HUMAN RIGHTS | Defending human dignity
24 January 2008
How Human Rights Became an International Issue
The evolution of worldwide standards for human rights
Today, nearly all states in all regions of the world, at all levels of development, proclaim their commitment to human rights. This was not always the case.
A nation’s progress on human rights -- or lack of it -- has been an established subject of international relations for only about half a century. Prior to World War II, how a government treated its own citizens in its own territory was considered to be a matter of its sovereignty -- that is, the supreme power it had over its internal affairs.
SHOCK OF THE HOLOCAUST
In the Holocaust during World War II, the Nazis systematically murdered millions of European Jews. Worldwide revulsion at this brutality caused an extraordinary intellectual change. Human rights entered the mainstream of international relations.
The Nuremberg War Crimes Trials in 1945 held high-level Nazis accountable for their actions and introduced the idea of “crimes against humanity.” For the first time, officials were held legally accountable to the international community for offenses against individual citizens. It was in the United Nations, however, that human rights really emerged as a subject of international relations.
Human rights have a prominent place in the U.N. Charter adopted in 1945. On December 10, 1948, the U.N. General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This comprehensive list of rights declared that the way in which states treat their own citizens is a matter of legitimate international concern and subject to international standards.
EFFECT OF THE COLD WAR
Following World War II, an intense ideological struggle broke out between communist and capitalist nations. This “Cold War” lasted until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Few states were willing to allow even multilateral monitoring of national human rights practices, let alone international implementation or enforcement.
By the mid-1960s, the Afro-Asian bloc had become the largest group in the United Nations. These countries, which had suffered under colonial rule, had a special interest in human rights. They found a sympathetic hearing from the Soviet bloc and some countries in Europe and the Americas, including the United States. The United Nations thus once again began to address human rights.
This led, most significantly, to completion of the International Human Rights Covenants in December 1966. Along with the Universal Declaration, these treaties provide an authoritative statement of internationally recognized human rights.
Although the core concepts of human rights norms were clarified by the mid-1960s, implementation of those norms remained almost entirely up to the will of individual national governments.
When Jimmy Carter became president of the United States in 1977, he made the theme of universal rights a priority for American foreign policy. Carter attempted to disentangle international human rights from the East-West politics of the Cold War and from North-South arguments between the industrialized and non-industrialized countries over economic matters. This gave new momentum and increased legitimacy to human rights advocates throughout the world.
THE HELSINKI PROCESS
The mid-1970s also saw the introduction of human rights into the mainstream of multilateral and bilateral foreign policy. And the Helsinki Final Act of 1975 explicitly introduced human rights into the mainstream of U.S.-Soviet relations. (See Helsinki Final Act of 1975.)
The Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) began in the early 1970s as a series of talks involving the United States, Canada, the Soviet Union, and almost all the countries of Europe. Discussions focused on resolving issues between the communist East and democratic West. The CSCE’s final act, reached in 1975 in Helsinki, Finland, and signed by 35 countries, became known as the Helsinki Accords. The accords cited 10 specific principles, including respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms such as freedom of thought, conscience, religion, and belief.
With the end of the Cold War, the CSCE took on a greater role -- managing the historic change taking place in Europe. Its name changed to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). It is now the largest regional security organization in the world, comprising 56 countries from Europe, Central Asia, and North America. OSCE’s Copenhagen Declaration and the Paris Principles have become enormously influential as a measure for human rights performance.
Within the United Nations, a revitalized Commission on Human Rights formulated new treaties on women's rights (1979), torture (1984), and the rights of the child (1989). Experts were appointed to study and report on human rights violations in a growing number of countries.
In the 1970s, nongovernmental organizations concerned with human rights emerged as an international political force. These groups, in addition to their advocacy for victims of human rights abuses, have been important in influencing national and international human rights policies.
THE POST-COLD WAR ENVIRONMENT
Since the end of the Cold War, international efforts to promote human rights have been strengthened. For example, the creation of a U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights brings increased international monitoring.
Although there are still regimes (e.g., Cuba, Burma, North Korea) that engage in systematic violation of internationally recognized human rights, there is, nonetheless, a new willingness within the international community to tackle systematic human rights violations.
For example, in Somalia, when the country descended into warlord politics, multilateral military forces intervened to save thousands of civilians from starvation. In Bosnia, the international community helped end the bloody civil war that had killed some 200,000 people and displaced two million others through systematic “ethnic cleansing.”
See “The Birth and Development of Human Rights in the United States.”
This article, the second in a series of four, is adapted from a chapter in an upcoming IIP print publication, Human Rights in Brief. It is based on the essay “What Are Human Rights?” by Jack Donnelly, a professor of international studies at the University of Denver. Ruth Wedgwood, Edward B. Burling professor of international law and diplomacy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, served as adviser on this publication.
