Rule of law, anyone?

Negotiated and reciprocal agreements between communities are vital to underpin any law

- R JAGANNATHAN

From Left to Right, from Liberal to Conservative, there is a touching faith in the rule of law as the answer to all of society's problems. They may differ on what these rules ought to be, but they agree that the rule of law must prevail.

They are confusing something that is nice to have with something that is assumed to always work. The truth is that the rule of law cannot work in all circumstances, and there is no actual proof that it does so in reality. A few examples will prove that point.

Just last month, the US Supreme Court overruled a half-century-old law that made abortion a part of women's rights. Now states will determine what these rights are on their own. In the same country, there will be multiple rules of law. In April, after Muslim groups in Sweden rioted over alleged blasphemy by one politician, Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson said that integration had failed; mainstream Swedish society and its immigrant citizens lived in "parallel societies". In 2018, former German chancellor Angela Merkel acknowledged that there were no-go zones for the law enforcement agencies a reference to Muslim ghettos in some cities. Between the late 1990s and - 2013, hundreds of British teenage girls were "groomed" by largely Pakistani gangs, and the police, despite knowing about it, did not act for fear that they would be judged racist or Islamophobic.