Remembering the 50th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
LONDON – In captivity Augusto Pinochet should perhaps find time to read Mahatma Gandhi who used to say that one could assess a civilization by the manner with which it dealt with minorities and those that disagreed with it. Ralf Dahrendorf, the eminence grise of European education, made a similar point in an address before that remarkable campaigning power-house, the Minority Rights Group. “Defense of minority rights is the litmus test of liberty and the rule of law”, Professor Dahrendorf said and went on wryly to note, “ruling interests and beliefs need no protection: power protects, though it may corrupt as well.”
A Martian arriving today could be pardoned for thinking earthlings had never confronted minority rights issues until Yugoslavia exploded, so bewitched and bewildered they still appear to be by the experience. The Cold War was a frozen blanket that enveloped the whole world, pressing into deep hybernation, at least until the Gorbachev years, every other human dilemma. Even President Jimmy Carter, who tried to make the White House a bully pulpit for human rights, ended up turning his heaviest guns on malpractices in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe.
Now it is back to normal weather and human rights, once a minority concern itself, is one of the new growth industries. As rulers from China to Malaysia to Chile have found, abuses are no longer secret, there are no walls of silence, the electronic age is promoting my brother s keeper at an unprecedented pace.
It is a new phase but, for all that, it’s built on that precious interlude between the defeat of Hitler and the opening of the Cold War when a series of remarkable events took place–the founding of the United Nations, the Bretton Woods conference and the writing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Fifty years old next Tuesday, it is a document more comprehensive than the Magna Carta or the Declaration des Droits d Homme and more demanding than the Declaration of Independence or the Communist Manifesto. It covers every aspect of human well-being and delineates the relationship of human beings with the government. It is probably the most important single document that humanity has yet produced.
In the summer of 1993 at the World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna the post Cold War groundswell of liberty was starkly apparent. The principles of the Universal Declaration approved in 1948 by the UN s then small, and western dominated, membership of 56 were thrown open to the whole of the world-wide community for its opinion. In the end 171 countries reaffirmed the Declaration in all its essential points. The rear guard action mounted by China, Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore, among others, to water it down came to naught.
There are some, seeing human rights riding high, who cannot resist a shot. One well known commentator, Caroline Moorhead, writing in Index on Censorship, the magazine that is the long-standing voice of persecuted writers, writes, “Have the very triumphs of the human rights lobby, in agitating so vociferously on behalf of individual prisoners, actually made political murder a more effective solution for repressive governments?” Her argument is that it is easier for governments to “disappear” their critics than risk the embarassing publicity of holding them in prison. Ms Moorhead asserted that while making a TV series for PBS in America she could only find 20 political prisoners.
This is sheer nonsense. Amnesty is still fighting on behalf of thousands of prisoners of conscience, many, many more than there are “disappearances”. Over the years Amnesty and its colleagues in the human rights effort have won the release of tens of thousands of political prisoners. Dozens of countries have done away with totalitarianism and the rule of international law is spreading to countries that once spurned its application. Maybe once in a thousand cases Amnesty pressure may be counterproductive but for the most part it has triumphed in country after country, case after case.
Moreover, thanks in no small part to the campaigning of Amnesty, Human Rights Watch and other human rights organisations, the genocide and torture conventions are now accepted by the vast majority of nations. The Pinochet judgement by Britain s highest court upholding his arrest is another major watershed, for it indicates that British law has now taken on board the writ of these two conventions. (Interestingly, one of the law lords who decided the case is married to a long-time member of the staff of Amnesty.)
The most important issue now pressing on the human rights front is how far and how quickly can this relatively new sensitivity to international law be pushed? The wars in ex-Yugoslavia and Rwanda have been responsible for another major step forward–the creation of ad hoc war crimes courts. Recently the former prime minister of Rwanda was successfully prosecuted and convicted of genocide. Only this week a British Foreign Office minister indicated that the government would favour a similar institution to deal with Iraq.
These ad hoc courts, for all their limitations in laying their hands on suspected war criminals, have provided much of the impetus for the establishment of a permanent international criminal court whose creation was approved at a UN conference in Rome this summer. The U.S. was a lone voice in the West holding back from voting its approval, despite President Bill Clinton’s earlier enthusiasm for the concept. Opposition from the Pentagon and the Congress compelled the Administration to seek what in effect would be veto powers for the U.S., that would make it almost impossible for the court ever to prosecute an American soldier, whatever the circumstances.
Still, the almost unanimous vote in Rome means that a number of good global citizen states now have the mandate to take the lead in one more major step of building a world of laws not of men , in which the powerful and the cruel do not necessarily get their way and the vulnerable and preyed upon have the chance to show that no body and no nation is above the law. Not even Augusto Pinochet.
