Edward St John - Activism

Activism

He was a member of the conservative Association of Cultural Freedom and a friend of activist journalist B. A. Santamaria. Despite this conservatism, he set up the International Defence and Aid Fund for Southern Africa for victims of apartheid; and his election to parliament had been firmly opposed by the Australian League of Rights.

St John helped establish global principles of the rule of law at successive meetings of the International Commission of Jurists in Bangkok, Rio de Janeiro and New Delhi, a non-governmental international human rights organisation. As an environmentalist he led the campaign against the flooding of Lake Pedder, which was dammed in 1972. After leaving politics for himself he supported Peter Garrett's Nuclear Disarmament Party candidature for the Australian Senate in 1984, which almost succeeded.

Over the last decade of his life he campaigned for nuclear disarmament and peace. In 1984 he and the poet Les Murray jointly composed "The Universal Prayer for Peace: A Prayer for the Nuclear Age". A founding member of Australian Lawyers for Nuclear Disarmament in the same year, he was instrumental in its affiliation to the International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms. In the mid-1980s he co-founded and chaired the Australian Peace Foundation. Inspired by his New Zealand colleague Harold Evans, he was a leading supporter of the World Court Project (WCP), through which his last quest was to ask the International Court of Justice to provide an advisory opinion on the criminality of nuclear weapons.

From 1985 St. John began writing his major work, an anti-nuclear book Judgment at Hiroshima, with some research assistance from Elizabeth Handsley but died before publication. A Japanese edition appeared in 1995 to coincide with the 50th anniversaries of the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. His widow Valerie released the English version two years later with copies distributed to research libraries in Australia and overseas.