Constructing Reason: Human Rights and the Democratization of the United Nations

Prior to 1945 no international covenant acknowledged human rights or the morality that underpinned those rights as critical elements of peace or as goals to be sought by sovereign national governments. Even the UN Charter, which includes seven references to human rights, was not crafted with individual or communal rights as a central preoccupation of the United Nations. Rather, the new United Nations was meant to maintain peace through the concerted political and military effort of the world's great powers. However, between the UN's founding and the current moment, the world community has created panoply of rights, largely through UN institutional structures. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan (2005) affirmed the centrality of human rights to global security and to the work of the United Nations in sweeping reform proposals made in the spring of 2005. His actions marked an extraordinary evolution of the world organization, a new conceptualization of the prerequisites for world peace, and an opportunity for individuals and non-state organizations to influence the expanding international human rights regime.

A new international governance structure has emerged in the past two decades that provides extensive points of influence for nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), socially progressive movements and individuals. Through the network of intergovernmental organizations created since World War II, assisted by the process of globalization, internet communication, media saturation and concentrations of financial resources, private actors can affect international agenda-setting, decision-making and policy implementation in many areas of global governance. Human rights creation has been one of the arenas of thematic diplomacy in which national governments have had to cede their monopoly over international negotiation, allowing a more democratized process that in turn lends itself to increased legitimacy for the universal rights created. The steady democratization of the United Nations system has produced what Jürgen Habermas (Borradori 2003, p. 62) identifies as a "rationally justified consensus" on what constitutes universal human rights in the new millennium, thus contributing to the resolution of inter-state and intra-state conflict without the resort to force.

Since the Enlightenment, philosophical speculation has contemplated the role of individual rights in the preservation of international peace. Immanuel Kant in his seminal work, Perpetual Peace (1795), recognized that the violation of rights in one part of the world would be felt everywhere. He argued (1939, p. 58) that "all politics must bend the knee before right." Only when the norms of morality are applied to the facts of international politics can a just peace be achieved. Kant's prescription necessarily requires an acceptance of limitations on state sovereignty and on the power of governments to treat their populations as they will without external interference. Kant (1939, 54) notes that a state has the duty to organize itself on the basis of liberty and equality for its citizens. While foreign to the politics of the Westphalian system of nation-states in place since the 17^th century, in the contemporary era a morally acceptable international human right regime requires at least some transfer of authority to the larger global civil society, its participants and its institutions.

One critical observation must be made about Kant's understanding of rights. Like other Enlightenment thinkers, Kant held to a liberal conception of rights. Those rights were individually held, largely political and civil in nature, and derived from the fundamental equality of mankind. Liberals stressed the rights of the person and tended to view human rights as protecting the individual from actions by the state. This outlook emphasized rights such as free speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, specific rights of the accused and the right to organize. Liberals emphasized protection of minority groups against overweening majority power and advocated the proclamation of rights in legal documents and their protection through the judicial process.

This is not the understanding of rights – at least not in the whole – that undergirds the human rights regime in contemporary international politics (Blau and Moncado 2005, pp. 4-18). Since the creation of post-World War II international organizations, this uniquely western view of rights has been challenged by peoples in developing nations and...