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Title:

The conscience of mankind.

By:

Manasian, David,

Economist

, 12/05/98, Vol. 349, Issue 8097

Database:

Academic Search Premier

Section:

Human-Rights LawCan international law establish universal human rights? After 50 years of treaty-making, writesDavid Manasian, it is at last beginning to get somewhereTHIS has been a year of speeches, declarations, resolutions, conferences, concerts, meetings andcampaigns marking an event of which the general public remains largely oblivious. Celebrationsof 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 sessionof 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 makeyet more speeches. And nearly 10m people have already signed Amnesty International's pledgeto do what they can to implement the declaration.But the posters and petitions may have been preaching mainly to the converted. Most peopleremain unaware of the declaration, and many of those who know about it are unimpressed byrighteous 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 tothe terrible things people do to other people.And yet, paradoxically, this constant stream of reports about human-rights abuses is itself atribute to the Universal Declaration, and to the international human-rights movement it helped tospawn. Repeated misbehaviour by any government is now almost always picked up by someinternational 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 proddedreluctant 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 andHuman Rights Watch, have become serious participants in international affairs. Linked withthese larger international groups, and often sponsored or encouraged by them, are thousands of indigenous NGOs in poorer countries, gathering information on particular issues and pressingtheir governments to live up to international standards. Human rights has become a mainstreamsubject at law schools, and the number of lawyers specialising in it has soared. Harried by NGOsand consumer groups in rich countries, many multinational companies too have felt compelled toformulate human-rights policies, and to answer publicly for the effects of their commercial1

activities. But the NGOs' main targets remain governments, the key guarantors-and usually thekey abusers-of human rights.With talk about human rights so pervasive, it is easy to forget that the adoption of the UniversalDeclaration launched a revolution in international law. It may not be as famous as America'sconstitution, 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 GenocideConvention and the four Geneva Conventions updating the laws of war, all roughlycontemporaneous, 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 societyof sovereign states, as they had been ever since the rise of the European nation-state centuriesearlier. There was little to challenge state sovereignty, either in international law or in the waythat most governments behaved. True, philosophical appeals for what today might be describedas universal human rights have been heard since the time of the ancient Greek Stoics; but suchideas 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; butthere 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 remainedsovereign. They answered to no higher political or moral authority. Nineteenth-century attemptsto 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 statesovereignty, restricting only what a state could do to enemy soldiers or foreign nationals, not toits own. For the most part, individuals had no standing in international law: their fate lay in thehands of their governments.The devastation of the second world war, the Jewish Holocaust and the violence inflicted onoccupied populations by the Germans and the Japanese prompted a profound reconsideration of the relationship between human rights and international peace. The United Nations, like theLeague of Nations which had failed so abysmally before it, was meant to be a collective securityarrangement, 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 anew element. For the first time, a state's treatment of its own citizens officially became a subjectof international concern. Regimes which treated their citizens abominably would, it wasrecognised, eventually pose a threat to other countries too.The UN Charter, signed in June 1945, is unequivocal about this. Its preamble pledges theorganisation ``to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights'', and article 1 cites ``promoting andencouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction asto 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 humanrights as necessary to the maintenance of international peace.

The limits of sovereignty

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In retrospect, it seems amazing that Stalin's Soviet Union, which egregiously abused humanrights, 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 relativeimportance of different rights, and about the weight that should be given to individual rights andthe 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 whilechampioning universal rights.When the declaration was drafted, the cold war had already begun to blight post-war hopes thatinternational co-operation would prevail over great-power rivalry. The declaration was passedunopposed, 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. Someof the main ones are listed in table 1.This large body of international human-rights and humanitarian law (the modern term for thelaws 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 thesea. 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 isdifferent. 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 50years. Governments have evaded or ignored their obligations under these treaties with depressingregularity. Even as humanitarian law has been refined, many armed conflicts have been waged asindiscriminately 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'sCultural Revolution, Argentina's ``dirty war'' and Cambodia's killing fields. The end of the coldwar 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 andthe ethnic cleansing of the Balkans.Sceptics (and there are many) could be forgiven for concluding that the frenzy of treaty-makingwhich 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 directway of enforcing them? For all the human-rights legislation now in place, they would claim, theonly genuine guides to international behaviour are still national interest and military power.Such arguments should be treated with respect. Human rights have undeniably been widelyabused, and are still being flouted in many parts of the world. Nevertheless, this survey willargue that human-rights law, for all its failures, has marked a genuine turning point in worldaffairs. It has had an influence on countries' behaviour in the past and could play a bigger role inthe future. To make that admittedly difficult case, the best place to start is to see how human-rights law works in practice.3

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