My VIP for this week is Richard Wilkins, a man who was unknown to me until recently. Wilkins is a constitutional lawyer and a law professor at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, and a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
In September 1995, Wilkins was the
bishop of his ward, and he attended a satellite broadcast of Women’s Conference
with his wife, Melany. At the end of the session, President Gordon B Hinckley
went to the stand and presented “The Family: A Proclamation to the World.” On
the way home, his wife mentioned the Proclamation, and he replied, “It’s nice.”
In late winter 1996, Susan Roylance
called Wilkins at his office. She was a good friend and president of United
Families International. She often consulted with him “in defense of causes that
promoted the family” (A Sacred Duty – The true account of a BYU law
professor’s journey to defend the world’s families, 1999, p. 8).
Roylance had previously asked
Wilkins to look into a matter from the Beijing Women’s Conference held in New
York in 1995. He promised to do so and to write a couple of pages for her book
about his findings. He was quite surprised about what he found in his limited
research and he wrote the following for her book: “Ill-conceived or otherwise
unsound international declarations pose dangers, not because they directly
displace existing American law, but because they inevitably shape that law.”
When Roylance called Wilkins in 1996,
the book had been published, and she had another request for him. She asked him
to attend a Habitat II Conference in Istanbul in early June 1996. It was to be
a United Nations conference that would “establish an agenda: a sort of statement
of intent to influence world communities” (A Sacred Duty, 1999, p. 10).
She wanted him to go and “do something,” but she could not tell him what she
wanted him to do.
Roylance and Wilkins, along with
other members of United Families International, attended the conference in
Istanbul. BYU’s David M. Kennedy Center for International Studies sponsored him.
Through fate or divine workmanship, Wilkins was asked to present one of the
main talks at the conference. The title of his presentation was “The Impact of
UN Conference Declarations on International and Domestic Law.” He concluded his
presentation with the following paragraphs:
… Each conference builds upon language
used and objectives sought in preceding conferences and, as a result, forms an
important link in a chain that inevitably encircles the international community….
Perhaps most important, however, conference documents – although not formally binding
upon participating states – over time develop the force of customary
international law and serve as important resources in the interpretation (and
sometimes development) of the domestic policy of participating nations.
This final point suggests that all
participating nations should take very seriously indeed the language they
incorporate into a UN declaration…. That same language … may well become
binding tomorrow.
Wilkins’ message was well received,
and he was thronged by people requesting copies of his speech. There were people
who were surprised at the impact of the work done at the UN conferences, and
others who did not believe that the conferences had much impact.
Later, Wilkins was selected to speak
at another session of the conference before work began on polishing the
statements that would be adopted. By that time, he was well aware that there
were two opposite forces at the conference. One force was fighting for
preservation of the traditional family, and the second force was trying to make
the traditional family obsolete.
In his final remarks at the
conference, Wilkins used the principles taught in “The Family: A Proclamation
to the World” – not the words – to defend the traditional family against a vigorous
attack. In the final voting, the Catholic group and the Muslim group held
strong and voted for language that would preserve the family. However, it was
Wilkins’ words that galvanized the pro-family groups and made their strong
defense possible. Together, they saved the world’s families.
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