19 - Making peace as a project of moral reconstruction

Summary

The UNESCO exhibition captured the conscious and sustained efforts in the aftermath of the Second World War to put human rights at the centre of projects of moral reconstruction. The American and Canadian Bar Associations undertook a project focused on the international law of the future involving a veritable who's who of international lawyers in a two-year wartime study that sought to articulate how law could lay 'the bases of a just and enduring world peace'. Taken together what is most striking about the international bills of rights drafted in the wartime period is the expansive catalogue of individual civil, economic, social and political rights they put on the table and the growing certainty that post-war moral reconstruction required their transnational protection. If the post-war effort to put human rights at the centre of projects of moral reconstruction had reached its end times, its legacies for more contemporary expressions of global morality continue to run very deep.