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The following is the full text of the introductory speech made by Justice Minister Rauff Hakeem at the Lakshman Kadirgamar Memorial Oration 2013 held at the Sri Lanka Foundation Institute on Wednesday. The keynote speech was made by Prof. Francis Gurry, Director General of WIPO.

Justice Minister Rauff Hakeem making the introductory speech before Professor Francis Gurry, Director General of WIPO delivered the Lakshman Kadirgamar Memorial Oration at the Sri Lanka Foundation Institute. Pix by Indika Handuwela

“I am privileged to introduce a distinguished international lawyer and scholar Dr. Francis Gurry to deliver the Lakshman Kadirgamar memorial lecture. Dr. Gurry is Director General, World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO). The author of numerous publications on intellectual property rights, he was formerly a practicing attorney in Australia with a law degree from the University of Melbourne and a PhD from the University of Cambridge.

On this occasion, we recall and rekindle the memories of Lakshman Kadirgamar — a man who appealed to the conscience of the world that had forgotten that freedom from fear was the most fundamental of all human rights. Today, we celebrate his life’s work in the afterglow of the defeat of terrorism, not quite certain as to what he would think of how we are winning the peace. The absence of Lakshman Kadirgamar in post-war, politics of our island is a tragedy for the majority and a disaster for the minorities. I say so in the most emphatic terms because he is on record as to why he who belonged to a minority community entered politics in that most tortuous period of our history. 

In 1996, he told parliament why he entered politics. “I am here only to do one thing, and that is to help my country as best as I can to solve the gravest problem of our time and if I can make a miniscule contribution towards that effort, that will be enough for me till the end of my days. I seek nothing else.” Having said that, he went further: “Our approach to our national problem must surely be bipartisan because the task ahead of us is one of immense magnitude and of utmost gravity and under those circumstances, you will never find that I will run away under fire”.

We owe it to the memory of Lakshman Kadirgamar to acknowledge that he was a leader who saw the national problem and “the evil scourge of terrorism” in contextual clarity. We need that clarity today more than ever. 

In 1997, he described his vision for the future. “A durable solution to this problem will not come from force of arms alone. It will not come from conquest or our vanquishing the LTTE. It has to come by the acceptance of the people in their entirety, by the Sinhala and the Tamil people. That is a political settlement, and a political settlement that is perceived by the communities, by the majority and minorities, to be fair and just. It must be a settlement enshrined in law, and it must be enshrined in the hearts of people.”

Lakshman Kadirgamar was a visionary who redefined the international conversation on terrorism. When he set out on that courageous journey, ‘to persuade the world that his motherland was in a fierce struggle to combat that most pernicious form of politics – that of using unbridled terror as a form of negotiation,’ his, was indeed a lonely voice.

That was a time when 9/11 and the warped logic of terrorism were yet to reach New York, the host city of the United Nations. Lakshman Kadirgamar was disarmingly candid when he described himself as the International face of an island-nation that was then known for its Tea, Tourism and Terrorism. It is Lakshman Kadirgamar who initiated the international alliance of democratic states to combat terrorism so that in his own words ‘there will be no succour, no solace , no safe haven, no place to hide, no place to run for the terrorists of the world because all of us, the democratic states, will stand together and fight together.” 

Prof. Francis Gurry lays a floral tribute at the foot of the late Lakshman Kadirgamar statue at the Lakshman Kadirgamar Institute. Pic by Mangala Weerasekera

In the book Democracy, Sovereignty and Terror, a volume with the life work of Lakshman Kadirgamar, so aptly captured on its sub title on the front cover, are the words, “Lakshman Kadirgamar on the Foundation of International Order”. He despaired at the predicament of democratic states that were challenged by internal conflicts that encouraged a ruthless few to hold a tolerant majority hostage to their commitment to traditions of tolerance, openness and dissent.

As Sri Lanka’s Minister for Foreign Affairs he made the world realise, I use here his own words, that ‘an internal armed challenge to any state anywhere is a challenge to all states everywhere’. 

The book edited by Sir Adam Roberts, President of the British Academy, is the most enduring tribute to the man whose life work is celebrated today with an oration by Dr. Francis Gurry who will no doubt enlighten us more about Lakshman the Scholar-Jurist who spent a good part of his professional career in promoting human creativity and innovation through an international protocol on intellectual property.

When he set out on that courageous journey ‘to persuade the world that the country he represented as Minister of Foreign Affairs was in a fierce struggle to combat that most pernicious form of politics — that of using unbridled terror as a form of negotiation,’ he was fully aware of the enormity of the task ahead and the fate that awaited him. 

I recall his almost prophetic words in one of his dazzling parliamentary performances in 1996, almost a decade before he was slain by an assassin’s bullet. Speaking in the now famous Tawakkal debate he said ‘I do not fear the bullets and the bombs aimed at me. I will have to carry this burden to the end of my days, long after I cease to hold office. That does not frighten me, does not bother me.”

I am reminded of the poignant words of Dag Hammarskjold another great international figure who paid the supreme price for his beliefs. “In the last analysis, it is our conception of death which decides our answers to all the questions that life puts to us.” This is what placed Lakshman apart from mere mortals like us. In defining death in his own terms he defined the purpose of his life.”

WIPO’s help sought to train Lankans on intellectual property

Professor Francis Gurry delivering the keynote speech

Suganthie Kadirgamar speaking on behalf of the Lakshman Kadirgamar Institute for International Relations referred to her late husband’s contribution while at the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) to the modernisation of Sri Lanka’s archaic Intellectual Property Laws, some of which were over a hundred years old at the time. She said it was done first during the time of Trade and Shipping Minister Lalith Athulathmudali and then again, under Trade Minister Kingsley Wickramaratne when Mr. Kadirgamar was then a Cabinet Minister and his opinion was obtained.

She asked the visiting Director General of WIPO if he could resume WIPO’s Intellectual Property Training programme for Asia that was held in Sri Lanka from1979 until the northern insurgency disrupted it. She also urged WIPO to establish an internationally accepted searching authority to examine prior art on specifications of inventions seeking novelty to assist young Sri Lankan inventors search if their inventions are new in the world.

Prof. Francis Gurry, Director General of WIPO making the keynote speech said that he was recruited to WIPO by the late Mr. Kadirgamar following an interview in Sydney in 1984 and he worked with Mr. Kadirgamar from 1985 to 1988. “It was a deeply enriching experience”, he said and added that of the many things the late Mr. Kadirgamar taught him was the importance of the timing in every decision that is taken.

Challenges for International Organizations and Multilateralism
Francis Gurry
Lakshman Kadirgamar Memorial Oration 2013
I am deeply honoured to have been asked to deliver the 2013 Lakshman Kadirgamar Memorial Oration. I first met Lakshman in 1984 in Sydney, when he interviewed me for a position at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) where he was, at the time, the Director of the Bureau for Asia and the Pacific. I worked for Lakshman for three years, from 1985 until he returned to Sri Lanka in 1988, and had the opportunity to travel with him on a number of occasions to his beloved Asia, to which he was so profoundly attached and which he incarnated in so many ways.

It was a deeply enriching experience to work with Lakshman Kadirgamar. Of the many things that he taught me, there is one that always stands out for me because it was something that could be acquired only from a person of culture and experience, as opposed to a book. It might be called the principle of timing. Instinctively, whenever a decision needed to be taken, Lakshman would ask: “Is the timing right?” I am often called to remember this teaching, either because I have failed to respect it and find that, upon reflection, my predicament is a consequence of my lack of sensitivity to timing, or because I have paid attention to timing and am able to see how that attention has been rewarded by an enhanced understanding of a particular situation. It has always seemed to me to be a lesson from the depths of Asian experience and wisdom. I know that one encounters it in other cultures. The Book of Ecclesiastes, for example, reminds us that “To every thing there is a season, and a time for every purpose under the heaven” , and Shakespeare had Brutus say that “There is a tide in the affairs of

men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune” . For Lakshman, timing was aninstinctive reference point that placed a decision in a larger social and cultural context than our penchant for quantitative and computed analysis allows. It was a non-egocentric view of things, one that saw events as part of a larger continuum.

This broader appreciation of connection also inspired Lakshman’s attachment to international cooperation and to international organizations. He served two United Nations agencies, having worked for the International Labour Organization (ILO) before joining WIPO. As it was international organizations that brought me into contact with Lakshman Kadirgamar, it is their condition and the state of their brand of universal multilateralism in the contemporary world that I would like to explore this evening. I should say at the outset that this is a vast subject. My exploration will necessarily be a very selective one.

There are many signs that timesare not very propitious for action or coordination through international organizations and universal multilateralism. Both international organizations and multilateralism are facing enormous challenges.

In the first place, we see that the capacity to agree internationally is very limited. In consequence, successful multilateral rule makingis now a rare occurrence. In 2012, for example, a grand total of four new multilateral treaties were concluded. If I am not mistaken, 2013 is likely to produce a similarly poor harvest of only around three new multilateral treaties , with a successful Bali Ministerial Conference for the World Trade Organization providing a possible fourth.In contrast, the complexity of the contemporary world has legislative authorities busy in all other instances. Nationally, legislative agendas are so full that it is challenge to succeed in having a subject figure on the agenda. Bilaterally, an indeterminate, but large, number of free trade agreements are under negotiation or are being concluded, as are several high-profile plurilateral trade agreements. Likewise, many regional organizations are actively pursuing normative agendas.

The absence of need or a shortage of appropriate subject matter for multilateral attention would seem to be an unlikely explanation for the lack of multilateral outcomes. Globalization, population growth, urbanization, technology and interconnection have produced a regrettably long list of suitable problems, many of which seem inherently to lie beyond the power of any one State to resolve because they involve the movement of persons, arms, pollution, diseases, capital, products or ideas across multiple borders. Indeed, the enumeration of potentially suitable subjects would suggest that the size of the capacity for multilateral policy response is varying in inverse proportion to the size of the problems.

The size and number of issues calling for attention and the paucity of outcomes seems to have spawned a rich array of plurilateral groupings of States, groupings that are multilateral in the sense of involving morethan two States, but not

universally multilateral like the United Nations and its specialized agencies. The G20 is a salient example of this development, but there are many others, particularly in the area of trade, which seems to be the next most prominent source of transnational groupings after religion. A non-exhaustive list of trade groupings between States would include a growing list of abbreviations and acronyms, notably the AndeanCommunity, APEC, CARICOM, EFTA, MERCOSUR, NAFTA, OPEC, Pacific Alliance, SADC and UEMOA . This listing does not include ASEAN or the EU, which, in a sense, started as trade groupings and expanded their cooperation into other areas. The feature that all these groupings share in common is that they were not formed to pursue their objectives within the ambit of operations of international organizations, but were established to pursue their objectives outside of, although not necessarily inconsistently with,the operations of universal multilateralorganizations.Many, if not most, of these organizations or groupings have a normative function. To some extent, they may be considered to be special interest groups, but many of them may also be considered to be coalitions of the impatient, eager to advance where the universal multilateral organizations are unable to do so.

Outside of the normative area, competition to the classical international organizations can also be seen in the operational, development and humanitarian areas. Far from being spaces occupied bidimensionally by the classical international organizations, on the one hand, and by States pursuing bilateral agendas, on the other hand, these areas are now populated by a rich variety of actors of varying public and private compositions. Health is the area where this proliferation is the most obvious. The World Health Organization (WHO) has been joined in the international arena by a multiplicity of other actors, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, UNAIDS, the GAVI Alliance, PATH, the Clinton Foundation, the Global Health Innovative Technology Fund (GHIT) and a host of other public-private partnerships.

These developments suggest that there is an evolution underway in the manner in which international cooperation and action is undertaken. The classical international organizations face competition from two sources – from non-universal multilateralism and from hybrid organizations. Why is this occurring?

There are many possible explanations, but I would like to highlight four contributing factors – the pace of technological change, geopolitical shifts, the changing definition of the public function and the digital environment.

The speed of technological change poses a severe challenge for organizations whose procedures and processes are built upon the slow accumulation of historical experience. One can see technological change in a long-term or a short-term perspective. In the long term, we see that the gap between radical technological changes that produce fundamental transformations of human societies is narrowing. It took humanity five million years to progress from the point where it began walking on two feet, thus freeing its hands for purposes other than locomotion, to the development of the first stone tools, then 1.8 million years to the mastery of fire, 700,000 years to the agrarian revolution, only 12,000 years to the industrial revolution and a mere 140 years to the information revolution. In the short term, we see that the last 30 years have producedfundamental change in our way of communicating, with widespread penetration of the Internet and mobile telephony throughout the world, as well as the beginnings of profound changes in the life sciences, with genetic engineering followed by nanotechnology, synthetic biology and regenerative medicine.

In either the long-term or the short-term perspective, we can observe that history is accelerating. In contrast, universal multilateral processes are inherently slow. They require lengthy process in order to enable all nations, with varying degrees of development and major information and knowledge asymmetries, to be comfortable with the perception and analysis of problems and the democratic development of responses. The contrast between the speed of technological change and the consequent social transformations, on the one hand, and the pace of multilateral responses is stark. It constitutes a major incentive for those States that are “ready” to tackle a perceived problem to proceed to do so without waiting for the multilateral ritual to unfold.

The acceleration of history is evident also in the speed with which geopolitical shift is occurring. There are many measures of this shift – in demographics, where Europe and North America’s share of world population is estimated to decline to 12% by 2050 ; in economic production, where the share of global production of Europe and North America was 68% in 1950 and is estimated to decline to 30% by 2050 ; and in technological production, where Asia now produces 45% of science, technology and engineering graduates and 38% of all international patent applications, in contrast to 31% for the 38 countries that are party to the European Patent Convention or 27% for the United States of America. 

Geopolitical change, and the speed with which it is occurring, presents a challenge of adaptation for the international organizations. There is a growing disjunction between economic reality and political architecture. The political
architectureof the multilateral system, whether in terms of the institutionalized distribution of power, definitions of political groupings, or location on the scale of development, is based on the economic reality of the world at the end of Second World War and the decades that followed it until the 1990s. Change is working its way through the system, but it has not yet found its full institutional expression. A lack of correspondence between economic reality and political architecture is a fertile breeding ground for lack of trust, that fragile commodity upon which the possibility of a shared view of a problem and its solution and, thus, agreement rests.

A third contributing factor to the challenges faced by the classical international organizations is a blurring of the distinction between public and private that hasoccurred in many parts of the world over the past two decades. While it is difficult to generalize about this across a diverse world, a wave of privatization swept much of the world in the 1990s, reducing the public function and enlarging the private function. At the same time, changing notions of corporate social responsibility, as well as the rapid accumulation of fortunes from the IT revolution, saw private individuals and enterprises become more active in public policy challengeson a scale and with an organizational effort that had previously only been seen in public organizations. Again, the field of health springs to mind and, with it, the examples of child vaccination, the elimination of polio or the alleviation of neglected tropical diseases. The entry of private individuals, organizationsand foundations into fields traditionally managed by public organizations has increased the competition for voluntary funding on which so many of the international organizations have come to rely in addition to their regular budgets in order to prosecute their programs – competition, it might be added, from actors who are necessarily more agile and adaptable than the international organizations.

A final factor that may be mentioned is the new digital environment. This environment has a multiplicity of implications and consequences for international organizations. Let me name just three.

In the first place, it has empowered a range of actors, usually non-governmental organizations (NGOs), to participate in policy discussions by putting them on an equal information footing with States and by linking them throughout the world. The Internet has busted the State’s monopoly on information, one of the bases on which it could claim the authority to make policy, and has facilitated the creation of networks of all conceivable varieties – social, political, economic, cultural, scientific and technological. It has, in short, created a shift in access to information and knowledge and in the capacity to use knowledge for all sorts of purposes. The number of NGOs with a presence in Geneva, for example, is now 250 (compared to 35 intergovernmental organizations). At WIPO, in 1970, there were 35 NGOs accredited to the WIPO Assemblies as observers. There are now 307.

Secondly, the Internet and social media have changed the way in which we communicate as a species. One may legitimately ask whether anyone under the age of 30 reads the documents that issue from international secretariats. Soon it will be under 40, and then 50 and so on. Can international organizations capture the imagination of the public without engaging in a radical change of communication methods, and will member States allow secretariats to do so? And yet we have seen the power of social media to engage public action in so many examples in the recent past. But where would the mantra of member-State-driven find itself in the twittersphere?

Thirdly, the digital environment is also producing the phenomenon of big data, meaning the vast amount of data that is being generated from all the electronic devices, connections and terminals that we increasingly use to transact our daily social and economic existence, together with the new techniques that have been developed to process and to analyse those data. Up until now, big data has

mainly been used by the commercial sector to find better ways to sell things. But its real value “lies in our ability to extract insights and make better decisions” and, as such, it has enormous potential in social, economic, development and humanitarian policy.But it involves an entirely different methodology from the classical multilateral processes of identifying problems and developing solutions through discussion in meetings held at six-monthly intervals to enable national consultations with interested parties between meetings.

What results from this brief review of some of the salient agents of change affecting international organizations is a picture of great complexity. International cooperation now takes place in a world of multiple speeds and layers (national, bilateral, plurilateral and multilateral), multiple dimensions (public, private and a range of mixtures of both)and multiple power balances(economic, financial, political, people, information, idea, diplomatic and military). The one-dimensional world of a single balance of political power seems to be becoming a thing of the past. It was suggested in the New York Times, for example, that “there may still be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion.” 

This complexity is not necessarily a bad thing. It may be considered to be an evolution of the international community from a rather simple one in which there was only bilateral action or international cooperation through the UN and its agencies to a more mature state that mirrors the complexity of the globalized, interconnected world. But, just as the globalized, interconnected world has heightened our vulnerability to disease, financial crashes and economic crises, so the multispeed, multi-dimensional and multi-powered international community has a number of inherent risks compared to the more simplified international community that it leaves behind. Let me enumerate some of the main ones, more by way of questions than by analysis.

A first risk is one of incoherence. Who is the keeper of coherence in the complex world of multiple instances making rules and undertaking programs of action? Ideally, one might imagine a world of Russian dolls, in which one set of rules fits neatly into the next, with the universal multilateral perhaps the biggest doll, in the sense of the most general, and each other layer being smaller, in the sense of more detailed, until you reach the national doll.

A second risk is exclusion. The great advantages of the system of universal multilateralism are inclusiveness and legitimacy. Those advantages are costly in terms of process, whichoften leads to the frustration that drives the resort to other instances. So there is a balance to be achieved between process expense, on the one hand, and efficiency, on the other hand, with inclusiveness, legitimacy and effectiveness the consequences of the choice. Democracy is not necessarily adopted for its efficiency. The risk of exclusion is related to the risk of unequal strength. Arguably, the weakest are most protected in the multilateral environment.

A third risk is the lack of appropriate governance and accountability frameworks for the new world of multiple powers and instances. However imperfect they may be, there are governance and accountability frameworks that have been developed for the classical international organizations. What frameworks apply to NGOs, public-private partnerships or even the participation of classical international organizations in public-private partnerships? This is relatively undeveloped territory. I certainly do not want to denigrate some of the magnificent work being done by some of the newer forms of organizations active on the international stage, so please understand the example that I am about to give as one offered for the sake of illustration. If a foundation decides to tackle a certain health challenge or to eliminate a certain disease, who takes this decision? Why is one health challenge or disease considered more important, more appropriate or more urgent than another? What are the economic and social consequences of the choice on different parts of the world? What are the collateral effects of shifting resources into a particular area? And so on. I ask

these questions, as I said, not by way of criticism, but by way of illustration. Once a private organization enters a field of pubic action, I am not sure that the answer to these questions can simply be “it is our resources and we shall do what we want with them”.

The world of classical international organizations and universal multilateralism offers some assurances againstcertain of the risks of the new international community. But I think that it is insufficient to rely upon these assurances to react against or to oppose evolution. Rather, we should look to see how we might be able to preserve the advantages of universal multilateralism, while at the same time adapting to the new circumstances of a fast-changing world. For that, the international organizations will need to acquire, especially, speed and agility, the characteristics needed for survival in the new world. This is the challenge that lies before them.

is revolutionizing working methods, which is, again, a challenge for organizations based upon the tradition of methods carefully constructed from long empirical experience.

an inflection point. The environment external to them is changing rapidly and radically and it is not always clear that they are able to respond to the changes in a timely manner.