This is part two of three articles on the writing and founding of our Cook Islands Constitution. By Thomas Tarurongo Wynne.

As the discussion of our constitution has evoked comment from our legal fraternity, especially around the question of freedom of religion, is it timely to consider the origins of our laws and common law and what are the roots of this tree we sit under called the judiciary.

In the foliage of English common law, the Bible’s branches run deep, weaving principles of justice, fairness and equity into a legal system that has profoundly influenced much of the modern western world. Yet, as with all relationships between sacred texts and human governance, the connection between common law and the Bible is both foundational and fraught, evolving as western society has sought to balance divine authority with secular humanism, or placing man at the centre of its own universe.

> Also read part 1: Thomas Wynne: Who wrote our founding document?      

This relationship between the Bible, the Church and the law has been like our ocean, at times diverse and calm, at others a raging torrent, but never static. If we point to the English Reformation in the 16^th century as a turning point, the authority of the Church diminished and secular power rose. Nonetheless biblical influence continued to shape societal values, our response to the poor, to society’s ills even as emerging legal frameworks began to separate the sacred from the civic.

Today, common law jurisdictions tread a careful line, with the overt invocation of the Bible in courtrooms as rare, reflecting a commitment to pluralism and secular governance, but is this also true for the Cook Islands? Or do the roots of our common law and its principles of human dignity, fairness, and justice – now articulated in secular human rights terms – owe much to its Judeo-Christian roots and ethics.

Does the moral weight of the Bible continue to resonate in the Cook Islands, though silent in most of the West, to remind us of our shared aspirations for a society that values both individual worth and collective responsibility, that the dollar is not the goal, or that people matter more than productivity and profit? In a world increasingly secular, this legacy is a quiet reminder of the values that underpin our legal systems and, perhaps, our often broken, and sometimes divine humanity.

The question maybe for us as a country, as we approach 60 years as a democracy, is whether we still honour the moral compass and foundations from which we came, or whether we risk losing sight of them altogether, or that we adopt new rules to live by or resurrect the old, before the missionaries arrived; or maybe a bit of both?

Nonetheless, the centrality of the Church in the Cook Islands cannot be ignored, as it is one of the three pillars we say and celebrate, that holds our society and its world view together, and why the upheaval that happened more than 200 years ago, with the arrival of the Gospel, is celebrated nationally and on each Island state across the more than 1 million square miles of our country.

The question for us today is not whether the Church should continue to guide us as a country, because it is embedded in our laws, our spirituality, our constitution’s preamble and our psyche. But how we ensure that this guidance remains relevant to the Cook Islands of today? Especially in founding legislation like our Constitution, within the multiethnic and diverse world we now live in and engage with. Let alone the labour and labourers we have welcomed in to service our tourism industry from all over the world.

Freedom comes at a price and that price is the responsibility it demands as its counterbalance. Freedom on its own is a vaka that sails without its Ama, and that Vaka is doomed to sink to the bottom of the ocean of despair. Freedom must be managed responsibly and it’s is our laws and constitution that provide that balance for us. Our laws and constitution should reflect us and not just who we are but those who are beyond the reef and horizon.

If our laws are from the common law and hewn out of a tree born from the laws of the Bible, then let us not cut that tree down, or forget the roots, eating only from its fruit, but neglecting the very roots that it came from – that would be foolish and a fool’s end as a country is neither our inheritance or our destiny.