Fiftieth Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

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Fiftieth Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Magazine article

By: David Manasian

Date: December 3, 1998

Source: Manasian, David. "50th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights." The Economist. (December 3, 1998).

About the Author: David Manasian is the Senior Editor for the London-based news magazine The Economist.

INTRODUCTION

The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 10, 1948, ushered in a new era in human rights expectations and humanitarian law worldwide. The United Nations' 1945 charter itself including provisions creating bodies designed to monitor human rights abuses. The traditional notion among many countries that a nations's sovereignity superceded the human rights of its citizens and guests was rejected firmly with the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Written on the heels of World War II (1938–1945) with its dramatic human rights abuses involving concentration camps, mass genocide, forced sexual slavery, and other war crimes, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was a joint effort that included drafters from North America, Western Europe, Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East.

Announced in 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was part of the International Bill of Rights, a United Nations project that also included the Optional Protocol and the International Covenants on Human Rights, which include the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The Optional Protocol and the Covenants were adopted in 1976, after nearly a decade of consideration by member states. The UN hears cases of human rights abuses via a Human Rights Committee; this committee manages affairs related to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, and the Committee on Torture.

Until the passage of the 1948 Universal Declaration, no such international document defining universal human rights existed. As the following article notes, the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights triggered praise for the document and its impact, while examining ongoing human rights abuses in member states.

PRIMARY SOURCE

Can international law establish universal human rights? After fifty years of treaty-making, writes David Manasian, it is at last beginning to get somewhere.

This has been a year of speeches, declarations, resolutions, conferences, concerts, meetings and campaigns marking an event of which the general public remains largely oblivious. Celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—a sweeping list of fundamental civil, political, social and economic rights—will reach a climax with a special session of the United Nations General Assembly on December 10th, the day the declaration was adopted by the same assembly in 1948. Bill Clinton, along with scores of other world leaders, will make yet more speeches. And nearly ten million people have already signed Amnesty International's pledge to do what they can to implement the declaration.

But the posters and petitions may have been preaching mainly to the converted. Most people remain unaware of the declaration, and many of those who know about it are unimpressed by righteous resolutions by politicians and do-gooders. Besides, what is there to celebrate? Human-rights abuses around the world are reported by newspapers and television every day of the week. Massacres in Kosovo. Slaughter in Algeria. Torture in Turkey. Chronic violence in Colombia. The jailing of dissidents in China, Myanmar and a dozen other countries. There seems no end to the terrible things people do to other people.

And yet, paradoxically, this constant stream of reports about human-rights abuses is itself a tribute to the Universal Declaration, and to the international human-rights movement it helped to spawn. Repeated misbehaviour by any government is now almost always picked up by some international group. Professions of concern about human rights, whether sincere or not, accompany almost any debate about world politics. For any western politician visiting China, raising the question of human rights with Chinese leaders has become a necessary ritual, rather like the obligatory state banquet or visit to the Beijing opera. Such concerns have also prodded reluctant governments into risky armed interventions in Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Kosovo, mostly with mixed results.

A stealthy revolution Over the past few decades, a small army of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) advocating, monitoring and lobbying for human rights, led by bodies such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have become serious participants in international affairs. Linked with these larger international groups, and often sponsored or encouraged by them, are thousands of indigenous NGOs in poorer countries, gathering information on particular issues and pressing their governments to live up to international standards. Human rights has become a mainstream subject at law schools, and the number of lawyers specialising in it has soared. Harried by NGOs and consumer groups in rich countries, many multinational companies too have felt compelled to formulate human-rights policies, and to answer publicly for the effects of their commercial activities. But the NGOs' main targets remain governments, the key guarantors—and usually the key abusers—of human rights.

With talk about human rights so pervasive, it is easy to forget that the adoption of the Universal Declaration launched a revolution in international law. It may not be as famous as America's constitution, the French revolution's Declaration of the Rights of Man, or Britain's Magna Carta; but together with the United Nations Charter (the UN's founding document), the Genocide Convention and the four Geneva Conventions updating the laws of war, all roughly contemporaneous, it marked a decisive change with the past.

Until the end of the second world war, international relations were based on the idea of a society of sovereign states, as they had been ever since the rise of the European nation-state centuries earlier. There was little to challenge state sovereignty, either in international law or in the way that most governments behaved. True, philosophical appeals for what today might be described as universal human rights have been heard since the time of the ancient Greek Stoics; but such ideas played almost no part in international politics.

The United States and the European powers had sometimes intervened in the civil strife of other countries to protect their own nationals, as they did in the Chinese and Ottoman empires; but there was general agreement that whatever states did to their own nationals was their business. So long as they were able to maintain physical control over their territory, they remained sovereign. They answered to no higher political or moral authority. Nineteenth-century attempts to abolish the slave trade through international agreements achieved little. Instead, slavery waned because it became uneconomic. Efforts to codify the laws of war paid careful heed to state sovereignty, restricting only what a state could do to enemy soldiers or foreign nationals, not to its own. For the most part, individuals had no standing in international law: their fate lay in the hands of their governments.

The devastation of the second world war, the Jewish Holocaust and the violence inflicted on occupied populations by the Germans and the Japanese prompted a profound reconsideration of the relationship between human rights and international peace. The United Nations, like the League of Nations which had failed so abysmally before it, was meant to be a collective security arrangement, with the five permanent members of the Security Council, the world's major powers at the time, pledged to act together to punish breaches of the peace. But there was also a new element. For the first time, a state's treatment of its own citizens officially became a subject of international concern. Regimes which treated their citizens abominably would, it was recognised, eventually pose a threat to other countries too.

The UN Charter, signed in June 1945, is unequivocal about this. Its preamble pledges the organisation "to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights," and article 1 cites "promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion" as one of the UN's principal purposes, along with peacekeeping. But the Universal Declaration goes further, explicitly linking respect for human rights as necessary to the maintenance of international peace.

The limits of sovereignty In retrospect, it seems amazing that Stalin's Soviet Union, which egregiously abused human rights, should have agreed to any reference to them in the UN Charter. But even in the long and bitter debates that accompanied the drafting of the Universal Declaration, the Soviets never repudiated the concept of universal rights as such. They argued only about the relative importance of different rights, and about the weight that should be given to individual rights and the conflicting doctrine of national sovereignty. The UN Charter embodies this contradiction, proclaiming that the UN is based on the "sovereign equality of all its members," even while championing universal rights.

When the declaration was drafted, the cold war had already begun to blight post-war hopes that international co-operation would prevail over great-power rivalry. The declaration was passed unopposed, but the entire Soviet block abstained, along with Saudi Arabia. And yet, remarkably, even in the depths of the cold war a stream of human-rights treaties was still being signed. Some of the main ones are listed in table 1.

This large body of international human-rights and humanitarian law (the modern term for the laws of war) is historically unprecedented. It has developed alongside a similar body of international law governing trade, finance, and the exploitation of natural resources such as the sea. But in these other areas, international law is more akin to contractual agreements, in which benefits are reciprocal and national sovereignty remains largely unaffected. Human-rights law is different. It touches governments at their most sensitive point: how they exercise power over their own citizens. Never before have states agreed to accept so many restrictions on their domestic behaviour, or to submit to international scrutiny.

But has it done any good? Abuses of human rights have remained widespread in the past fifty years. Governments have evaded or ignored their obligations under these treaties with depressing regularity. Even as humanitarian law has been refined, many armed conflicts have been waged as indiscriminately as ever. The overwhelming majority of casualties are now civilians, not soldiers. International human-rights law did nothing for the post-war victims of the Soviet gulag, China's Cultural Revolution, Argentina's "dirty war" and Cambodia's killing fields. The end of the cold war in 1989 raised hopes that human rights would be more widely respected, and the 1990s became the decade of democracy—yet it also brought horrors such as the Rwandan genocide and the ethnic cleansing of the Balkans.

Sceptics (and there are many) could be forgiven for concluding that the frenzy of treaty-making which followed the Universal Declaration has mocked such continued and widespread suffering. Indeed, they might ask, does it make sense to call these treaties "law" at all, if there is no direct way of enforcing them? For all the human-rights legislation now in place, they would claim, the only genuine guides to international behaviour are still national interest and military power.

Such arguments should be treated with respect. Human rights have undeniably been widely abused, and are still being flouted in many parts of the world. Nevertheless, this survey will argue that human-rights law, for all its failures, has marked a genuine turning point in world affairs. It has had an influence on countries' behaviour in the past and could play a bigger role in the future. To make that admittedly difficult case, the best place to start is to see how human-rights law works in practice.

SIGNIFICANCE

As Manasian points out, one of the greatest criticisms of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is that there is no mechanism for enforcing it. In the half-century following the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a series of UN member states faced human rights crises, including military dictatorships in Chile and Argentina with accompanying torture of civilians, Pol Pot's regime in Cambodia, the Tutsi-Hutu genocidal conflict in Rwanda, war and ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, and famine in Eastern Africa. Within the context of diplomatic history, prior to the 1948 Universal Declaration, many governments would have limited their discussions with other countries to matters of diplomacy, trade, and war. As the creation of the United Nations and the documents that make up the International Bill of Rights, UN monitoring bodies and special rapporteurs—experts appointed by the Commission on Human Rights—investigate and report on human rights issues in member states, uncovering information and details about internal human rights situations. The systematic documentation of such internal issues is one of the primary functions of the UN agencies and councils that support human rights compliance and those issues outlined in the International Bill of Rights.

In 2005, the UN General Assembly voted to change the human rights oversight structure within the UN. The United Nations Commission on Human Rights, part of the UN since 1946, had become highly politicized in the eyes of many member nations. Membership included countries with strong human rights abuse records, and in 2004, United States UN Ambassador and Representative to the Economic and Social Council Sichan Siv walked out of the UNCHR meeting when Sudan's membership was approved. Ambassador Siv stated that the UN should "not elect a country to the only global body charged specifically with protecting human rights, at the precise time when thousands of its citizens are being murdered or risk starvation." The newly created Human Rights Council convened its first meeting in April 2006; the membership process involves a secret ballot in the General Assembly, requiring a simple majority for membership, and establishes a protocol for removing HRC members when severe human rights violations are documented.

As the Universal Declaration of Human Rights continues into the twenty-first century, its role in international affairs remains a crucial link in keeping human rights at the forefront of political, social, and civil society. While member nations may argue over cultural differences, legal definitions, and committee procedures, the issue of human rights has now become firmly established as part of international and humanitarian policy. The Declaration provides member nations, leaders, and individuals with a cohesive set of principles to guide treaties, policy, and human behavior.