can transport light into darkness and bring people together. Let‘s light a spark. And, start a fire.

A TRANSNATIONAL GEOGRAPHY OF INCLUSION.

43.

We must reach beyond a Western stance of “Us” and “Them”, “Here” and “There”. We need to displace Empowerment (of “them”), Paternalism (over “them”) and treacherously misleading Understandings of “Aid” (for “them”). We need to begin imagining a Transnational Geography of Inclusion.

LAW AS A PLACE OF DWELLING.

THE GROUNDS OF LAW.

44.

Oftentimes and in many places, “Law” is still too far from those who fight for it. Such “law”, written and imposed by others proves inaccessible and inadequate to those who need it, particularly those working on the ground. Law needs to be transformed into a more accessible tool which can be made and used from the bottom-up.

JUSTICE IS NOT THE DEFAULT POSITION.

45.

Justice must be available to all of us. But, we only get the justice we fight for.

LAW AS POLIS.

46.

We need to shout out and proclaim our commitment to Justice. We prove this commitment by being critical and pragmatic. We need to make known, that law is neither theory nor closure. Law is a practice to defend the collective enterprise.

FROM KNOWLEDGE TO ACTION. THE POLIS.

47.

Hannah Arendt conceptualised ‘action’ as a key ingredient of human relationships, focusing on the ‘polis’ – the public sphere

• f meaningful (and collective) human action.

The public sphere today is fragmented, digitized, divided and

• volatile. It must be reclaimed as a sphere that is always already

shaped and limited and protected by law. As then, today, we need to build a polis by putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes. To think what we are doing. To feel what they are feeling. To resist together.

BUILDING THE POLIS FOR AND WITH EACH OTHER.

48.

Today, as then, we need to build a polis by putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes. By thinking what they are thinking. By feeling what they are feeling. To resist together.

BUILDING A TRANSNATIONAL POLIS.

49.

We need to build a polis of law to reflect on what we are doing and what we are doing to others. We need to (re-)learn how to resist and when to take a stand. We need to let art fill the polis, art to feel, sense, hear, see what human life is and what it can be. We shall fill the polis through a politics of resistance.

LAW AS PRACTICE.

50.

Law cannot replace politics and civil society. But, law can be used as practice. Law is practice, not theory. But Law as Practice needs Theory to Irritate it, to Verbalise it. As such, Law is not just politics by another name, but a praxis of co -producing politics, and safeguards to politics: it facilitates and protects the production of civil society and civil action.

FROM KNOWLEDGE TO CONNECTED ACTION. THE SEAs.

51.

For us, SEAs – Sites of Engagement & Agency – are vital enablers of public intervention. They function as barometers and facilitators, as catalysts and irritants, a platforms and laboratories. SEAs include the judiciary, journalism, domestic, regional and international organisations, even Universities, but also the crucially transnational, sometimes endangered or precariously institutionalised actors such as social movements, grassroots groups, activist and advocacy associations and networks.

NEW SITES OF ENGAGEMENT & AGENCY.

52.

We want to connect SEAs to fight for renewed engagement and agency in and across these

• SEAs. We must make them havens for the

previously marginalised and excluded, creating a space for the mobilization of impact that matters.

SING IT OUT.

53.

Like the music that we can only hear on the inside, law, too, is often inaudible and invisible. Listen to the music of law, then. This music is the often inaudible music of our species. But we hear it, still. That music is the sound of people fighting to be free.

It is time to make it resound. Sing it out

Emily Dickinson - This World is not Conclusion.

A Species stands beyond - Invisible, as Music - But positive, as Sound - It beckons, and it baffles - Philosophy, dont know - And through a Riddle, at the last - Sagacity, must go - To guess it, puzzles scholars - To gain it, Men have borne Contempt of Generations And Crucifixion, shown - Faith slips - and laughs, and rallies - Blushes, if any see - Plucks at a twig of Evidence - And asks a Vane, the way - Much Gesture, from the Pulpit - Strong Hallelujahs roll - Narcotics cannot still the Tooth That nibbles at the soul -

2018 King’s Transnational Law Summit.

In April 2018, the Dickson Poon School of Law at King’s College London hosted an international conference and multi-stakeholder meeting of a very unique format, never before done at a Law School or University in London, the UK or well beyond. The Transnational Law Summit 2018 (“KTLS18”) invited a select group of academics, practicing lawyers, judges, legal and social activists, policy makers, philosophers, journalists as well as representatives

• f the arts and humanities, including fiction writers, poets, photographers and film-makers for

three days of lectures, workshops, readings and conversations. More than 250 experts presented and exchanged their ideas before an audience of several hundred members of the academy, policy circles, social and political activists and the general public. Drawing on the format of events such as the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the World Social Forum which has been held every few years in different cities in the Global South, or the Hay Literary Festival in the UK, the inaugural Transnational Law Summit aimed at creating a new platform for an inclusive, open-minded and interdisciplinary collaboration between theory and practice. In contrast to other multi-stakeholder meetings, however, the Transnational Law Summit places law and legal practice at the centre of its meeting. In creating a new, interdisciplinary space, KTLS18 has given birth to an unparalleled

• pportunity for lawyers from around the world to engage with other colleagues, collaborators

and constituencies on pressing global issues.

The Transnational Law Summit. 2020.

The inaugural London Summit was planned and organized over a period of 18 months and involved junior and senior academics, lawyers, judges, activists, and many others who collaborated across vast distances and different time zones to elaborate the core themes of the event, to identify the key experts in different areas and to draw up an extremely rich and diverse schedule. The 2018 launch of the Transnational Law Summit as a new, bi-annual platform for an Epistemology & Advocacy for Change was made possible by the generous gift of Sir Dickson Poon to King‘s College London. The inaugural Summit was

• rganised under the auspices of the Dickson Poon Transnational Law Institute and

the academic leadership of the Institute‘s Director, Peer Zumbansen. The KTLS18

• rganising team was comprised of more than 40 academics and activists, students

and researchers from around the world. It is the organisers‘ hope that the 2018 Summit laid the foundation for a future series of Summits, occurring every other year in a new city. We are reaching out to you in search of funding and a hosting institution for 2020.

Thank you. And, let’s collaborate for XTLS20 – the Transnational Law Summit in 2020.