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  • Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights
  • Petra Goedde (bio)
Roland Burke , Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2010), 264 pages, ISBN 978-0-8122-4219-5.

A persistent criticism levelled against the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 10 December 1948, has been that it is more reflective of Western than universal values. That criticism is not without merit. The leading figures involved in the framing of the declaration, were undoubtedly dedicated proponents of Western enlightened humanism. Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of the late President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, chaired the UN-appointed Human Rights Commission. John Peters Humphrey, a Canadian legal scholar and first Director of the Human Rights Division of the United Nations Secretariat, produced the original draft of the Declaration. René Cassin, French jurist, gave the Declaration its distinctive structure, drawing on the Napoleonic code. The Commission included non-Western members, among them Charles Malik from Lebanon, C.P. Chang from China, and Carlos Romulo from the Philippines, yet all of them had [End Page 563] received at least part of their education in the West.

Nonetheless, as Roland Burke demonstrates in this engaging book, Asian, African, and Arab human rights specialists played a key role in the evolution of the human rights program almost from its inception. He shifts the focus from the story of the creation of the Universal Declaration, which is primarily a Western story, to how its implementation evolved both within the United Nations and in the political interactions between the First and the Third World. In doing so he shows the intricate ways in which the process of decolonization and the evolution of the human rights agenda influenced and shaped one another.

Burke puts forward three interrelated arguments. First, he assigns a decisive role to "decolonization as a political force in the evolution of the UN human rights agenda." Second, he maintains that for anti-colonialists, human rights represented more than a "rhetorical weapon for lambasting the Western democracies." Third, he argues that the overall outcome of decolonization for the human rights agenda was neither a complete failure nor an unqualified success.1 The first of the above arguments goes to the heart of the current debate about the place of decolonization in human rights history and conversely the place of human rights in the history of decolonization. The other two arguments are more diffuse and less original. They focus on dissecting competing interpretations in the existing scholarship and finding a middle ground between them. Fortunately those sections do not diminish the excellent quality of the first argument, a welcome addition to the burgeoning field of human rights history.

Burke sees the 1955 Bandung conference as a defining moment in the anti-colonial human rights debate. At Bandung, delegates affirmed their commitment to the universality of human rights, yet at the same time took the liberty to define self-determination as the "first" right. By prioritizing human rights as collective rather than individual rights, the delegates set the stage for the global debate about hierarchies of human rights. As long as the struggle for decolonization was underway, issues of national sovereignty and self-determination carried far greater weight for anti-colonialists than issues of civil and political rights. Universal human rights, as defined at Bandung, served Asian and African interests well.

The question of whether or not self-determination should be considered a human right has been the subject of considerable scholarly debate. A.W. Brian Simpson (and more recently Samuel Moyn) has argued that human rights apply primarily to individual rights and thus self-determination, as a collective right and a core feature of the broader struggle for decolonization, and should not be considered part of the postwar human rights agenda. However, the UN Declaration of Human Rights addressed both individual and collective rights, though it does not make specific reference to self-determination. Burke seems to place self-determination both inside and outside the human rights agenda of the 1950s. In one sentence, he refers to the "primacy of self-determination over human rights," in another, he writes about the anti-colonialist position that...

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