{"id":315859,"date":"2026-05-11T12:00:49","date_gmt":"2026-05-11T11:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=315859"},"modified":"2026-05-05T20:43:30","modified_gmt":"2026-05-05T19:43:30","slug":"emerging-world-law","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2026\/05\/emerging-world-law\/","title":{"rendered":"Emerging World Law"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Transition from the World Constitution and Parliament Association (WCPA) to the Provisional World Parliament (PWP)<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

5 May 2026 – <\/em>In the 15th<\/sup> century, the Renaissance in Europe was led by a new vision of human selfhood, as expressed, for example, in Pico della Mirandola\u2019s Oration on the Dignity of Man<\/em>. A new freedom was leading the way to a transformed world and a blossoming new civilization. In our day a reborn planetary renaissance is being led not only by further growth in our experience of selfhood but by a new universal vision of law and its meaning for humanity. The World Constitution and Parliament Association has provided a key dimension of this planetary rebirth.<\/p>\n

In the self-understanding of the World Constitution and Parliament Association, the WCPA is an international civil society organization composed of people from around the world who see the absolute need for democratic world government.\u00a0 But something truly new has been emerging.\u00a0 The WCPA has served both the creator and \u201cguardian\u201d of the Constitution for the Federation of Earth.<\/em> WCPA was first organized by Philip and Margaret Isely in the late 1950s as \u201cThe World Committee for a World Constitutional Convention\u201d and the name was soon changed to the World Constitution and Parliament Association (WCPA).<\/p>\n

Largely funded by the Iselys, thousands of people around the world were organized through dozens of meetings that focused on what is known today as four Constituent Assemblies meeting in 1968 in Switzerland, in 1977 in Austria, in 1979 in Sri Lanka, and in 1991 in Portugal, during which time they drafted and edited the Constitution for the Federation of Earth<\/em>. At the Fourth Constituent Assembly in Troia, Portugal, the Constitution for the Federation of Earth<\/em> was amended one final time and declared finished and ready for ratification by the people and nations of Earth under the standards for ratification set forth in Article 17.<\/p>\n

While this campaign for ratification was and is being conducted, however, Article 19 of the Constitution calls for the simultaneous creation of the Provisional World Parliament (PWP) and the activation of a number of Commissions concerned with urgent world problems, including the problem of ratification of this Earth Constitution. Sessions of the Provisional World Parliament were inaugurated in September 1982 in Brighton, England, presided over by Sir Chaudhry Mohammad Zafrullah Khan, former Foreign Minister of Pakistan and former President of the UN General Assembly.\u00a0 Since that time, a total of 16 sessions of the Parliament have been held in a variety of locations around the world, most often in India, where the tradition of \u201cworld union\u201d is strong, deriving from the vision of thinkers like Sri Aurobindo, Rabindranath Tagore, and Mahatma Gandhi.<\/p>\n

The Parliament has thus far been organized and funded by WCPA and its partner the Earth Constitution Institute (ECI), and it has met on an irregular basis, sometimes two or three years in a row, other times with a gap of several years between sessions.\u00a0 Clearly, if this really is to be a \u201cProvisional World Parliament\u201d for the Earth, then these gaps present a serious problem of continuity and credibility. \u00a0Nevertheless, at the first 15 of its sessions, the Parliament issued not only resolutions but also what it calls \u201cWorld Legislative Acts (WLAs),\u201d a number of which are enabling legislation for organs and administrations of the emerging world government under the authority of the Constitution. At the 16th<\/sup> session of the PWP in Pondicherry, India, in December 7-10, 2025, the Parliament enacted a \u201cPermanent Secretariat,\u201d which would (from that time on) take charge of Parliament affairs (formerly organized by the civic organization WCPA\/ECI). From now on the PWP would itself organize future sessions of the Parliament under the authority of the Earth Constitution.<\/p>\n

A central question long debated both within and outside the Provisional World Parliament is the question of what is the legal status of the PWP and its enacted World Legislative Acts?\u00a0\u00a0 Is this simply a group of civil society persons gathering together to enact a \u201cmodel,\u201d a sort of dramatic \u201cstage play,\u201d at being a legislative body?\u00a0 Or does the Provisional World Parliament represent genuine emerging world law for the planet that claims to embrace and legitimize the national laws of the nation-states as well as embracing and enhancing whatever authority the United Nations might possess. That is the issue I am attempting to address, as concisely as possible, in this paper.<\/p>\n

The system of militarized sovereign nation-states does not recognize any form of \u201cemerging world law,\u201d nor indeed any possibility for world law to emerge that is not established by the nations themselves. This, in spite of the fact that some nations, like the UK and the USA recognize long standing traditions of governance known as \u201ccommon law\u201d that continue to have legal force even though these traditions did not originate through a formal legislative body.\u00a0 Similarly, historians recognize that all legal systems had a beginning in historical events such as revolutions that transitioned from a situation prior to recognized legitimate government to the present situation where government claims to be legitimate. In other words, all governments arise from historically contingent events making their status in the present also historically contingent and hence subject to change. New forms of law and legitimacy are therefore perfectly possible in human history.<\/p>\n

Governments today have colonized most of the territory of the Earth, leaving only the oceans, outer space, and Antarctica as a global commons that they feel free to exploit and abuse.\u00a0 Each national territory involves a law-making and enforcing power that, within their territories, includes or excludes civil society organizations and citizen voices in a variety of ways.\u00a0 Each power regulates who can come and go within its territory. Nations do not need to be a democracy or to respect human rights. A number of dictatorships, with state-run media and universal surveillance of their citizens, have a huge international presence and recognition in the United Nations and elsewhere even though internally they have little or no semblance to democracy in which citizen rights are protected or defended.<\/p>\n

Nineteenth and twentieth century philosophies of law often declared that legitimate law derives from \u201cthe commands of a sovereign.\u201d\u00a0 They emphasized that authority to regulate human actions had to stop somewhere, at some final locus of decision-making, and this locus was known as the sovereign. In the 20th<\/sup> century, philosophers have recognized that this final authority for law may be one aspect of law, but there is much more to consider. Beginning about the time of the publication of The Concept of Law <\/em>by HLA Hart (1969), law began to be seen as providing a concept of a \u201clegal person\u201d that empowered and enabled the \u201cnatural person\u201d in numerous ways. The law, for example, grants and protects rights, allows people to marry, to form contracts, to obtain educational degrees, to practice a specialty such as medicine or accounting or engineering. It regulates commerce, protects consumers as well as the environment, and is supposed to provide the conditions for a secure and flourishing life.<\/p>\n

In spite of his breakthroughs in the understanding of law, Hart remained a \u201cpositivist\u201d claiming that the facts <\/em>of what he called publicly identifiable \u201crules of change, of adjudication, and of recognition\u201d constituted the substance of law.\u00a0 A society agrees on following specific rules that are simply observable as facts, for example, a common rule in some nations states a majority vote in the Parliament and a signature into law by the Executive results in legitimate, enforceable laws or rules that everyone must follow. Hart declares such rules need \u201cwidespread recognition,\u201d and if they lack this, the rules become objectionable. But this does not affect the definition of law as a set of rules (facts) <\/em>by which society operates. All societies include rules that depend on a \u201chabitual obedience\u201d in the population. Moral questions as to the legitimacy of a set of rules are secondary, Hart argues, and not determinative of the validity of the laws.<\/p>\n

From a positivist perspective, only the \u201cfacts\u201d matter because world history and international relations depend on the facts of power projection and\/or propaganda manipulation.\u00a0 Under this philosophy, moral issues have no traction, except as propaganda ploys, and there is no such thing as unjust power. There are only facts, and moral outrage is considered to be merely subjective<\/em> and consists in emotional reactions that carry no factual or ontological reality and hence no credible role in international affairs. However, the majority of Western history thought otherwise, and something similar is true of history in much of the East as I understand it.<\/p>\n

Before modern times evolved in the 15th<\/sup> to 17th<\/sup> centuries in the West, political power was in the hands of kings and royalty, and was inherited from one generation to the next.\u00a0 It was often thought that there was a natural moral law given by God in the form of both reason and revelation to which the king and governments were supposed to adhere.\u00a0 Whatever the political realities on the ground that may have told a very different story, human life was thought to be encompassed by the moral dimension known as \u201cnatural law.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although the issue of democracy was raised in ancient Greece, the theory of democracy in the modern sense evolved from the work of such thinkers as Duplessis Mornay and Johannes Althusius in 17th<\/sup> century Western Europe.\u00a0 \u00a0The theory of democracy is most basically a moral theory claiming that governmental power only legitimately arises from the people and for this reason governmental authority should serve the good of the people\u2014not royalty, not special interests, not the rich, and not the rulers themselves.\u00a0 Government arose from the people and was accountable to them. This understanding of the accountability of rulers to the ruled presupposes a moral relationship<\/em> between rulers and ruled for which positivism is unable to provide a satisfactory answer.<\/p>\n

The reductionist, materialist, and positivist views competed within Western philosophy with a tradition that emphasized the moral dimensions of human relations as real and compelling in human affairs. In the 18th<\/sup> century work of Immanuel Kant, John Locke, Thomas Jeffereson and others, this took the form of natural rights theory<\/em>. Governments were considered legitimate if they protected basic human rights summarized by Jefferson as the rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.<\/p>\n

Jefferson\u2019s famous Declaration of Independence <\/em>very simply presents this moral-based \u201csocial contract theory\u201d of his time:<\/p>\n

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.<\/p>\n

Governments are instituted to protect inalienable Rights, and governments that fail to do this are illegitimate and may be \u201caltered or abolished.\u201d\u00a0 For many advocates of democratic world government today, the social contract is no longer territorial, as it was for Jefferson, but now is planetary. We need government for the entire planet that protects human rights, including the rights to life and liberty now expanded to include protection of our planetary environment and the elimination of threats of war using weapons of mass destruction. The people of Earth have the right to \u201calter or abolish\u201d the present system to ensure the future and well-being of themselves and future generations. However, the Earth Constitution <\/em>does not abolish the present broken world system but embraces and empowers it with holism. Holism transforms fragmentation into a new renaissance\u2014a reborn world system.<\/p>\n

In the 20th<\/sup> and 21st<\/sup> centuries, these same debates persist between so-called \u201cpolitical realists,\u201d (positivists) and defenders of so-called natural law theories who insist on the reality of human rights and human dignity as the basis for legitimate government and law. The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 is a milestone in this debate. It begins with the stunning declaration that \u201crecognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

This moral foundation of legitimate government has been spelled out in some detail by 20th<\/sup> century philosophers of law in works such as that of Lon Fuller in The Morality of Law <\/em>(1969), Ronald Dworkin in Taking Rights Seriously <\/em>(1978), John Finnis in Natural Law and Natural Rights <\/em>(1980), Alan Gewirth in The Community of Rights <\/em>(1996), David Luban in Legal Ethics and Human Dignity <\/em>(2007), Errol E. Harris in Twenty-first Century Democratic Renaissance <\/em>(2008), and my own work Human Dignity and World Order <\/em>(2024). In a variety of ways, all these works link the legitimacy of law with the moral foundation of the common good, protection of human rights and freedoms, and respect for the integrity and dignity of persons. In three of these works, by Finnis, Harris, and myself, the lack of legitimacy of the current world system is exposed and a call is issued for democratic world government.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, there is a powerful historical precedent behind these contemporary works. A compelling account of the legitimacy of government as based on its ability to protect equality before the law, freedom, and lives of its population goes back to Immanuel Kant in the late 18th<\/sup> century. Kant contended that an inviolable dignity informs every person as a free and responsible agent. The very essence of morality is, therefore, to respect human dignity\u2014”to treat every person as an end in themselves, never merely as a means.\u201d What Kant terms \u201crepublican\u201d government is government that protects the freedom, liberty, and equality of citizens. It prevents people doing violence against one another out of self-interest, competition, anger, or hatred.\u00a0 In other words, properly legislated enforceable law is law that abolishes war (that is, all forms of violent conflict among persons). War is precisely a condition that directly violates the dignity of some \u201cenemy\u201d in the lawless effort to kill or destroy them.<\/p>\n

Kant astutely points out that the system of militarized sovereign nation-states is inherently a war system<\/em>, since there is no enforceable republican law above the nations to keep the peace. The international situation is analogous to a society or large group of people without enforceable laws (sometimes referred to today as \u201ca failed state\u201d): it is a condition of de-facto war whether or not conflict is happening at any one time. For this reason, the system of sovereign nations is an immoral condition<\/em> both for the nations and the citizens living within the nations. Kant concludes correctly that an absolute moral imperative exists to leave this war system of militarized sovereign nations and unite humanity under an earth federation that ends war, thereby making moral living possible (since every person is protected by law as an end in his or herself).<\/p>\n

For Kant, creation of an Earth Federation is the ultimate ethical political goal for human beings everywhere. The final goal of all political action must be to end war among human beings. Neither laws or systems that foster war and lethal conflict are legitimate. A complete account of what constitutes legitimate law would, of course, also need to include mechanisms by which law is legislated by a body representative of the people from whom its authority rises. It would need to include mechanisms for an impartial judiciary dedicated to protecting and following the laws and their source in a democratic Earth Constitution, and it would need civilian policing mechanisms for enforcing the laws enacted by the parliament and adjudicated by the judiciary. It would also need a concrete bill of rights highlighting the duty of the government to protect these rights and freedoms that are reserved for the people. There would need to be well-written \u201crules of recognition\u201d for all five of these mechanisms and their protocols. We find all this in the Constitution for the Federation of Earth.<\/em><\/p>\n

By these standards, we can also see that the United Nations is a complete failure. It has no legislative body, and its General Assembly is anything but representative of the peoples of Earth: one vote or tiny island nations and merely one vote for giant nations like China and India. It has no judicial authority with the binding judicial powers of mandamus<\/em>, and neither the International Criminal Court (ICC) nor the International Court of Justice (ICJ) even come close to this standard. It has no ability to raise funds for itself and is entirely dependent on the voluntary donations of nation-states. Finally, because the UN Charter is merely a super-treaty of so-called \u201csovereign\u201d nations, it has no credible enforcement mechanisms other than war, since war is an inevitable consequence of a fragmented world system of some 194 territorial sovereignties, recognizing no enforceable authority for the whole.<\/p>\n

Today, numerous thinkers have further empowered the issue of the immoral war-system of sovereign nations by identifying additional world problems, from climate destruction, to rising oceans, to overexploitation of our planetary ecosystem, to weapons of mass destruction. None of these problems can be effectively addressed by sovereign nations because the problems are all global in scope and would require universal enforceable legislation to address them. This means that the legal systems of these nation-states are, just as Kant asserted in the 18th<\/sup> century, morally illegitimate and therefore substantially invalid. In the 21st<\/sup> century, professor Errol E. Harris asserts the following conclusions concerning the sovereign nation-state,<\/p>\n

Strictly speaking, the nation-state is no longer the legitimate bearer of sovereign power\u2026.In twenty-first century world conditions it is not sustainable because the national sovereign state can no longer fulfill the function that was its raison d\u2019etre; <\/em>namely, ensuring the security of its citizens, protecting their human and civil rights, and maintaining the rule of law. The national state is, therefore, no longer the legitimate claimant of sovereignty\u2026. In the world today the only form of democracy that could aspire to the ideals of the traditional philosophical conception would have to be global, one that could legislate to implement global measures to deal with global problems (as sovereign nation-states cannot) and could maintain the Rule of Law world-wide (which the exercise of sovereign rights by independent nations prevents). Accordingly the only effective democracy would have to take the form of World Government\u2026. (pp. 132-35)<\/p>\n

Of all the Constitutions that have been drafted for the Earth, the only one that comes close to being legitimate and viable is the Earth Constitution with its Provisional World Parliament. It recognizes sovereignty as belonging properly only to all the people of Earth. It establishes Legislative, Executive, Judicial, Civil Enforcement, and Ombudsmus bodies to address the conditions of human rights and the well-being of our planet effectively, and it is premised on human dignity, that is, on the ending of war and disarming the nations, which alone can make possible universal respect for human dignity. As of December 2025, the PWP has become a permanent human institution under the authority of Article 19.<\/p>\n

Here is where we encounter the big question of this essay as to the legal status of the Provisional World Parliament and its Permanent Secretariat.\u00a0 We have seen that the laws of nations no longer carry legitimacy because they cannot possibly address the needs of their citizens, which include not only protecting their human rights and liberties, and their rights to decent food, health care, clean air, water, housing, and sufficient income to assure human dignity. Their rights also include the absolute imperative to end war and protect our planetary ecosystem. Nations spend their wealth on militarism and preparations for war rather than on protecting the environment and sustaining the Earth for future generations. They are neither morally nor even practically legitimate.<\/p>\n

The PWP premises its action on the Earth Constitution which recognizes the sovereignty of the people of Earth and explicitly addresses the host of global problems beyond the scope of nation-states, beginning with \u201cending war and disarming the nations.\u201d\u00a0 The PWP, therefore, operates out of the very foundations of legitimate law.\u00a0 Its laws and determinations at this point in time lack widespread recognition and hold authority for only a number of thousands of our planet\u2019s inhabitants. At the same time, it has commissions for moving to the first stage of ratification of the Constitution by the nations and people of Earth as well as commissions addressing the environmental crisis and for disarming the nations.<\/p>\n

Jefferson declared that the people have the right to \u201calter or abolish\u201d government that does not protect their rights or serve their needs. The Earth Constitution does not abolish the laws of nation-states. It embraces them within a holistic framework that restores their legitimacy<\/em> as governing bodies under the authority of the Earth Constitution. In all these features we find emerging world law that is clearly more legitimate<\/em> than the system it will be transcending and embracing.<\/p>\n

A new category of law has developed in history.\u00a0 Not illegitimate nation-state law.\u00a0 Not baseless and unenforceable international law. The new category can be termed \u201cemerging world law,\u201d not yet fully legitimate because it lacks widespread recognition, but nevertheless, more legitimate than anything deriving from nation-states, since they are not legitimately sovereign. Only the people of Earth are legitimately sovereign.<\/p>\n

The World Constitution and Parliament Association as an international NGO has given birth to a new category of governmental legitimacy in human affairs\u2014emerging world law. Our duty as world citizens is to recognize, promote, encourage, and empower the emergence of enforceable world law under the authority of the Earth Constitution.\u00a0 Human life teeters at the edge of a precipice: self-extinction through global war and\/or self-extinction through climate destruction, which are inevitable consequences of the illegitimate system of militarized sovereign nation-states.<\/p>\n

A new renaissance has been spreading across our precious planet Earth. The concept of universal law embracing the whole of humanity provides a new dawn for transformative evolutionary growth. But universal world law has its birthplace in the vision of \u201cemerging world law.\u201d\u00a0 Something truly new has entered planetary history. Emerging world law is not the law of nations, nor is it merely a movement of civil society. It is a new dimension in the concept of law itself. Like Pico della Mirandola\u2019s Oration on the Dignity of Man,<\/em> we call today for an Oration on the Dignity of Emerging World Law.<\/em><\/p>\n

Emerging world law is the lifeline that can save us. Let us embrace the concept and grow it as rapidly as possible into effective, enforceable, and genuine world law enacted under the sovereignty of all the people who live on Earth. Recognition of the emerging world law<\/em> within the Provisional World Parliament as it grows in size, stature, and prestige, both enacts and empowers our absolute moral duty to ratify the Constitution for the Federation of Earth.<\/em><\/p>\n

______________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Dr. Glen T. Martin:
\n– Member, <\/em>TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/em><\/a>
\n– Professor of Philosophy Emeritus
\n– Founder\/Chairperson Emeritus, Program in Peace Studies, Radford University
\n– President, World Constitution and Parliament Association (WCPA);
\n– President, Earth Constitution Institute (ECI)
\n– Author of twelve books and hundreds of articles concerning global issues, human spirituality, and democratic world government; a recipient of many peace awards.
\n<\/em>www.earthconstitution.world<\/em><\/a> \u2013 Email: <\/em>gmartin@radford.edu<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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