Rule of law: A guide for politicians

The purpose of this Guide is to provide an orientation for politicians
regarding the basic elements of the rule of law.
The Guide was inspired by discussions within the InterAction Council of
Former Heads of State and Government. The process of preparing the
material was initiated and supervised by the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of
Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at Lund University, Sweden, and the
Hague Institute for the Internationalisation of Law (HiiL), the Netherlands.
The first draft of the Guide was authored by Dr Ronald Janse, head, rule
of law programme, at HiiL, during the Henry G. Schermers Fellowship at
the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social
Sciences. Further work was then performed within the two supervisory
Institutes. The material was then reviewed by members of the InterAction
Council and representatives of the Inter-Parliamentary Union. Valuable
comments were also received from individual experts. The final review
was made by Dr Hans Corell, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the
Raoul Wallenberg Institute and former Legal Counsel of the United
Nations.
A lodestar in the preparation of the Guide has been that it should be as
short as possible so that it could be read by busy politicians at various
levels. But it should also be useful to other decision-makers and policymakers and to journalists and others who need to orient themselves in the
topic. The Guide should also be easy to translate and publish in different
languages. This is also the reason why there are no graphical illustrations
or pictures in the Guide.
The original language of the Guide is English. However, the Guide may be
translated into other languages with the permission of the Institutes,
provided the present Foreword is included and that the translation is a
true representation of the text. The original is available on the websites of
the supervisory Institutes, where translations will also be published.