The Contentious History of the International Bill of Human Rights by Christopher N. J. Roberts (review)

The explosion of publications about human rights is earsplitting; the number of books in English with “human rights” in the title increased 1600 percent between the decades 1945 to 1955 and 2004 to 2014.¹ Roberts aims to cut his way free from the tangle of competing interpretations by recasting human rights as “basic representations of human relationships that emerge from struggle” (14, italics in original). Recognizing that this approach might not sound exceptional, he insists that he can uncover the previously overlooked actors by focusing on “People,” who are “the empirical entry point to the study of rights” (189, italics in original). The account offered is methodologically conventional, yet nonetheless illuminating because it is based on a wide range of documents that track the development of resistance in the United States to applying human rights at home, especially economic and social rights. The United States did not ratify the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1966, until 1992; it has never ratified the companion International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

In his effort to “unearth the full story” (73), Roberts focuses on two controversial issues for the United States regarding the International Bill—the “colonial clause,” which gives the British and French governments the final word in the application of the Covenants to their colonies, and the “federal-state clause,” which prevents the federal enforcement of human rights that infringe on states’ rights, such as those maintaining segregation in the southern United States. Particularly telling is the analysis of the shift in American opinion from enthusiastic internationalism in the immediate postwar period (by 1949, twenty state legislatures had passed resolutions in favor of a world federation of governments) to the complete rejection of any attempt to give priority to international standards of rights. Important as these matters are, however, they do not justify Roberts’ categorical conclusion, “By the early 1950s, the prospect of human rights within the United States was crushed” (121).

“People” in this account turn out to be political leaders and opinion makers, if not states; states “are the key actors in recording the overall struggle in international treaties” (227). Yet only one state is really in question, the United States. To uncover the full story would require more attention to French support of the colonial clause; the focus for Roberts is mainly on the United States’ decision to back the British, not on the machinations of the imperial powers as they grudgingly accommodated to the tide of decolonization. Finally, despite a brief consideration of Mohandas K. Gandhi’s skepticism about rights, Roberts pays little attention to the smaller, non-Western states whose delegates pushed the United Nations forward to the completion of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the two Covenants.