A/HRC/14/38 and possible means of implementation, and its relationship to other human rights, aspects which had a direct bearing on the peoples’ right to peace. That had been, in his view, a worthwhile exercise, as, shortly afterwards, the right to development, as enshrined in the Declaration on the Right to Development (1986), had found significant endorsements in the final documents adopted by the United Nations world conferences that were held in the 1990s, which had brought it into the conceptual universe of international human rights law. 32. The other pertinent antecedent was the work undertaken in 1997 by the group of legal experts convened by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to prepare the Draft Declaration on the Human Right to Peace. The right to peace had been duly inserted by the UNESCO group into the framework of international human rights law; however, after the subsequent consultations with 117 member States, three main positions of the governmental experts had become discernible: those fully in support of the recognition of the right to peace as a human right, those who regarded it rather as a “moral right”, and those to whom it was a human “aspiration” rather than a “legal right”. That exercise as to the right to peace did not have the same outcome as the one pertaining to the right to development. In other words, the Declaration on the Right of Peoples to Peace had not yet generated a significant projection as did the Declaration on the Right to Development, despite the fact that, in a historical perspective, the right to peace had been deeply rooted in human conscience for a much longer period than the right to development. 33. Mr. Cançado Trindade argued that in approaching the right of peoples to peace, one was confronted with some disquieting interrogations. First, it was well known that the Charter proclaimed, in its preamble, the determination of the peoples of the United Nations to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, and, to that end, to live together in peace with one another as good neighbours. The phraseology was quite clear: in disclosing the constitutional vocation of the Charter, its draftsmen had referred to the peoples, rather than the States, of the United Nations. He wondered why it had taken so much time for the legal profession to acknowledge that constitutional conception, further evidenced by such key provisions as articles 2, paragraph 6, and 103 of the Charter. 34. Mr. Cançado Trindade considered that the debates within the United Nations system on the human right to peace had proved inconclusive and consensus difficult to reach due to the apparent over-sensitiveness of States when it came to what they regarded as presumably touching on their so-called vital interests. He wondered why so many years had lapsed between the adoption of the Declaration on the Right of Peoples to Peace and the current seeming revival of the subject by the Human Rights Council. He expressed concern about the fact that the adoption of a definition of the crime of aggression had not yet been achieved, despite the fact that one could have built on the Definition of Aggression (1974). According to Mr. Cançado Trindade, those and other questions remained unanswered because States were unable to speak a common language when it came to reaching an understanding as to the fundamentals to secure the very survival of humankind. 35. Concerning the time dimension — the long-term outlook — of the right of peoples’ to peace, Mr. Cançado Trindade indicated that its roots could be traced back to the search for peace, which had predated by far the adoption of the Charter of the United Nations. Yet, earlier projects had proved incapable of accomplishing their common ideal, precisely because they had overemphasized restricting and abolishing wars related to inter-State relations and overlooked the bases for peace within each State and the role of non-State entities. He noted that more recent attempts to elaborate on the right to peace had displayed a growing awareness that its realization was ineluctably linked to the achievement of social justice within and between nations. During the twentieth century, the conceptual construction of the right to peace in international law had antecedents in successive initiatives taken in distinct contexts at the international level. The current generation had 10 GE.10-12138