In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Introduction The New Moral Order: Between Human Dignity and Territorial Sovereignty All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. —Article 1, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) The human rights system emerged in 1945 as a victor’s response to the tragedies and atrocities of World War II, a global war that began with the Japanese invasion of China in 1937 and took its devastating toll on human life and property until the summer of 1945. The war was ‘‘total war’’ unrestrained by law—a war that obliterated the distinctions between soldiers and civilians; destroyed whole towns, villages, and cities; and produced the ghastly death camps of the Nazi Holocaust. Nazi and Axis policies included the mass deportations of people; abuses of prisoners of war; extensive reliance on slave labor; and, for the Japanese , the widespread use of women as sex slaves for their imperial army. From the seventy-two belligerent states at war, eighty million to one hundred million soldiers were called to arms; thirty-two million soldiers died in the war; and an unprecedented number of noncombatants also perished . Eleven million people were slaughtered in prisons and extermination camps and more than twenty million civilians are estimated to have died in the Soviet Union alone. The sheer scale of war in Europe and Asia laid bare the vulnerability of human beings to the unbridled exercise of state and military power.1 Capitalizing on the widespread belief that the war had destroyed the foundations of the old state and imperial order, a converging resolve elevated rights principles and guarantees to a new prominence in international relations. Although the Allied leaders were careful to keep their 2 Introduction own military actions and political records hidden from public scrutiny, they prepared the way for a significant departure in the calculations of interests in global politics. Using treaty law that is binding on the ratifying states, they extended the jurisdiction of international law to protect the fundamental human rights of all people, everywhere. Breaking with legal precedent, they made rights guarantees part of a universal treaty system and inserted human rights oversight into the agenda of the fledgling United Nations, the intergovernmental body established in October 1945 to promote international peace, security, and cooperation . Human rights criteria now entered the evolving debates about the nature and extent of security for people and states. These actions inaugurated the first human rights system in world history . Armed with the full weight of what history had just revealed about the human capacity for evil, this system commanded great moral authority , which its authors were able to translate in a few years into three components : (1) a permanent U.N. committee structure of oversight and norm-setting, (2) authority to codify new international human rights and criminal law and make it binding on the ratifying states, and (3) a willingness to respond to—if not yet mobilize—international public opinion that was becoming invested in halting grave injustices and abuses abroad. It is not surprising, then, that John P. Humphrey, the Canadian jurist and prominent architect of the U.N. human rights project , described so vividly the atmosphere of ‘‘optimistic excitement’’ in these early years of human rights history. In his own words, the undertaking to remake the law was ‘‘nothing short of revolutionary.’’2 Left unqualified, Humphrey’s claim captured only one side of the very complex process of international reconstruction after 1945. Many pressing international problems required concerted attention; among them were decisions of military occupation, the fate of refugees from the war and of peoples newly displaced in the Middle East and South Asia, and world financial reform. The challenges also included the colonial independence movements and, not least, the growing antagonism between the United States and the Soviet Union over power and principles. Although the framers of the United Nations wanted to avoid the failures of past efforts at establishing collective security, they approached these issues with the same ‘‘realist’’ principles that had been the basis of international relations for centuries: territorial sovereignty , national security, and balance of power. Not surprisingly, the institutional and normative advances in rights protection were inserted into this international system of power and state calculations of interests . From the start, then, a forceful and time-honored defense of sovereign authority checked the revolutionary potential in human rights formulations. Article 2 (7) of the Charter of the United Nations was [18.188.40.207] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 12:25...

Share