Gareth Evans on morality

March 10, 2026

Dear Gareth.

As someone who has been arrested multiple times for acts of peaceful, civil disobedience, I concur with Gareth Evans that conscience and morality sometimes demand that one ignore the law, though one expects to be prosecuted regardless. That’s the trade-off a moral man agrees to when he commits the offence. If you believe in your cause, then you must be prepared to wear the punishment and not care, for your cause is just.

But what if governments wilfully break the law in pursuit of immoral, inhuman, despicable aims?

If a government illegally maintained diplomatic, political, economic and military relations with an illegal occupying power, who bombed, strafed, starved, herded into concentration camps and exterminated a People, all the while training their death squads, refusing UN staff permission to transit, and threatening to withhold aid to poor countries if they didn’t vote against non-binding UNGA resolutions, which simply reaffirmed that People’s fundamental right to self determination, would that illegal support, during a Holocaust, that complicity in genocide, be morally defensible or common criminality?

I’m just just asking for a Timorese friend… and a Palestinian one.