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Chapter 8: Indivisibility as Economic Justice: 1968–1986
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Chapter 8 Indivisibility as Economic Justice: 1968–1986 All human rights and fundamental freedoms are indivisible and interdependent; equal attention and urgent consideration should be given to the implementation, protection and promotion of both civil and political, and economic, social and cultural rights. . . . In approaching human rights questions within the United Nations system, the international community should accord, or continue to accord, priority to the search for solutions to the mass and flagrant violations of human rights of peoples and persons affected by situations such as those resulting from apartheid, from all forms of racial discrimination, from colonialism, from foreign domination and occupation, from aggression and threats against national sovereignty, national unity and territorial integrity, as well as from the refusal to recognize the fundamental rights of peoples to self-determination and of every nation to the exercise of full sovereignty over its wealth and natural resources. —U.N. General Assembly Resolution 32/130 (1 (a) and (e)), December 16, 1977 By the 1970s, the aspirations of the 1960s that emerged in U.N. discourse , attaching interstate political and economic justice goals to human rights, increasingly became demands during the 1970s, starting with the New International Economic Order. As discussed in Chapter 7, the rhetoric of indivisibility was deployed to prioritize economic, social , and cultural rights over civil and political rights, and the only way for economic, social, and cultural rights to be properly achieved was to link them directly to demands for development resources. By 1977, this human rights revisionism was finally made official U.N. doctrine in General Assembly Resolution 32/130. It was at this point, however, that the rhetoric of indivisibility began to split into different paths. I argue that the path of Resolution 32/130 would lead, in 1986, to the Declaration on the Right to Development. The other path was paved by the entry into force of the two Covenants in the late 1970s, the replacement of the first highly unsuccessful attempts 156 Chapter 8 at monitoring of the ICESCR by a new body in 1987, and a significant realignment of principles in the aftermath of the World Conference on Human Rights in 1993. This second path (which is the subject of the next chapter) was evidenced by the normative activity of scholars and advocates, and the development of new institutional activity at the U.N., focused on the interdependence and interrelatedness of human rights (even though it is often called indivisibility). In terms of broad policy on human rights, Jack Donnelly described the period between the Teheran Conference and the adoption of General Assembly Resolution 32/130 in 1977 as “lacking direction.”1 While colonialism and racism continued to dominate the agenda, “anticolonialism [was] essentially a self-liquidating venture, as colonies become independent countries.”2 Other human rights items that began to appear in General Assembly resolutions dealt with contained problems in specific countries and regions—apartheid in South Africa, political repression in Chile, and the ongoing human rights concerns in the IsraeliOccupied Territories. “Not surprisingly, then, in the late sixties and early seventies the human rights work of the U.N., dominated by these limited and increasingly sterile issues, was, as a rule, restricted, routine, or repetitive.”3 A new grand vision of human rights was necessary—a majority vision. The emergence of particularly political instantiations of Third World solidarity (especially fueled, if one will pardon the pun, by the enormous success of the OPEC embargo of 1973 in response to the Yom Kippur War), such as the adoption of the New International Economic Order, were evidence of a new generation of human rights, the seeds of which were planted in the 1950s and 1960s. While the ground for this growth was tilled at Teheran, it was increasing Third World unrest over global economic inequalities that pushed the mild revisionism of Teheran into the full-blown human rights revisionism of Resolution 32/130. Trade, Aid, and Development in the 1970s For developing countries at the U.N., the struggle against the “unjust” global economy was to the 1970s what the struggle against colonialism and racial discrimination was to the 1960s. The most important outcome of this new priority was the watershed proposals that emerged in 1974 and 1975 under the banner of the New International Economic Order (NIEO). The NIEO proposals were adopted by the Sixth and Seventh Special Sessions of the General Assembly in 1974 and 1975,4 the crowning achievement of a long process of building Third World solidarity through...