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

Chapter 3 Putting the Stamps Back On: Apartheid, Anticolonialism, and the Accidental Birth of a Universal Right to Petition It should be mentioned that from its inception, this activity of the Human Rights Division has been one of the most abortive in the United Nations . . . the United Nations would be well advised to abolish the Communications Unit. . . . It is not disclosing a secret that many Member States of the United Nations are outright dictatorships. —Jamil Baroody, Permanent Representative of Saudi Arabia, Confidential Report on the State of the Human Rights Program to the Secretary-General, May 1971 Please remind staff not to remove stamps from envelopes concerning human rights destined for division of human rights. . . . Apparently it is the practice of the incoming mail section to cut stamps from some communications, and these stamps are then sold in bags at Christmas time . . . it might be a source of the problems mentioned. —Exchange of correspondence regarding the fate of human rights complaints within the UN Secretariat, conducted in December 1974 The Third World’s pivotal role in the expansion of the UN human rights powers is one of the greatest paradoxes in the history of the organization . For more than twenty years, diplomats from the Afro-Asian bloc were the most potent force for change in the interpretation of Article 2(7) in the UN Charter, which prohibited intervention in domestic affairs . Yet for much of that time, as the course of the self-determination debates demonstrated, they were also among the most protective of their own state sovereignty. Decolonization transformed the UN into a body with unprecedented willingness to question state sovereignty, yet Third World diplomats often stipulated exceedingly narrow limits for when sovereignty could be breached, and a slender selection of states which were subject to such procedures. 12417 Decolonization & Evolution of Inter Human Rights.indd 59 12417 Decolonization & Evolution of Inter Human Rights.indd 59 10/19/09 1:49:29 PM 10/19/09 1:49:29 PM 60 Chapter Three The shift from state sovereignty to individual rights culminated in the recognition of petitions from the victims of human rights abuse as a legitimate object of study for UN human rights bodies. Since the foundation of the UNO in 1945, pleas for help had poured in from across the world. These letters, bureaucratically termed “petitions” or “individual communications,” were a mixture of vexatious or frankly irrelevant claims, worthy but unreasonable aspirations, and genuine accounts of flagrant human rights violations. More than any other facet of the human rights enterprise, the letters, or petitions, engaged with the reality of human rights on the ground. They revealed the miserable gap between the grand abstractions that the world body was so good at drafting, and the desperate situation of the people who wanted those promises made good. The letters held the potential to connect the UN program to the streets, prisons, and homes where the rights struggle would be won or lost. These petitions languished until the 1960s, when they began to be used to advance the struggle against apartheid, European colonialism, and racial discrimination. Bodies like the Special Committee of 24, the Special Committee on Apartheid, and the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination all made extensive use of petitions in their operation. This was a stunning departure from the attitude of the Commission on Human Rights, which had expressly denied itself the power to study any individual petitions in 1947. For two decades, the Commission scrupulously avoided any serious consideration of the countless letters it had accumulated, and only began to reverse its position in the late 1960s, several years after the pioneering decisions of the various anti-apartheid and decolonization committees.1 The fundamental importance of decolonization for the fate of individual petitions has often been observed. In his major monograph on the history of human rights, Paul Gordon Lauren singles out the crucial role of the Third World in finally securing a process for dealing with the letters. The struggle against apartheid provoked “the new and determined majority” of African and Asian states to pioneer much more aggressive methods in the pursuit of human rights goals, epitomized by the acceptance of petitions as evidence of racial discrimination in Southern Africa.2 Their measures here “opened a critical door that had been slammed shut from the beginning, and thereby made possible many other efforts that went far beyond apartheid.” These innovations, he asserts, “in turn, prompted a number of Western members . . . to take the initiative...

Share