The International Commission of Jurists: Global Advocates for Human Rights

7. Mobilizing Advocates for Development

Chapter 7 Mobilizing Advocates for Development The enjoyment of the totality of human rights calls for the organisation and mobilisation of the poor in developing countries for self-reliant development .... Development should be understood as a process designed progressively to create conditions in which every person can enjoy, exercise and utilise under the Rule of Lawall his human rights, whether economic, social, cultural , civil or political. -From Conclusions to 1981 IC] Conference on Development, Human Rights and the Rule of Law Part IV Overview, 1970-1990 After extraordinary atrocities in the 1970s, the human rights movement came of age. Cambodia's killing fields, South African apartheid, disappearances in Argentina, and widespread torture pricked the global conscience. Human rights NGOs, sympathetic national officials, and international organizations responded together with apparent effect . First the U.S. Congress and then President Jimmy Carter insisted that aid recipients respect human rights. The United Nations began seriously investigating disappearances, arbitrary killings, and torture. A new American Court of Human Rights followed the European model by rendering judgments against defendant states. African governments ratified a human rights convention that established a regional commission. Economic sanctions punished South Africa. Hundreds of new national and international NGOs organized. Amnesty International attracted an unprecedented global membership. Democratic change arrived first in Western Europe. Portugal, 138 Chapter 7 Spain, and Greece removed their dictators in the 1970s. A decade later, Latin American juntas, Eastern European Marxists, and Asian despots fell. By 1990 dictators confronted broad human rights laws that limited domestic jurisdiction; international organizations, aroused citizens, and other governments demanded change. The Cold War, apartheid, colonialism, fascism, and communism were all historic relics . Yet unresolved problems remained. Economic justice was still a distant, improbable goal. Old barbarisms continued-war crimes, torture , communal massacres. China, Haiti, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, and Israel withstood international pressure. Human rights advocates developed promotion, standard-setting, and protection activities that parallel the public education, lobbying, and litigation of domestic interest groups. Part IV of this book evaluates how the IC] performed those three functions during Niall MacDermot's twenty-year tenure as Secretary-General. For fourteen of those years, New York attorney William]. Butler chaired the Executive Committee. Chapter 7 examines promotion-in social science parlance, the political mobilization of groups and socialization of individuals for world citizenship and global leadership. Chapter 8 examines standard setting or lawmaking, and Chapter 9 assesses protection or enforcement activities. The final chapter in Part IV illustrates how the IC]'s Centre for the Independence of Judges and Lawyers (CI]L) performed all three functions. New Direction for a Global Mission Social Movements and Interest Group Entrepreneurs Social movement theorists contend that injustice triggers mass protest . Outraged victims will spontaneously organize and demand radical change.' A major study on mobilizing American interest groups found to the contrary that social movements rarely begin as insurgencies by exploited victims against their oppressors. "Distress and anger over perceived injustice are a persistent fact of life among disadvantaged elements of any society and are only one of a number of factors that must exist before a social movement begins."2 U.S. interest groups typically spread through "the intervention of sympathetic patrons who provide fresh resources and crucial assistance for entrepreneurialleaders at a critical time." 3 Theories about international politics give conflicting perspectives of the human rights movement. Are idealists correct that mass demands for universal rights contribute to a global consciousness that could Mobilizing Advocates for Development 139 doom state sovereignty?" Realists forecast an enduring clash of civilizations unaffected by a futile campaign to propagate Englightenment values in non-Western societies." Are the major battles of the twentyfirst century more likely to feature world citizens' assaults on arbitrary state power or Islamic, Hindu, and Buddhist challenges to Western Christendom? From 1970 to 1990, the IC] systematically cultivated non-Western offshoots, grass roots with uneven growth that put rival theories to the test. Unlike a social movement, the IC] mobilized new groups in the same way it had been founded-from the top down. IC] leaders were elite entrepreneurs who used government, church, and foundation patrons to start third world organizations. The IC]'s longest serving Secretary-General was another dominant entrepreneur who came to embody the organization. Niall MacDermot was a committed internationalist who ardently championed both civil liberties and economic justice. As a youth in the 1930s MacDermot belonged to the "New Britain Group," which espoused utopian plans for European...