The Rites of Human Rights at the United Nations

Roland Burke

Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism,

and Development, Volume 9, Number 1, Spring 2018, pp. 127-142 (Article)

Published by University of Pennsylvania Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/hum.2018.0007

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/688182

[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ]
 Roland Burke

The Rites of Human Rights at the United Nations

Across its first four decades of life, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was
invoked to support an almost limitless range of causes and movements. Differences in
emphasis and application to particular contexts were always envisaged as the Universal
Declaration circulated across the world, and across time. This was intrinsic to its
appeal, as a set of abstractions that transcended the specific and spoke to an enduring
set of freedoms required for all, everywhere, and for all time. Rarely were local condi-
tions likely to encourage a uniform enthusiasm for each aspect of its vision, or
symmetry in the realization of its articles. The authors were no strict constructionists,
and all imagined a living text.1
By the 1970s, however, the Universal Declaration was almost too alive for its own
safety. The manner with which the vision of 1948 was embraced had, almost from its
inception, been partial. Yet as the Universal Declaration entered its third decade, there
was an abundance of reference to the document that was discordant with its original
purposes and meaning—and a growing competition within the language of human
rights. After a brief phase dominated by benign lassitude, which extended into the
1950s, a constellation of competing ideas and programs had interlaced their priorities
with terms from the human rights lexicon. Third world crusades for self-
determination, economic development, global wealth redistribution, and cultural
particularism each engaged human rights to underwrite their legitimacy. Western
NGOs, most notably Amnesty International, and neoconservatives conflated human
rights with a highly individualistic, and depressingly pessimistic, core of classical
freedoms. Theirs was a similar revision of human rights as once defined—albeit one
which involved subtracting from, rather than adding to, the concept.
All of these various movements held a degree of kinship with the vision of 1948, a
nucleus of similarity sufficient to expropriate the latent power of human rights
language. Each sought, or at least pretended to seek, emancipation of some kind.
Nevertheless, the invocation of human rights in the course of these other crusades
ultimately pushed the concept to its elastic limit. These ritualistic and often hollow
recitations of the Universal Declaration had a paradoxical effect, elevating the profile
of its terminology while compromising the legitimacy of the language that was being
drawn upon. “Human rights” became an all-purpose lexical carapace, under which all
manner of dissonant causes were pursued. As human rights proliferated, its meaning
pluralized, becoming the moral lingua franca not of one world but conflicting ones.
Neoconservatives dismembered the Universal Declaration from the right. Soviet bloc
functionaries drowned it in the opaque verbiage of socialist legality. Revitalized NGOs
pared it back to a minimalist humanitarian palliation. Third World developmentalists

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 deduced “New World” and “New International” orders from single articles. Western
European Social and Christian Democrats, Commonwealth and American progres-
sives, and the vanishingly small population of Asian, African, and Latin American
democracies quietly wandered through this contest of extremities with a kind of
weighted average position that at least approximated what had been adopted on
December 10, 1948. All of them spoke of human rights.
Recent histories of human rights have emphasized the importance of the 1970s as
the “breakthrough” moment for human rights. Current scholarship locates the 1970s
as the epicenter of the modern movement, when human rights made a precipitous
transition from juridical novelty to mass phenomenon.2 The prime exponent of the
“breakthrough” thesis, Samuel Moyn, has explicitly cleaved this decade from all that
preceded it.3 Human rights were born without much by way of precedent or precursor
genealogy, in a telescoped process of historical rupture. Recognition of the 1970s as a
decisive point in the history of human rights has been an important corrective to
narratives of gradual, but inevitable, progress that once characterized the historiog-
raphy.4 Yet the nature of the “breakthrough,” and its implications, have yet to be
characterized. Moyn’s impressive work, breviary of the “new history of human rights,”
tends to measure “breakthrough” through the prism of visibility, a logical and mean-
ingful measure of the stunning rise of the term. Intensity of utilization, which Moyn
numerically quantifies in a telling appendix, is the proxy for the “rise” of human
rights.5 While this represents a novel approach for historians of ideas, and one supple-
mented by an exceptionally powerful contextualizing argument, it is an austere
measurement. Prominence tells nothing of the ways in which the languages of human
rights were being used.6
This essay reassesses the 1970s “breakthrough,” and approaches the dramatic
proliferation of human rights phrases as a more variegated and paradoxical demon-
stration of change. It revisits the Universal Declaration on its twenty-fifth anniversary
in 1973 and surveys the fractured set of meanings that “human rights” had already
acquired and would continue to accrete in the coming years. It argues that the 1970s
represented a key moment in the history of human rights, when the language of rights
was deployed with increasing vigor. However, this enthusiasm was not for a shared
concept, even in the generous sense that had been allowed in the frame of 1948. There
was in its place a shared appreciation for the potential power of the term. Human
rights were invoked as never before, but with a narrowness of purpose and a naked
instrumentalism that threatened to dissolve the power that had so encouraged their
uptake into the vernacular of diplomats and activists.
Within the United Nations, human rights were forced into highly constrained
channels, the program captured by autocratic regimes that refashioned the preferred
definition of rights within the international organization. A handful of causes, relating
to national liberation struggles (and attached antiracism campaigns) and to economic
development, were the mainstay of the agenda. They were met with equally narrow-
band countercampaigns, typically from the nascent American neoconservative
movement and congressional campaigns for freedom of emigration. Both sides deco-
rated their claims with references to human rights that were too empty and too
selective to mean much—but their presence was enough to subvert the phrase.

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Outside the UN, a small but rapidly growing band of NGOs—the International
League for Human Rights (ILHR), Amnesty International (AI), and the International
Commission of Jurists (ICJ)—were increasingly vocal. And they were increasingly
troubling for the states that held command of the UN program, though even their
fidelity for 1948 had started to recede toward something like humanitarianism. As the
1970s opened, both the states and the NGOs spoke dialects of human rights with an
unprecedented verbosity, yet the proliferation of verbiage was not a straightforward
indication of “progress.” The era that witnessed the advent of stereo and quadraphonic
sound systems was, perhaps appropriately, polyphonic, or even cacophonic, in its
recitations of human rights. The words were abundant—and so too were competing
meanings.

Liberating the Universal Declaration: Human Rights, Armed Struggle, and Apartheid
At the dawn of the 1970s, within the body that had generated the Universal Decla-
ration, much of its vision of inherent, indivisible, individual rights for all had been
incrementally qualified and repurposed. Alongside the original division between
Western and Soviet notions of rights, there were now multiple axes of fracture, with
the deepest lines of scission emerging between the third world and the Western
democracies. Once champions of the most maximalist universality, and hopeful aspi-
rants to the sorts of societies mapped out by the Universal Declaration, the majority
of Asian, African, and Arab governments now cast human rights in a very different
manner. As early liberal democratic postcolonial regimes collapsed, governmental
enthusiasm for the raft of freedoms in the Universal Declaration waned. Other prior-
ities, purportedly more urgent, cannibalized what had become the moribund human
rights discussions within the UN. In the process, the whole philosophy of human
rights was given a new inflection: collective, statist, technocratic, and, in some variants,
enthusiastic about the emancipatory power of revolutionary violence.
For the majority of the General Assembly, discussion became fixated on the global
economic conditions, national structures, and armed revolutions that were held by
their proponents to be necessary preceding measures on the road to universal rights.
In an oddly compelling logic, these systemic transformations were more important
than the rights themselves because their realization was an enabling requirement. Yet
in the all-encompassing crusade for development and liberation from colonialism,
cosmetic reference to the Universal Declaration and human rights was arguably worse
than none at all: the Declaration simply bejeweled a very different set of propositions,
without shaping them.7 The quest for greater justice in wealth distribution across the
world, and accelerated development, certainly related to human rights; so too did the
abuses of Portuguese imperial rule, and the racist tyranny in Southern Africa. The
difficulty, in terms of the preservation of a unitary language, was that these issues
consumed human rights almost wholesale.
With each recitation of human rights that was incorporated into these different
crusades, any distinctive philosophy of rights outside collective racial oppression or
inequitable economic relations was progressively effaced. In the rhetoric of the militant
members of the Group of 77 (G-77), and the invocations of opportunistic Soviet
diplomats, human rights could be transmuted from individual freedoms to the silent

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 handmaidens of sovereign claims. The rituals of the General Assembly, never much
more than ineffectual at best, emerged as the means for exsanguinating any meaning
that was not amenable to the majority. Worse still, the loudest dissents, typically from
the nascent American neoconservative movement, were those that presented a
competing human rights idea that was only marginally less partial. If the G-77 had
inflated the language, the American right and Amnesty, in their own ways, would
deflate it to the despairing triumvirate of integrity of the person, freedom to emigrate,
and freedom of conscience. Each side claimed custodianship of the Universal Decla-
ration and its terms. None was especially close to 1948.
By 1973 the formula for talismanic use of the Universal Declaration was well estab-
lished. William F. Buckley, conservative icon and U.S. representative to the UN, was
an acute observer of the formulaic use of human rights in the General Assembly—
while remaining oblivious to the inconsistencies within his own fractional idea of the
term, which was perfectly superimposable on the sorts of reactionary precepts
advanced by Frank Holman’s American Bar Association two decades earlier.8 With a
sardonic phrase that never risked self-awareness, he described the conventions of a
human rights resolution, which during his tenure typically involved one of the espe-
cially disfavored abuses: apartheid, colonialism (flavored both neo- and classic), or
Zionism. Freedoms of emigration and expression, and from arbitrary imprisonment
by a left-wing regime—the three causes Buckley himself had determined were the real
human rights canon—were always absent from the formulaic texts constructed by the
UN. “All resolutions,” he explained, “begin preferably with a present participle” and,
as a further requirement, “every verb introducing a clause needs, for some reason, to
be different . . . Aware . . . Recalling . . . Considering . . . Noting . . . Stressing . . .
Believing . . . Deploring . . . ”9
Although presented by an observer who was markedly closer to the states’ rights
champion Barry Goldwater than he was to his predecessor in the UN post, the civil
rights defender Justice Arthur Goldberg, Buckley’s anatomy of resolution structure
and syntax was accurate. Phrases “recalling” were the cue for a voluminous pro-forma
catalogue of declarations and treaties, commencing with the Universal Declaration
and moving through various conventions and other legal and exhortatory sequels.
These were then interleaved with whatever clauses were needed for the cause at hand
(to Buckley’s irritation, they were never his own). Human rights in the UN were
governed by an overly predictable grammar, a shopworn prose that gestured to more
than a stylistic rut. Words that were meant to hold power were now interchangeable:
a fully fungible boilerplate of outrage. These were the rites of human rights in the
UN.
Buckley’s service coincided with a moment when human rights were sharply
polarized, when the crusade for collective national liberation, most especially in
southern Africa, surpassed even the other priority concerns of state-led modernization
and economic development. The Universal Declaration’s twenty-fifth anniversary was,
for the most part, submerged in the vortex of antiracism and armed struggle. The
occasion was instead the platform to launch the International Decade to Combat
Racism and Racial Discrimination.10 At the plenary meeting that ratified the proposed
Decade in October 1972, a few minutes were devoted to the agenda item on a

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“programme for the observance of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Universal Decla-
ration of Human Rights”—which was concluded rapidly, to allow for hours of
rhetoric on national liberation, racial discrimination, and the importance of armed
struggle in southern Africa and, at Cuba’s insistence, Puerto Rico.11 It was a powerful
symbolic representation of the relationship among universal human rights, antiracism,
and violent insurrection. The struggle against racial discrimination, a subset of a much
broader human rights concept, had almost consumed the parent category. 1948 was
cited insofar as it underwrote the crusade, rarely much further.
Collective liberations of race, nation, and peoples were synonymous with human
rights. For a large swathe of the UN membership, the tension between person and
people, between national and individual, was resolved as meaning liberation of peoples
and nations.12 No longer was self-determination conceived of as a means for securing
human rights. Liberating peoples occurred in the aggregate, and in particular regions:
southern Africa, Israel, and its occupied territories. It was endorsed in formulations
that spoke of all necessary means, the sanctity of armed struggle, and material support
for freedom fighters.13 Extremity was often preferred, with open derision for non-
violent measures and exaltation of weapons provision as the most humanitarian form
of assistance.14 It was a long way from the social democratic banner of the 1955
Freedom Charter, or the mass nonviolent resistance of the Defiance Campaign.15 That
era had closed with the death of the ANC leader and Nobel laureate Albert Luthuli
six years earlier.
National liberation crusading approached its zenith in the 1973 session. Numerous
legislative achievements reflected the sense of the Assembly, with a surge in boldly
phrased resolutions on apartheid, racism, Portuguese colonialism, southern Rhodesia,
Israeli abuses in the Occupied Territories, and the legitimacy of the combatants of the
armed struggle.16 The following year, in 1974, this catalogue of resolutions would be
joined by their logical conclusion: official recognition of the illegitimacy of South
Africa’s delegation, and formal recognition of the National Liberation Movements,
the African National Congress and Pan Africanist Congress, as representatives.17 Yasser
Arafat, leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization and also recognized as a repre-
sentative, addressed the UN plenary that November, citing the Universal Declaration,
with his gun holster famously visible—it was the capstone to an extraordinary year of
militancy.18 National liberation was the moral and political crusade that defined the
era, and human rights were drawn deep into its orbit, not as shepherd moons but
fully dependent satellites.
However, the crowning achievement of the 1973 General Assembly had been the
passage of the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the
Crime of Apartheid (ICSPA) a little over a week before Human Rights Day.19 Spon-
sored by Brezhnev’s Soviet Union, Sékou Touré’s Guinea, and Nigerian general
Gowon’s military government, which had recently crushed all vestiges of Biafran seces-
sionism, its articles were potent in their expression and implication. The ICPSA was
a markedly different instrument from the 1965 International Convention on the Elimi-
nation of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD). ICERD outlawed apartheid
and racism just as thoroughly, but in a framework that was more closely aligned with
the principles of the Universal Declaration and advanced with a remarkable level of

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 conciliation.20 By contrast, those who advanced the ICPSA were sharply more provoc-
ative and almost exclusively focused on South Africa and its Western friends. Its
proponents abandoned the avoidance of polemic characteristic of earlier antiracism
advocates, like George Lamptey, the Ghanaian jurist who drove the 1965 convention
forward.21
Instead of approaching racism and apartheid as gross abuses of individual human
rights, ICPSA framed the nature of racially discriminatory violations in primarily
collective terms. An appalling collective violation of human rights, apartheid induced
a recasting of human rights as a discourse that emphasized, and was perhaps even
defined by, collective abuses. The chair of the Commission on Human Rights,
Mauritian ambassador Krishna Ramphul, in his summative speech on the develop-
ments of 1973, reperiodized human rights history to reflect the transition. With a
dismissive reference to the International Bill of Rights as an almost parenthetic
exception, he argued that “apart from that, there was no real programme in the United
Nations on human rights until this session of the Assembly.”22
The roll call vote saw the ICPSA adopted by a strong majority—one that
contained dictatorships of almost every orientation and was almost entirely bereft of
democracies, even those with decent anti-apartheid credentials.23 Its decoupling from
any substantive relationship for actual respect for human rights was stark. With the
ICSPA adopted and the Decade to Combat Racism already set to activate with no
further required action, Human Rights Day was very nearly forgotten by the General
Assembly, which promptly set about the other agenda items, scheduling work directly
on top of the commemorative ceremonies that they were supposed to undertake on
December 10.24
The commemorations, when eventually remembered, were mixed. The Canadian
jurist John Humphrey, who had once led the Human Rights Division but was now a
fleeting invited visitor to the Assembly, tried to find optimism on Human Rights Day,
but that was mostly beyond his capability. After a brief history of the Universal Decla-
ration, its origin, and its impact, Humphrey’s conclusions were gloomy. While the
vision of 1948, he argued, was “as revolutionary as anything that has ever happened in
history,” subsequent decades had dimmed it. In remarks that were rendered more
obliquely and gently in the official verbatim transcript, he was blunt about failure.
Those currently “denied their most basic rights,” a substantial section of the globe,
“can hardly be blamed if they do not share our enthusiasm for an event, which to
them can only seem a colossal joke.”25 Far from celebrating the Declaration,
Humphrey was almost mocking in his summation.

It might have been more appropriate if the United Nations had dedicated this
twenty-fifth anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights to the countless people whose rights it has not been able to protect.26

Given the general inclination to equanimity in official forums, this was an unusual
episode, where the candid prose of Humphrey’s private diary and correspondence
escaped into the public realm.

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Ritual and Reality: The Competing Meaning of “Human Rights” in the 1970s
While the intensely contested custodianship of “human rights” was perhaps at its most
overtly political within the General Assembly, the competitive invocations of rights
language by state parties captured only part of the growing dispersion in meaning.
Dissonance within human rights language was most striking in the gulf between
NGOs and individual activists, and the states, mostly authoritarian, that steered the
1970s UN program. The chasm between the empty nominalism and selectivity of the
UN organs, whatever their politics, and the substantive world of human rights was
arguably never greater. Efforts to close it were diligently blocked and preemptively
foreclosed. It was a demarcation regulated by more restriction on NGO participation
and physically enacted with an ocean-wide geographical cordon sanitaire. UN head-
quarters liberated itself of its Human Rights Division. The twenty-fifth anniversary of
the Universal Declaration was the year when the human rights program was trans-
ported to Geneva, a decision that was justified on the basis of cost initially, with the
necessary extension of office space cheaper in Switzerland.27
A rapid change in exchange rates rendered that rationale redundant almost as soon
as it was announced, yet no new excuse was furnished. Privately, a delegate from one
of the Asian bloc states disclosed the actual motivation, which was “to downgrade the
importance of human rights within the UN both psychologically and administra-
tively.”28 A senior official from the Secretariat observed that the human rights program
would “be more asleep” in its new home.29 NGOs, notably the International League
for Human Rights, were in close proximity to UN Plaza in New York, which made
the logistical aspects of activism with limited resources much more favorable. The
move to Geneva ensured that the diplomatic chantry priests could continue the ritu-
alized dissipation of energy without disruption from the temporal world. Outside the
UN, the salience of human rights was undiminished, and seemingly on the increase.
This was precisely the problem for repressive regimes and their allies, particularly
as the new mechanisms for petition started to show some prospect of partial efficacy,
following the passage of Resolution 1235 in 1967.30 The original system for
“addressing” individual complaints, set down in 1947, was perhaps the epitome of a
human rights ritualism evacuated of substance. Under the terms of ECOSOC Reso-
lution 75, each petition was noted and filed, with an appended explanatory note that
there was no capacity to have its substance studied. This was a system for receipt of
petitions that had been intricately designed to keep the content of the complaints
cauterized from the discussions of the Commission. In its earliest years, the UN Secre-
tariat was scrupulous in procedural matters, and in effacing the personal. The process
of filing, summarizing, and registering the physical petitions was studiously codified,
and their effectiveness and meaning were just as carefully excised. For two decades,
the procedure of petitioning was perfectly cleaved from the power latent within it, a
power that was then imprisoned in a meticulously well-catalogued compactus.
Across 1972, the UN had received more than 27,000 petitions.31 A number were
from the Soviet Union, despite the ban on receipt of communications at the UN
offices, imposed by Secretary-General U Thant in 1969 after a petition was presented

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 by Soviet citizens to the UN Information Center in Moscow.32 While the Soviet
petitions were not examined, Brazil, Indonesia, Tanzania, Iran, Portugal, and the
United Kingdom all had communications from their nationals studied. There was a
human rights world outside the UN, and by some round-about portals it did enter
the chamber, much as the authoritarian caucus tried to close it out. Although the
proceedings of the high-political sessions in New York tended to suggest otherwise,
the ultimate ends of human rights were individuals, not abstractions—a point epito-
mized by the daunting paper monument of pleas, each the pathetic metonymy for an
abused person.
The contrast was rendered vividly on those occasions where the “human rights”
of the NGO world directly encountered the species that tended to preoccupy the UN
and most of its member states. At the 1973 Human Rights Day Prize ceremony, the
point was demonstrated by who was absent. Only two recipients were actually present
to receive their awards, the remainder claimed by ill health, government travel restric-
tions, and death. The absence of the prize-winner Bishop Abel Muzorewa, detained
by Ian Smith’s regime in Rhodesia, exemplified the delta between the mood of UN
member states and the work of human rights activism in the outside world. As leader
of the only party that remained committed to nonviolent struggle for equality in the
country, Muzorewa represented a rara avis in 1973 in southern Africa. Two year later,
Smith arrested him again. Five years later, as the thirtieth-anniversary of the Universal
Declaration approached, Muzorewa would lead Zimbabwe to independence at
Lancaster House and inaugurate a brief period of liberal constitutionalism, though his
government was regarded as illegitimate by most African nationalists.
The unsuccessful candidates for UN prizes were just as telling. Andrei Sakharov,
perhaps the most influential figure in the entire human rights movement, had been
nominated for the award by the ILHR. In September 1973, Jerome Shestack, on behalf
of the League, wrote to UN secretary-general Waldheim with an extensive application
for Sakharov’s recognition, including some short annexes of his work.33 The League
also nominated Roger Baldwin, one of the founding members of the human rights
movement in the United States. Both nominations received a pro-forma response
from the chief of the Human Rights Division, Marc Schreiber, who indicated they
had been passed to the judges for consideration. Privately, the League speculated on
whether there were Soviet judges on the panel. Sakharov, who would later receive
both the Nobel and Lenin prizes, received nothing from the UN. The Union of Arab
Lawyers nominated Sean Macbride, a figure who had despaired at the outcomes of
the World Human Rights Conference in Tehran. Despite also being awarded both a
Nobel and a Lenin Prize, he did not receive a UN plaque.
While the almost farcical dysfunction of the UN represented the perils of state
capture of “human rights,” the assorted moral anomalies it produced were arguably
epiphenomenal to a more fundamental transition in the language. The emergence of
human rights as the singular, peerless, moral lingua franca produced a tendency to re-
express all causes as “human rights” outright, or at least an intimate sibling to them.
In the American context, Jeri Laber, founding director of Helsinki Watch, observed
that in the space of a handful of years all of the various causes for which she advocated

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became comprehensible in shorthand to her taxi driver, under the omnibus term
“human rights,” and required no further parsing.34
Internationally, efforts to bolster a seemingly fragile and exhausted normative
universality actively redenominated analogues, sometimes very loose analogues, as
“human rights,” effacing the distinctiveness of the discourse. In her speech to the 1968
NGO Assembly for the International Human Rights Year, UNESCO’s director of
philosophy, Jeanne Hersch, found a language that was, she feared, moribund in its
formalism and detachment and its increasing captivity to material and political
circumstance. Hersch spoke anxiously of the “portentous loss of meaning” in norms
of law, of a world in which “human rights and the Universal Declaration also lose
their base and reason for being.”35 In a commendable effort to recuperate “human
rights,” Hersch launched a project to re-base the moral currency, built on a massive
catalogue of cross-cultural examples.36 While impressive it its breadth and scale, the
finished work, The Birthright of Man, at least in part reflected the conceptual promis-
cuity that was evacuating human rights of their power. As a compendium of rough
homologues, with each debrided of its specific geographical, historical, and cultural
context, “human rights” were everywhere and everything, to more or less anyone. The
symmetry and organic unity so emphasized by the drafters of 1948 was reduced to lists
of emancipatory aphorisms, many requiring substantial ellipses to be accommodated
in even a spacious rights architecture. Human rights was virtue, as perceived by
someone, somewhere, at some point in recorded history.
Alongside this osmotic dilution of human rights as the synonym for all good, and
within the UN in particular, was the progressive loss of any idealism to retain
meaning. Among the more stunning moments of the 1970s arrived when the legations
revisited the UN Charter and sought to rededicate themselves to its vision of a world
that respected peace, sovereign equality, and human rights. The Assembly had become
weary of its own words, recognizing them as incapable of carrying any real affective
heft. In an extraordinary break from the theatrical formalism that was an almost
adamantine rule of the plenary, the New Zealand representative broke from the
torrents of platitude. “The mass of words which we redraft and qualify,” he lamented,
“no longer compel or persuade.” “We have,” he observed, “become the servants of our
language rather than its master.”37
By the mid-1980s, the UN forum was almost a closed loop system for the
rearrangement of symbols. When the Right to Development, the then premier
animating cause for the UN, reached its critical moment, the implications of the vote
were privately discussed among the Western caucus. While the exhortations and
surrounding rhetorical freight suggested that recognition of the right would produce
an epochal change in the balance of global economic justice (an endeavor that was
plausibly deduced from Article 28 of the Universal Declaration), the reality was more
prosaic. Richard Schifter, the newly arrived U.S. representative and a figure markedly
less partisan than his neoconservative predecessors, asked a good-natured (Australian)
counterpart for counsel. Anxious about committing to such a serious undertaking,
Schifter questioned what would follow the Declaration. The Australian warned that,
following UN precedent, there would likely be sequelae, in a binding, Convention. A
concerned Schifter sought detail on how much redistribution the Australian

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 government proposed. The puzzled Australian advised that there was no plan for any
kind of policy outside the chamber.38 Any Convention would mark the terminal point
of the enterprise—and it occurred well before there were any transformative implica-
tions beyond text on a UN document.
The UN human rights system had arrived back at Geneva not merely in space but
in spirit. In its relentless textualism, its repetition and pastiche of archaic resolution
phrasing, it had come to resemble the sort of highly mediated world of the League of
Nation’s Permanent Mandates Commission. As Natasha Wheatley has demonstrated,
the Mandates system operated with textual lands, textual rights, and textual people.39
By the mid-1980s, Geneva was a realm more hospitable to the skillful semiotician than
the over-passionate activist. As a site of international idealism, effectiveness within the
UN human rights program came to require a fluency in Kristeva as much as Kant,
with the elaborate symbology of prefabricated sentences and formulations on “effective
realization,” “essential pre-requisites,” and “interdependence.” As the desperate efforts
of the Working Party on Disappearances demonstrated, humans were generally not
permitted in the chamber.40

Conclusions: A Human Rights World Made Predictable?

Uptake of human rights language has often been taken as a shorthand metric of its
power, and an index of its success. Although not generally regarded as an especially
astute commentator on human rights questions, the German Democratic Republic’s
representative Peter Florin inadvertently captured the problem in his speech on the
thirtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration in 1978. When boasting of the
different, and superior, meaning of human rights in the socialist world, he observed
that though “the wording in both cases may sometimes be the same,” two immiscible
ideas resided beneath the phrase.41 The dramatic extension of the language of human
rights in the 1970s was complicated and contradictory in effects. Human rights as a
phrase was not merely malleable, it was ductile. Reference to 1948 became a golden
thread of rhetorical embroidery for any cause that self-identified as advancing claims
of justice, equity, freedom, and well-being. The attendant plurality of usages, a good
deal of them incompatible, risked the exhaustion of any vestigial power the language
held. There were too many words, spoken by too many, for too many purposes. The
proliferation of human rights verbiage was, at least in part, expressive of a normative
failure.
“Human rights” was more than an essentially contested term; it was term actively
appropriated for its legitimating power and prestige and then abraded and ablated by
the usages to which it was put. Writing after the controversial Resolution 3379
“Zionism is Racism” vote, a new benchmark for the polarization within the language,
Charles Fairbanks, a political scientist advising the U.S. State Department, opined
that “even those who now care about human rights will become ever more cynical
about the terms they now use to express this concern.”42 The incantation of human
rights as a capsid for other causes was dangerous: “the words,” he argued, “will at
length cease to stand for anything authentic or to evoke any feeling in those who hear
them.”43 In the high predictability of where and how scrutiny was apportioned (as
much from the United States as the G-77) of the reproducible phrase in which it was

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expressed, and in the bloc-aligned voting patterns of those engaged, the human rights
debates of the Commission and the General Assembly were functionally the same for
most of the 1970s. Their resilience to perturbation by the exterior world was
remarkable, a system of “human rights” that sat largely decoupled from those transfor-
mations of the “breakthrough” era of Soviet dissent and mass NGO mobilization.
Heroic efforts have been made to recuperate nominalist usages as a sort of acci-
dental virtue, a kind of backhanded tribute to the legitimacy and appeal of the term.
As in geologic processes, repetition was of itself worthwhile and productive. John
Humphrey clung to volumetric nominalism in his speech to celebrate Human Rights
Day in 1988. In the interminable sequence of resolutions against apartheid, he
observed, each goes on to say in every case “and the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights.” This was, he argued, “the kind of practice” that universalized the acceptance
of its precepts.44 Although it is a resourceful attempt to salvage cynical instrumen-
talism, finding redemptive power in the echolalia of authoritarian regimes risks
perversity. When Saudi canonists could claim fidelity (and even superiority) in respect
for human rights, when the Brezhnev regime could boast of its adherence to the key
instruments of international human rights law, and Ferdinand Marcos could author a
book on the human rights delivered by martial law and dictatorship, the elastic limit
of the language had almost certainly been reached.45 There was at least some case for
greater parsimony in the name of integrity. Equally, excessive parsimony, of a re-
authored “human rights” that was constructed, in the case of the proponents of the
Jackson-Vanik Amendment, around a single article of the Universal Declaration,
misstated quite profoundly what was so distinctive, and so hopeful, about 1948.
During a period when the human rights machinery remained gravely ineffective,
with the mechanisms of special rapporteurs, individual petition, and thematic and
area working groups still in their infancy, and an initiative for a UN High Commis-
sioner for Human Rights blocked by left and right, symbolism and linguistic integrity
constituted more or less the entire arsenal. If it was broken, there was not much
remaining. Each time purely collectivist causes acquired an exoskeleton of orphaned
human rights terms, each time Resolution 217(IIIA) was appended to a text that
reflected little of its philosophy, and with all of the long linguistic journeys that trans-
mogrified state prerogative into a “precondition” for “the realization of human rights,”
that power was spent. When redefined as little more than the austere negative
freedoms, the prevention of torture and extradjudicial killing, or an isolated right to
freedom of emigration, a good deal of its utopian quality was simply thrown away.
Trapped in its own circular references, tide-locked in fixed voting positions, only
the external reservoir of transnational mobilization on human rights, which flew
slowly and haphazardly into the UN, would replenish the language. This was a task
for another decade, well after the “breakthrough.” At the Second World Conference
on Human Rights, in June 1993, the patterns of a generation of human rights
formalism were broken. Inside the Vienna Convention Center, activists made their
way up the escalator from their allocated basement and pierced the rood screen that
normally shielded the UN’s human rights liturgy. For a handful of days, independent
press conferences, the political t-shirts of the “peoples” campaign, and printed Dalai
Llama masks sat juxtaposed with the bureaucratic language of the state legations. The

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 result was chaotic, loud, and unpredictable—human rights reality had, temporarily,
disrupted the incantations of human rights ritual. It was a moment of rupture that
marked the beginning of a less disruptive NGO movement.
Proceduralism and formalism, the mainstays of the UN program from the late
1950s onward, were arguably inherent features of an institutionalized human rights
system. They also provided a kind of basal metabolism for human rights, keeping the
language alive, albeit barely, and with large tracts moribund at best and almost
necrotic by the 1970s. The easy rituals of confected and hyperperformative outrage, of
laundry list recapitulation of past instruments, were, across the 1980s and early 1990s,
broken by activists who were inside the temple. Yet even activism was not immune to
the seductions of ritual, as intense campaigning became permanent advocacy. As the
2000s drew on, the template of the NGO “shadow report,” complete with executive
summary, bureaucratized the movement—at least in form. Energetic outrage was
released in calculated bursts. The Universal Periodic Review, a newer UN system that
explicitly embraces predictable repetition and drops into a well-understood catechism
all too often, was mapped onto the older state reporting cycle, shifting the cadence of
ritualized scrutiny modestly faster.46
The symmetry and predictability of dissent between state and NGO itself became
a ritual, a new, stable equilibrium that was just as resistant to disruption as the state-
domination of the early 1970s. In the decades that followed, most acutely in the late
1990s and 2000s, dissent had become professionalized and, to some degree, over-
wrought. Ornate, sophisticated, and articulate—human rights are perhaps again going
into a kind of recession in affective power, albeit within a beautifully textured institu-
tional nave.47 Emotionalism and unmodulated sentiment, forces that unmistakably
animated the initial efflorescence of hope that culminated in 1948 and the desperate
and disgusted outrage of the late 1970s “breakthrough,” struggle to live in worlds of
calibrated protest and constrained process. No matter how impressive the edifice, or
how logical the rites, there is no moment for shouting, screaming, or weeping.48
Conformity to the ritual requires a diminution in the fundamental force of human
rights activism, which does not adhere to a schedule and cannot be partitioned into
the auto-format paragraphs of a UPR document or a UN document control symbol.
Rituals can keep the concept alive, and marginal. They almost certainly cannot make
it live.

NOTES

1. See, generally, Johannes Morsink, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Origins,
Drafting, and Intent (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999); Morsink, Inherent
Human Rights: The Philosophical Roots of the Universal Declaration (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2011); Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York: Random House, 2001).
2. See, notably, Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2010); Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, ed., Human Rights in the Twentieth
Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Akira Iriye et al., eds., The Human Rights
Revolution: An International History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Jan Eckel, “The

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International League for the Rights of Man, Amnesty International, and the Changing Fate of
Human Rights Activism from the 1940s through the 1970s,” Humanity 4, no. 2 (Summer 2013):
183–214; Eckel and Moyn, eds., The Breakthrough: Human Rights in the 1970s (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Sarah Snyder, Human Rights Activism and the End of the
Cold War: A Transnational History of the Helsinki Network (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2013); and Barbara Keys, Reclaiming American Virtue: The Human Rights Revolution of the
1970s (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014).
3. Moyn, Last Utopia, 120–21, 178, 213–14.
4. Paul Gordon Lauren’s foundational survey work has been the principal object of criticism:
see The Evolution of International Human Rights: Visions Seen (Philadelphia: University of Pennsyl-
vania Press, 2003); cf. Reza Afshari, “On Historiography of Human Rights Reflections on Paul
Gordon Lauren’s The Evolution of International Human Rights: Visions Seen,” Human Rights Quar-
terly 29, no. 1 (February 2007): 1–67.
5. Moyn, Last Utopia, 231.
6. For further elaboration of this argument in relation to the later period, 1975–88, see Roland
Burke, “Human Rights Day after the ‘Breakthrough’: Celebrating the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights at the United Nations in 1978 and 1988,” Journal of Global History 10, no. 1 (March
2015): 147–71; Burke, “Competing for the Last Utopia? The NIEO, Human Rights, and the World
Conference for the International Women’s Year, Mexico City, June 1975,” Humanity 6, no. 1
(Spring 2015): 47–61.
7. The related problem of adumbrations and adornment were noted by the political scientist
Charles Fairbanks, in a 1974 memorandum that counseled for a deflationary approach to rights
language. “When the terms of human rights speech have lost their specific meaning,” he argued,
“it will be possible to use them in unforeseen and disturbing ways.” See quoted excerpt in Daniel
P. Moynihan and Suzanne Weaver, A Dangerous Place (London: Secker & Warburg, 1979), 195.
8. Although best known for his crusading in support of the Bricker Amendment, Holman did
advance a concept of human rights, albeit one so pared back that it was little more than Magna
Carta with suffrage (for some). See Holman, The Life and Career of a Western Lawyer, 1886–1961
(Baltimore: Port City Press, 1963); Selected Speeches and Articles (1964).
9. William F. Buckley, United Nations Journal: A Delegate’s Odyssey (New York: Putnam,
1974), 184.
10. Decade for Action to Combat Racism and Racial Discrimination, Gen. Ass. Res. 2919
(XXVII), November 15, 1972; Programme for the Observance of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Gen. Ass. Res. 2906 (XXVII), October 19, 1972.
11. GAOR, 2068th Plenary meeting, December 19, 1972, A/PV. 2068, paras. 1–8 c.f. paras.
9–167.
12. The U.S. delegation’s summation of the 1973 session was blunt about the inhospitable
nature of the UN for a wider human rights discussion. The dominant nonaligned group were “less
concerned with civil and political rights of individuals than they are with denial of practically all
rights to black majorities in Southern Africa . . . African bloc is preoccupied with this issue to
virtual exclusion of all others.” U.S. Mission to the UN, New York, to Secretary of State, Wash-
ington D.C., “The U.S. Position and Human Rights in the 28th GA,” December 1973, United
States Department of State, USUN 5688, AAD.

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 13. For exemplars of the rhetoric, and the insistent pairing of human rights to armed revolu-
tionary struggle, see particularly those contributions from Adib Daoudy (Syria), Dia Allah El-
Fattal (Syria), and representatives from Cuba, Albania, Iraq, the various National Liberation Move-
ments, and from 1973 onward, the PRC. A reasonably illustrative cross section can be found in the
1973 session of Committee III, A/C.3/SR.1980 – SR. 1991.
14. For the key exhibits of the militant mood, and the embrace of armed struggle, see Report
of the International Seminar on Apartheid, Racial Discrimination and Colonialism in Southern Africa,
Kitwe, Republic of Zambia July 25–August 4, 1967 (67-46381, Pre-Publication Draft); Proceedings
of The UN-OAU Conference on Southern Africa, Oslo, 9–14 April, 1973 (Uppsala: Scandinavian
Institute of African Studies, 1973); Report of the World Conference to Combat Racism and Racial
Discrimination, Geneva, August 14–25, 1978, A/Conf.92/40.
15. Congress of the People, The Freedom Charter, adopted June 26, 1955, Kliptown, South
Africa, reproduced in Nancy L. Clark, William H. Worger, South Africa: The Rise and Fall of
Apartheid (London: Routledge, 2004), 148–52; Nigel Worden, The Making of Modern South Africa:
Conquest, Apartheid, Democracy (Oxford: Wiley, 2012), 109–10.
16. Illegal Occupation by Portuguese Military Forces of Certain Sectors of the Republic of Guinea-
Bissau and Acts of Aggression Committed by them Against the People of the Republic, Gen. Ass. Res.
3061 (XXVIII), November 2, 1973; Basic Principles of the Legal Status of the Combatants Struggling
Against Colonial and Alien Domination and Racist Regimes, Gen. Ass. Res. 3103 (XXVIII),
December 12, 1973; Respect for Human Rights in Armed Conflicts, Gen. Ass. Res. 3102 (XXVIII),
December 12, 1973.
17. Cooperation between the United Nations and the Organization of African Unity, Gen. Ass.
Res. 3280 (XXIX), December 10, 1974, paras. 6, 7; Credentials of Representatives to the 29th Session
of the General Assembly, Gen. Ass. Res. 3322, December 16, 1974; Relationship between the United
Nations and South Africa, Gen. Ass. Res. 3207, September 30, 1974;
18. Observer Status for the Palestinian Liberation Organization, Gen. Ass. Res. 3237 (XXIX),
November 22, 1974.
19. International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, Gen.
Ass. Res. 3068 (XXVIII), November 30, 1973.
20. International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, Gen.
Ass. Res. 2106 (XX), December 21, 1965. This aspect was conspicuous not only in its framing
language but in its key provisions in article 5, which stipulated the inherent, universal right of
individuals to nondiscrimination on the basis of race, and the specific rights which must be
protected. For an overview of ICERD and its evolution, see Michael Banton, International Action
against Racial Discrimination (London: Oxford University Press, 1996).
21. Roland Burke, Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights (Phila-
delphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 72–73.
22. GAOR, 2195th meeting, December 10, 1973, A/PV.2195, para. 62–63.
23. See voting pattern on the text (GAOR, A/PV.2185, 2185th meeting, November 30, 1973)
and ratifications, UN Treaties Collection, Status 2014, International Convention on the Suppression
and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, accessed March 10, 2014, https://treaties.un.org/pages/
ViewDetails.aspx?src⳱TREATY&mtdsg_no⳱IV-7&chapter⳱4&lang⳱en. Bizarrely, Uruguay
acceded in 2012, some eighteen years after the first multiracial elections, presumably on the
somewhat debatable basis that there was general case application of the instrument.
24. It fell to Jamil Baroody, who had abstained on behalf of Saudi Arabia during the 1948

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vote, to remind his colleagues that Monday was Human Rights Day, “a special occasion that
should be observed,” and to advise that the commemorations and prize ceremony were already set,
and unavailable for other debates. GAOR, 2194th meeting, December 7, 1973, A/PV.2194, paras.
8, 27–30. When December 10 arrived, Baroody delivered one of the more thoughtful speeches,
despite his objections to the Universal Declaration; see GAOR, A/PV.2195, paras. 72–80.
25. Kathleen Teltsch, “Rights Manifesto Hailed at UN,” New York Times, December 11, 1973.
26. Ibid.
27. The official UN discussion of the issue is given in Budget Estimates for the Financial Year
1973: Rental of office space at Headquarters, Report of the Secretary General, A/C.5/1462, November
22, 1972; and Budget Estimates for the Biennium 1974–1975 and Medium-Term Plan for the Period
1974–1977, A/C.5/1506, July 2, 1973.
28. William Korey, “The UN’s Double Standard on Human Rights,” Washington Post, May
22, 1977.
29. Ibid.
30. Violations of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, Including Policies of Racial
Discrimination and Segregation and of Apartheid in all Countries, With Particular Reference to
Colonial and Other Dependent Countries and Territories, Economic and Social Council Reso-
lution 1235 (XLII), June 6, 1967.
31. “UN Lethargy on Human Rights Criticized,” Times, September 21, 1973.
32. United Nations Department, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, background note, “U
Thant’s Decision That UN Information Centres not accept Petitions from Individuals,” ca.
October 1969, FCO 61/513, UK National Archives, Kew; Sam Pope Brewer, “Protest by Dissidents
in Soviet Brings U.N. Curb on Petitions,” New York Times, October 4, 1969.
33. Jerome Shestack to Secretary-General Waldheim, “Nomination of Andrei Sakharov,”
September 18, 1973, accompanied by handwritten notes, ca. September 1973, United Nations
Miscellaneous Correspondence, Papers of the International League for Human Rights, New York
Public Library Manuscript Collection.
34. Jeri Laber, The Courage of Strangers: Coming of Age with the Human Rights Movement
(Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus, 2002), 74, 80.
35. Jeanne Hersch, “Man’s Estate and His Rights,” Final Report of the International NGO
Conference, Paris, September 16–20, 1968, 102–3.
36. Jeanne Hersch, Birthright of Man (Paris: UNESCO, 1969). A summary of the concept was
previewed in a special human rights issue of UNESCO Courier; see Hersch, “The Right to Be A
Man,” UNESCO Courier 21 (November 1968): 8–29.
37. Marshall, GAOR, 1877th Plenary meeting (25th session), October 21, 1970, A/PV. 1877,
para. 183.
38. Oral history interview, Richard Schifter, Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights,
UN representative for the United States, The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training,
conducted September 2003, Foreign Affairs Oral History Project, 46.
39. Natasha Wheatley, “Mandatory Interpretation: Legal Hermeneutics and the New Interna-
tional Order in Arab and Jewish Petitions to the League of Nations,” Past & Present 227, no. 1
(May 2015): 205–48.
40. Iain Guest, Behind the Disappearances (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1990), passim.
41. GAOR, 78th Plenary meeting (33rd session), December 11, 1978, A/33/PV. 78, para. 8. The

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 SED had been an early adopter of framing its ideology in human rights terms, with its “Human
Rights Committee” preparing a rights-inflected denunciation of the FRG in 1961; and a systematic
translation of the GDR’s constitution into human rights terms in 1970. See Economic, Social, and
Cultural Human Rights in the German Democratic Republic (Berlin: GDR Human Rights
Committee, 1970). The other Soviet bloc states prepared their ideological transliterations later; see,
notably, the anthology from across the Warsaw Pact, Human Rights in Socialist Society (Moscow:
Novosti Press Agency, 1981).
42. Quoted in Moynihan, A Dangerous Place, 195.
43. Ibid. For a lively account of Resolution 3379, and the radical milieu of the mid-1970s UN,
see also Gil Troy, Moynihan’s Moment: America’s Fight against Zionism as Racism (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2012).
44. GAOR, 74th Plenary meeting (43rd session), December 8, 1988, A/43/PV.74, 71–72. See
also brief discussion in Burke, “Human Rights Day after the ‘Breakthrough,’ ” 168.
45. Proceedings of Conferences of Riyadh, Paris, Vatican City, Geneva, and Strasbourg, on Muslim
Doctrine and Human Rights in Islam, Between Saudi Canonists and Eminent European Jurists and
Intellectuals (Riyadh: Ministry of Justice, ca. 1975); Ferdinand Marcos, The Philippine Experience:
A Perspective on Human Rights and the Rule of Law (Manila, 1977).
46. The UPR and its rites have been the subject of some of the most intensive scrutiny; see
notably the essays from Jane Cowan and Julie Billaud, in Hilary Charlesworth and Emma Larking,
eds., Human Rights and the Universal Periodic Review: Rituals and Ritualism (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2015); and the précis of UPR liturgy prepared by Shane Chalmers,
“The ‘Call and Answer’ of the Universal Periodic Review: Against ‘Ritualism’?,” Regarding Rights:
Academic and Activist Perspectives on Human Rights, February 22, 2013, accessed November 12,
2014, http://asiapacific.anu.edu.au/regarding-rights/2013/02/22/the-call-and-answer-of-the
-universal-periodic-review-against-ritualism/.
47. See, broadly, the provocative critique from Stephen Hopgood, The Endtimes of Human
Rights (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2013). See also the recent essay collection responding
to its assertion of a ritualized and bureaucratized “Human Rights,” Doutje Lettinga and Lars van
Troost, eds., Debating the Endtimes of Human Rights Activism and Institutions in a Neo-Westphalian
World (Amnesty International, 2014).
48. Timetable of the Universal Periodic Review (2015), Office of the High Commissioner for
Human Rights, accessed November 1, 2014, http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/HRBodies/UPR/
UPR21Timetable.doc.

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