UN Ideas That Changed the World

3. Human Rights for All: From Aspiration to Implementation

human rights for all 51 3. Human Rights for All From Aspiration to Implementation • Human Rights as Mobilization • The Universal Declaration • Normative Striving • The Declaration on the Right to Development • The High Commissioner for Human Rights • The Human Rights Council • International Judicial Pursuit • Conclusion Although the Universal Declaration of 1948 is the brightest jewel in the crown of UN contributions to human rights, it was neither the first nor the only precious stone in an illustrious and gem-studded diadem. Bertrand Ramcharan states that in San Francisco in 1945 there was “a groundswell of sentiment that the ‘new world order’ should be built on a foundation of human rights.”1 Civil society organizations such as the World Jewish Congress, the Christian ecumenical movement, the American Law Institute, and leading academics—the Third UN—were all pressuring delegates and developing blueprints for an international bill of human rights. Governments, especially the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and Latin American states, were supportive. In fact, the Dumbarton Oaks proposal, which was prepared by the big three in 1944, had stated that the new organization should promote respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. All this was in sharp contrast to the League of Nations, which did not include any explicit reference to human rights in its founding covenant. The League was exclusively preoccupied with relationships between rather than within states. In their UNIHP volume Human Rights at the UN: The Political History of Universal Justice, Roger Normand and Sarah Zaidi bring out the positives as well as the negatives of the extraordinary story.2 They comment: “The speed with which human rights has penetrated every corner of the globe is astounding. Compared to human rights, no other system of universal values has spread so far so fast.” In 52 united nations ideas changing the world his foreword to the volume, Richard Falk underlines the point: “Among the most improbable developments of the previous hundred years or so is the spectacular rise of human rights to a position of prominence in world politics. This rise cuts across the grain of both the structure of world order and the ‘realist’ outlook of most political leaders acting on behalf of sovereign states.”3 At the same time, Normand and Zaidi also emphasize that the gap between values espoused and rights implemented remains large in every country, even though it has narrowed over the life of the United Nations. In spite of this progress, the absence of adequate mechanisms for implementing human rights remains most serious and contrasts sharply with the more powerful legal tools that exist to enforce international economic law. This asymmetry in enforcement capacity is particularly true since the emergence of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995. Human rights in the world today serve “as both a source of universal values and an arena of ideological warfare.”4 Rhetoric is stronger than the machinery of implementation. This arrangement was by design, not chance. At the outset, Washington and London wished to avoid an activist system, and later when the United Kingdom decided that it could support limited types of intervention, Moscow joined Washington in ensuring that implementation was secondary. Race relations, colonial possessions, and gulags were all factors in this priority. While not discounting the evidence throughout this chapter about the lack of compliancewithloftynorms,nonethelesstheimportanceofideasshinesthrough. For instance, former senior UN official and French ambassador Stéphane Hessel argues that changes in language are important even if they do not get translated immediately into action: “It is useful to have words, even if they are not followed by deeds. . . . There is a tendency . . . to say that it is better not to have words if you don’t have deeds. . . . People who are not capable of having their words followed by deeds, should they therefore shut up?” Hessel goes on to answer his own question: “I would say the opposite. I would say that words carrying ideas have a long-lasting effect. If it had not been for people like Socrates or Hegel, we would not have the kind of view of the possible future of humanity that we do have. Therefore, it is good to have the Universal Declaration.”5 Human Rights as Mobilization In the early days of World War II, the Allies used references to human rights to mobilize support for the war effort. In 1939, Churchill proclaimed that the war was being fought “to establish, on impregnable rocks, the rights of the individual.” In a speech to...