A/HRC/37/63 Annex II Rule of law must evolve into rule of justice 1. The rule of law is a pillar of stability, predictability and democratic ethos. Its object and purpose is to serve the human person and progressively achieve human dignity in larger freedom. 2. Because law reflects power imbalances, we must ensure that the ideal of the rule of law is not instrumentalized simply to enforce the status quo, maintain privilege, and the exploitation of one group over another. The rule of law must be a rule that allows flexibility and welcomes continuous democratic dialogue to devise and implement those reforms required by an evolving society. It must be a rule of conscience and of listening. 3. Throughout history law has been all too frequently manipulated by political power, becoming a kind of dictatorship through law, where people are robbed of their individual and collective rights, and the law itself becomes the main instrument of their disenfranchisement. Experience has taught us that law is not coterminous with justice and that laws can be adopted and enforced to perpetuate abuse and cement injustice. Accordingly, any appeal to the rule of law should be contextualized within a human-rightsbased framework. 4. Already in Sophocles’ Antigone we saw the clash between the arbitrary law of King Creon and the unwritten law of humanity. Enforcing Creon’s unjust law brought misery to all. In Roman times the maxim dura lex sed lex (the law is hard, but it is the law) was mellowed by Cicero’s wise reminder that summum jus summa injuria (highest law is highest injustice, de Officiis 1, 10, 33), i.e. blind application of the law may cause great injustice. 5. The argument that “the law must be obeyed” has been challenged by human rights heroes for thousands of years. Spartacus fought against the Roman slave laws and paid with his life. Slavery remained constitutional and legal until the mid-nineteenth century; colonialism was constitutional and legal until the decolonization processes of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s; the Nuremberg laws of 1935 were constitutional and legal; Apartheid was constitutional and legal; segregation in the US was constitutional and legal (see, for instance, the US Supreme Court judgment Plessy v. Ferguson). Civil disobedience by Henry David Thoreau, Zaghioul Pasha, Michael Collins, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Ken Saro Wiwa, Mohamed Bouozizi were legitimate and necessary to give example and initiate reforms — but they all suffered the consequences of opposing blind positivism, the fetishism of the rule of law. 6. Democracy in the twenty-first century requires that the rule of law cease being the rule of power, might makes right, geopolitics and economics. The rule of law must incorporate human dignity into the equation and enable people power, self-determination and referendums. The rule of law must evolve into the rule of social justice and peace. 23