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Ever since its adoption on December 10, 1948, by the United Nations General Assembly, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has retained its place of honor in the human-rights movement. No other document has so caught the historical moment, achieved the same moral and rhetorical force, or exerted as much influence on the movement as a whole.
Parent to the two major covenants that followed it and grandparent to the many specialized treaties in the field, the Declaration expressed in lean, eloquent language the hopes and idealism of a world released from the grip of World War II. However self-evident it may appear today, the Declaration bore a more radical message than many of its framers perhaps recognized. It proceeded to work its subversive path through many rooted doctrines of international law, forever changing the discourse of international relations on issues vital to human decency and peace. It underscored the need for international human-rights institutions that could exercise novel jurisdictions over states. It animated peoples in many countries to rethink their plight and to demand of their leaders an unprecedented recognition of their human rights. This remarkable Declaration has become the constitution of the universal human-rights movement.
The Nuremberg trial immediately after the war was but the opening chapter to a terrible knowledge. States agreed on the need to prevent a recurrence of such indiscriminate violence and systematic slaughter. These imperatives led to key provisions of the UN Charter of 1945 that outlawed aggressive war and created the potential power within the Security Council to enforce that ban. But about human rights, the Charter had little to say. Its few provisions on the subject spoke in general terms. The UN was to "promote...universal respect for, and observance of, human rights." States pledged themselves to take appropriate action to achieve that purpose.
The major powers proposed to address human-rights issues through a nonbinding General Assembly declaration on the subject, to be followed by treaty regulation. The UN's Commission on Human Rights, chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, drafted the Universal Declaration, which was ultimately approved by the General Assembly by a vote of 48-0 with eight abstentions (mostly the Soviet bloc). The UN then prepared the two basic treaties: an International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and an International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. After the necessary ratifications, both entered into force in 1976. More than 140 states are now parties to each covenant (and many are also parties to regional human-rights systems in Africa, Europe, and the Americas).
At the heart of the Declaration lay recognition of the "inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family." The General Assembly proclaimed the Declaration a "common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations." Every individual and organ of society would strive to secure the "universal and effective recognition and observance" of the designated rights.
In language of great breadth, those interdependent rights cover most themes of the human-rights movement as it later developed. The Declaration aimed to protect the physical integrity and liberty of all human beings by proclaiming the right to life, and such further rights as protection against torture or arbitrary arrest. It sought to assure fair procedures before independent and impartial tribunals. It barred discrimination in the enjoyment of rights on grounds including race, religion, sex, and political opinion. It proclaimed freedoms of conscience, speech, religion, and association. It gave all citizens the right to "take part" in the government of their country, stating that the "will of the people" as expressed in periodic and genuine elections "shall be the basis of the authority of government." Several provisions addressed economic and social rights: to an education, to work for a just remuneration, to a standard of living adequate for health and well-being, and to security in the event of sickness or old age. (The Declaration did not include a number of rights that later became prominent in global politics, particularly the collective right of "peoples" to self-determination and the rights to development and environment.)
No believer in the Western traditions of liberal and social democracy would find the Declaration foreign territory. The rights that it and the later treaties specify impose on states both restraints and obligations to act, ranging from the protection of individuals to the promotion of cultural, social, and political change that will secure rights and expand the human possibilities of life. At their core, these rights address the fear, so pronounced within the liberal tradition, of abuse of power by the state. (As the movement developed, it took increasing account of abuse of rights and corruption of power by individuals and private organizations as well as by the state; accordingly, over the last two decades, human-rights doctrines and institutions have expanded their indirect regulation of this private sector.)
The exploitation of labor: a child in an engineering workshop in Pakistan. J. HOLMES / PANOS PICTURES |
But human-rights norms hardly impose a straightjacket: they offer no detailed blueprint to control the myriad possibilities of modern life for states and the peoples subject to them. Within the framework of equal respect, openness, popular participation, and social obligation that they establish, many forms of political, economic, and social life--within radically different cultures--can compete for acceptance and flourish. The absorption of most of the human-rights norms into constitutions of countries as diverse as Brazil, India, and South Africa suggests as much. The norms are more an invitation to invention than a confirmation of the status quo.
Two principal themes of the Universal Declaration characterize the movement as a whole: the universality of all the declared rights, and those rights' individual basis. The texts of the Declaration and the later treaties make no concession to regional or cultural variation. And rights belong--as these texts frequently put it--to "everyone." The cardinal postulate of equal human dignity captures both themes, and helps to explain why nondiscrimination has become the fundamental principle of the entire human-rights system.
In setting such postulates and rules, the Declaration and its progeny uprooted notions of state sovereignty that informed an earlier international law. As scholars had insisted, international law was a law among states. Whatever took place internally between a government and its citizens was the state's exclusive concern. This premise shielded much inhumane state conduct from international scrutiny: extrajudicial killing, torture, corrupt procedures, racial and religious discrimination, denials of free speech or association, and cruelly authoritarian and repressive government.
But following the Declaration, international law gradually came to regulate a vast range of relationships between a state and its citizens. Today its human-rights provisions resemble a global constitutional umbrella that regulates much state conduct of only internal scope. It thereby influences the political structure and form of government, the shape and significance of civil society, and hence the distribution of economic and political power. Peoples' struggles that succeed in abolishing systematic violations--rights have always meant fights, violent or ordered--will then often have revolutionary effects. The transformation under way in South Africa followed inevitably from the displacement of apartheid by the principle of nondiscrimination.
That country's stunning, peaceful transition has unfortu-nately not become the norm. We all know that in many states a substantial gap continues to separate human-rights rules from rulers' behavior affecting billions of people. Torture is prohibited--and regularly practiced. Severe and rampant gender discrimination continues. Freedoms of speech and association encounter brutal repression. Genuine and periodic elections within an open, pluralist structure of political parties remain a distant dream. Ideological conflicts over forms of government or routes toward economic development tear at the fabric of universalism. Most shocking--in light of the Word War II stimulus for the human-rights movement--the world watches and wonders and worries while ethnic massacres and genocides run their course.
Beyond such striking failures to achieve goals, the movement confronts serious dilemmas. East-West and North-South conflicts over the significance and interpretation of vital rights have taken the place of the earlier rift between Communist states and the West. Of course, challenges to the universality of human rights stemming from notions of cultural relativism may simply be a cover for those seeking to justify authoritarian rule. But there are legitimate, vexing issues, like the Western bias of the human-rights movement against collective rights and toward individualistic--as opposed to communitarian--forms of social life, the claims based on religious traditions that conflict with rights to conscience or equal protection, or debate over the place of individual duties in a rights-oriented scheme. Moreover, the ideological divide over the significance in the international movement of economic-social rights--formally of equal rank and interdependent with civil-political rights, but not treated seriously by most of the West--continues to generate acerbic debate and ill will.
Has the human-rights movement then constructed a paper paradise for its advocates and bureaucrats that fails to touch the world's victims? The scorecard is hardly so bleak. The movement showed striking effectiveness in its pressures for decolonization and in the struggles against racial and gender discrimination. It surely influenced the trends toward more democratic governments. And many of its long-run efforts, though less sensational, nonetheless make solid progress--more the stuff of lawyers, advocates, and statesmen who work toward ratification of treaties, or toward expanding the numbers and powers of human-rights institutions. The current struggle for a permanent International Criminal Court--however weakened that new body may be by compromises agreed to at the closing drafting session this summer--captures both these activities as the effort now begins to gain states' ratification of the treaty creating that institution.
Such successes have achieved deep change. Above all, they have given birth to a new and potent language. Today's routine discourse of human rights could not have been imagined 50 years ago. This discourse--in the UN and regional organizations, in the new treaty bodies, in relations between states, within states' political life, in national and international courts, in universities and religious institutions--has become a staple of international relations and law. Moreover, it has stimulated reformist politics within states and has thereby, for example, placed its strong mark on the new constitutions of the states in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Europe that have moved toward some form of political democracy. It has begun to influence the theories of development economists and the calculations of business enterprises.
In a word, human rights are now too pervasive and important to be ignored. Oppressive governments gradually yield to the relentless internal and external pressures for recognition of rights. Even states as distanced as China from observance of many human rights must take account of this historical trend, step by cautious step. However defensively, they too must join in the discourse. Nor is this merely an elite phenomenon of influencing leaders. The peaceful revolutions of South Africa and Eastern Europe illustrate how victories can emerge from decades of gradually changing public consciousness about rights and related grassroots mobilization. The human-rights movement has achieved its most striking successes precisely through a dialectic between bottom-up and top-down strategies for change.
Of course this new discourse must be firmly anchored in human-rights institutions. A state may find it relatively costless to pay lip service to human-rights rules lacking any institutional connection. But international institutions embodying those rules that can pressure states to comply pose a greater threat to sovereignty. The treaties that built on the Universal Declaration created intergovernmental entities that were intended to give backbone to the movement. They complement such bodies as the UN General Assembly that deal recurrently with human rights. Powerful nongovernmental organizations--global in scope, like Amnesty International, or active only in their states of origin, like the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights--have provided indispensable knowledge and ideas, infusing the movement with greater dynamism.
These diverse institutions are empowered to implement and apply human-rights norms in different ways: to develop new treaties, make investigative trips to monitor state conduct, give publicity to violations, impose economic and political pressures on violator states, and in rare instances authorize the use of armed force to protect rights against systematic and brutal violations that endanger international peace.
Given the risk of serious enforcement that they present, it comes as no surprise that these institutions have been granted only modest powers. Moreover, the politicized atmosphere of leading institutions--which makes routine states' self-interested dealings at the expense of human rights--fosters cynicism and despair about the entire movement. But even seemingly pale achievements--commenting critically on a state's reports about its compliance with human rights, for example--go beyond the thinking of most world leaders just a half-century ago. Whatever their flaws, we are far better off with these young institutions on which we can build than without them.
The gains won by the human-rights movement over this inventive half-century seem here to stay. As one observer put it, "the idea of human rights having been thought, it cannot be unthought." We have realized the Universal Declaration's goal of setting a "common standard of achievement" for peoples and nations. Now the struggle continues to realize that standard.
The persistence of ethnic massacres: a Tutsi refugee on the road to Kigali. MARTIN ADLER / PANOS PICTURES