Making Human Rights a Reality by Emilie M. Hafner-Burton (review)

I. Introduction

The author, a Professor of International Relations at the University of California-San Diego, has written an engaging book providing an overview of the nature and effectiveness of internationally recognized human rights. Like many others, she notes the gap between the law on the books and the law in action. In short, she believes the current state of affairs is woefully deficient in effectiveness. Unlike many others, she does not stop there but addresses the thorny question of what to do to make the international human rights system more effective. What she proposes—namely to link human rights action most fundamentally with the national interests of certain states, which she calls steward states—will certainly provoke much debate. Such a debate is the sign of a serious and creative argument.

II. The Argument

Professor Hafner-Burton starts with the solid point that "[m]ost governments . . . make legally binding promises, which they break when convenient."¹ She then presents statistical indicators on a variety of rights (including disappearances, killings, torture, political prisoners, censorship, political association, worker rights, political rights, and civil liberties) to show the gap between consent to norms and continuing violations. From this initial review, her first conclusion is that the endorsement of a broad range of rights with numerous states involved in the process has not worked very well. For her, "the results of that universal approach have been underwhelming."² In her words, "the practice of open-door universalism has made the legal system dysfunctional and less legitimate."³

Seeing human rights violations mostly as a matter of rational calculation rather than emotional outburst, she identifies six factors that correlate with human rights violations: conflict and cultures of violence, illiberalism (or authoritarianism rather than democracy), political dissent, poverty and inequality, intolerance and dehumanization, and crimes and abuse systems. She observes that most situations of human rights violations involve the participation of a large number of persons who rationalize their roles in terms of following orders, protecting a greater good such as national security, and so on. In her summary, "most perpetrators of abuse reason and rationalize; they are not biologically or mentally disabled, and most are not impulsive criminals acting on whims."⁴ While true enough in general, some readers, no doubt, would want more attention paid to the pathologies of those like Stalin, Hitler, Idi Amin, Mao Zedong, and—to a different extent—Richard Nixon. The committing of crimes, including mass murder, sometimes involves personality disorders more than is admitted here.

Her follow-on initial survey of the international law of human rights, with attention to global and regional institutions for implementation, is standard and sound. Her conclusion to this in Chapter 4 raises a possibility which she does not believe in, namely that the system will improve over time if supporters continue to carry on. "The way forward, [others] envision, is making more law open to participation by all governments. . . . More people in more countries will come to see these obligations as legitimate, and so obey them willingly because they will learn to believe in them and trust that law represents the right values."⁵ Eschewing this approach based on gradual and incremental learning over time, she prefers an approach linking human rights to state power. She thus parts company with the late Louis Henkin and others who saw most international human rights activity as a matter of socializing national governments and at least part of national publics into learning human rights values over time.

Her next two chapters buttress further her analysis with quantitative and qualitative information about the workings of the human rights system. The latter approach specifies the bad news: national ignorance (only about 7 percent of the US public has heard of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights); no quality control about which states participate in international mechanisms; insufficient resources as, for example, regarding the monitoring mechanisms; insider policies (an old boy network); cumbersome procedures; poorly employed complaint...