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We now live in the 21st century, a digital age, and it's time to recognize access to fairly priced banking service as a human right.

A decent life, after all, is all but impossible without a bank account. Access to banking services has rightly been called a passport to the modern economy.

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For all we know, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is a fine ophthalmologist with a sympathetic bedside manner.

By all accounts, though, he is not a very nice person. Indeed, he would seem to meet the commonplace definition of "ruthless Middle Eastern despot."

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The small apartment my wife and I rented for a month-and-a-half four years ago in the Marais district of Paris was 81 stairs up from ground level: our kitchen windows looked north across the leaded rooftops—among which, just over 100 metres away, was the roof of the Bataclan music hall, in which on the evening of November 13, 89 people were massacred by terrorist gunmen, and a larger number grievously injured.