Rule of Law

Gonçalo,

outro grande resumo do meu ponto, por Paddy Ashdown, o "czar" da Bósnia:

The second principle is the over-riding priority, as we have discovered in Bosnia, in Kosovo, in Afghanistan and now Iraq, of establishing the rule of law - and doing so as quickly as possible.

If the rule of law is not established very swiftly, it will not be long before crime and corruption infect the body politic, contaminate its organs, choke off its resources and threaten its chances of recovery.
This, above all was the mistake we made in Bosnia.

It is much more important to establish the rule of law quickly than to establish democracy quickly. Because without the former, the latter is soon undermined.
In Bosnia, we got these priorities the wrong way round. Perhaps it was because we wanted to get out quickly and we thought elections would help us hand over power and go.
So we insisted on six elections in six years, with the turn-out falling at each one; but in that time we have barely been able to put six major criminals behind bars.

And it is much tougher than it would have been if we had made the rule of law our number one task in the first year, rather than in the sixth.