One of the things that seems to be happening now in the 21st century is, that instead of embracing the idea that in a globalised world we have to operate together and that there has to be more multilateralism and acceptance of legal processes that cross borders, there’s almost been a kind of reluctance to do that and a retreat into nationalisms. Perhaps this is because a globalised world feels too frightening and people feel they are losing their identity and therefore take comfort in securing their identity within national boundaries. The difficulty with that is that it involves attacking international courts.

People don’t want to have courts beyond their own borders making decisions that might affect how they live and yet, at the same time, we cannot function as a world without holding one another to account and seeking to create standards that cross borders, if we don’t have international entities to deal with conflicts and with erosions of the standards that we’re seeking to set.

What do you do about that level of crime? What do you do about what’s happening to the Uighur in one of the provinces of China, where the Muslim people of that region who have a very distinct culture, language and religion are having those things taken from them? We know from independent evidence that there has been a destruction of the mosques and the burial grounds, the very things that go towards a sense of self that all people have whether they, too, are experiencing rape of the women and an interference with the reproductive system so that they’re being forced to have abortions and to be sterilised. Where the men and women are in forced labour camps, which is perhaps more useful than slaughtering them because they are there working, and the story to the world is then that they’re being educated, that these are educational establishments. Or where the boy children are being put into special schools where they are deracinated, not allowed to speak their own language or know their own culture.

One of the ways to deal with this would be to empower nations individually not to convict China, but to be able to say that China is in the process of committing a genocide and therefore nations have to decide whether they’re going to trade with a nation that is doing that. The genocide convention compels us to prevent genocides, not to wait until they’re over and then wring our hands and bring people before courts. You’re supposed to prevent it when it’s in progress. The world has now become concerned with its individual financial interests ahead of preserving a level of standards, in terms of law and protection, that we thought that we were working towards as we came to the end of the 20th century.

So, we have to revisit some of these things. But to do so, there has to be political will, and the world at this moment, I’m afraid, is too caught up in the embrace of populist government, which is retreating from the great principles of liberal democracy. We’re at a danger point, and this is a moment where we have to think, how do we move forward? What kind of world do we want to have and can we persuade the people of the world that there is a better way?