No one seriously thinks that the law is deployed for the benefit of the people anymore. It is almost exclusively used as a cudgel to beat submission into the thickest of skulls, particularly the thickest skulls of the young people challenging systems of power and oppression. What little lawful behaviour that occurs in day-to-day life is only by chance. The legal systems and frameworks we have to day only exist to ensure that the State, and those who benefit from the use and abuse of State power, continue to be preserved, even if it means it is at the expense of the weak and vulnerable.
What w have come to describe as the international humanitarian law lays bare the abuses of the powerful and the desperate attempts at survival of the weak and vulnerable. In Palestine, the Palestinian peoples have endured near-starvation at the hands of the Israeli Occupation Forces for the last twenty-five years. The international community has stood by and watched as international humanitarian law has been debased by the Israeli Occupation Forces. And when the international community as intervened, it has been to provide more and more destructive bombs to the Israeli Occupation Forces with which to conduct a systematic destruction of the Palestinian people.
This kind of violence is witnessed at national level too. In India, Hindutva, the supremacist ideology adopted by the ruling coalition in the central government, has been used to target Muslims and Dalits with increasing violence. Constitutional changes have been rammed through the Indian Lok Sabha to deny the Muslims of Kashmir any semblance of self-determination. In dozens of cities, towns and villages, Dalits have been assaulted and murdered on false accusations of cow slaughtering. In both instances, the law has been useless in preventing the atrocities being visited on minorities in India.
In Kenya, marginalised communities have been on the receiving end of environmentalists and environmental law. They have been violently pushed out of their lands in the name of environmental conservation. It is irrelevant that their traditional land use systems have preserved and conserved the environment better than than the modern fortress-like systems being deployed against them today. Because they do not have the population and money needed to push back against their oppressors, they have been reduced to subsistence levels so desperate that they have little or no energy to fight against their plight.
It used to be that there was a. pretence at enforcing the law equally and equitably. That pretence no longer obtains. The exploited can no longer rely on the law to offer them protection or restitution. And when they take their case to the streets, the law is used as a weapon to kill and maim with impunity. If the powerful have their way, even the idea of protest will be illegal. However, the powerful have made a terrible mistake.
The UK had the Gundpower Treason and Plot. The French had the Revolution against their oppressive nobility and beheaded the lot of them. The North American colonists, after their genocide of the First Nation, rebelled against their oppressive king. The United States, against all odds, faced the Black Power movement of the 1960s and backed down. More recently, Bangladesh has exiled its oppressive Prime Minister and Sri Lanka toppled its oppressive president. Sooner or later, the weak and vulnerable will have their backs against the wall and the only choice before them will be death or rebellion. No one willingly chooses death. Sooner or later, systems of oppression are rend asunder. It is never non-violent.
