EXPANDING THE WEB OF HUMAN RIGHTS

MAURICE J . WILLIAMS

There has been considerable progress in developing the institutions to
strengthen the protection of human rights worldwide

For more than 50 years, the subject of human rights has been an integral part of American foreign policy. During that time, the world has witnessed egregious violations of human rights in almost every corner of the globe. But there also have been many positive steps taken to protect these rights, and critical efforts made to establish and fortify the institutions that protect human rights worldwide.

Even before the United States entered World War II, President Roosevelt linked American policy to respect for the basic rights of freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from want and fear. In the 1940s, the Nazi Holocaust atrocities pierced the world’s conscience, and created a determination that human rights safeguards should be an international concern. In the aftermath of the war and these atrocities, the nations meeting in San Francisco in 1945 to consider a United Nations Charter agreed that genocide and crimes against humanity constituted threats to international peace, and needed to be dealt with collectively. Thus, human rights are embodied in the UN Charter as primary goals of the United Nations, and a special branch of the United Nations, the UN Commission on Human Rights, was established to promote these rights.

In 1946, the UN Commission on Human Rights elected Eleanor Roosevelt to chair its deliberations. The 18 members of the commission, representing widely varying political and cultural traditions, forged a remarkable document, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted by the UN General Assembly in December 1949. It established inalienable rights for individuals, and asserted that the United Nations has a legitimate interest in the way nations treat their subjects. The adoption of this document foreshadowed a revolution in international relations.

The Universal Declaration prohibits governments from resorting to certain actions in their efforts to coerce or control their people. It also promotes positive steps that governments should take to advance people’s well-being, and to ensure that all people are able to exercise their rights. However, the declaration is entirely voluntary, and states initially did not take human rights seriously. For much of its first two decades, the Commission on Human Rights was a talk shop for talented lawyers and statesmen.

As a political decision-making body, the Commission on Human Rights focused exclusively on setting voluntary norms. The commission’s review of compliance by states was pro forma. It was possible, for example, to censure South Africa for apartheid and Chile for civil abuses without prompting any real reforms in either country. Gradually, however, a web of commitments emerged with progressive pressures for states to observe the norms of two international covenants based on the Human Rights Declaration—elaborating specific civil and political rights, and economic, social, and cultural rights. As a supplement to these covenants, states also negotiated a series of specific-issue treaties against genocide, racial discrimination, torture, discrimination against women, and the rights of the child. Along with the Universal Declaration, these treaties constitute an expanding body of customary international law— namely, norms that approach the force of law by common acceptances and practices.

A dramatic breakthrough for dealing with gross violations occurred in the 1970s when the Commission on Human Rights established an expert Working Group on Involuntary Disappearances. Horrific reports of “disappearances” in Argentina’s “dirty war” prompted international concern and attention. By initiating fact-finding and reporting by private experts, rather than state delegates, and by broadening the inquiry to “disappearances everywhere,” the inquiry was facilitated by the widespread international publicity. This experience proved that people are more likely to be protected from abuses as a result of heightened international exposure and embarrassment to the perpetrators of violations, rather than through vague expressions of concern.

The success in mobilizing “shame” against these “disappearances” led to other panels of private experts to investigate summary executions, torture, massacres, religious intolerance, violence against women, the sale of children, state judicial independence, and forms of racism. By 1995, these expert investigations of the UN Commission on Human Rights had launched 24 such investigations, each able to inquire urgently into violations and facilitate broad public scrutiny.

A similar approach was formalized by a Human Rights Committee of independent experts, in their private capacities, elected by the Human Rights Commission to monitor civil and political rights. An Optional Protocol agreed to by 92 states in 1966 empowers the Human Rights Committee to conduct public examinations of complaints initiated by individuals whose civil and political rights have been violated. By January 1998, the Committee had considered 800 complaints and adopted 270 decisions on their merits, with increasing recognition and corrective actions taken by the governments concerned.

For the Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, adopted in 1966, monitoring responsibility lies with the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), assisted by an independent body of private experts. Substantive provisions of the Covenant include rights to: an adequate standard of living; health, social security, and education; scientific and cultural life; favorable conditions of work; leisure; the freedom to join trade unions and to strike; and protection for the whole family, including mothers and children. The focus of ECOSOC is on government compliance to achieve these objectives gradually. The response of US policymakers to date, however, has been to downgrade the economic and social provisions of the Declaration on Human Rights to goals rather than rights.

In contrast to the gradual approach taken by the ECOSOC, the bodies monitoring civil and political rights focus on individual rights and call for immediate compliance. Human rights advocacy efforts have evolved into a worldwide movement aimed at exposing and combating official misconduct and alleviating suffering. Amnesty International, Helsinki Watch (now part of Human Rights Watch), and the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, and many other non-governmental human rights advocacy groups all play an important role in publicizing the plight of individuals and groups whose human rights are being violated.

The international covenants provide a foundation for such efforts, but set forth only broad principles. The civil and political covenant, for example, requires governments to allow for a free press, the right to hold public meetings, and the right to speak freely.

US HUMAN RIGHTS POLICY

Over the past three decades, American presidents have had to consider human rights concerns in their broader economic and political policy agendas. According to former Secretary of State Warren Christopher, “US administrations since President Carter have oriented US foreign policy to building a world where the rule of law protects human rights and the stability essential for peace and free markets.” During the 1970s, President Carter gave priority to supporting enforcement of human rights as a central focus of his foreign policy. The US Congress in 1976 mandated creation of a human rights bureau in the Department of State, headed by an assistant secretary, and directed that foreign aid be linked to recipients’ observance of human rights. Several years later, Congress mandated the preparation of an annual report on the status of human rights worldwide.

The United States also began to raise questions concerning human rights in the Soviet Union as part of efforts to challenge Soviet influence. Congressional action in the 1974 Jackson-Vanik Amendment linked trade with the Soviet Union to its willingness to allow emigration by Soviet Jews.

In the 1980s, President Reagan embraced the human rights cause, but defined it in terms of the promotion of democratic, non-communist governments worldwide. US promotion of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe highlighted political and civil rights deficiencies in the Soviet Union. Generally, however, the Reagan administration was tolerant of human rights abuses by “friendly dictators” on the right in El Salvador, Guatemala, Indonesia, Liberia, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. However, late in the Reagan presidency, there was acknowledgement by the administration of authoritarian abuses by Chile’s General Augusto Pinochet, Haiti’s President François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, and President Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines.

In part, no doubt, as a reaction to the Reagan administration’s tolerance of human rights abuses, non-governmental human rights organizations came of age during this period. In 1977, Amnesty International won the Nobel Peace Prize for its unique role in putting a name and a face to each person whose human rights have been violated. The human rights movement, both official and non-governmental, greatly improved its information gathering and reporting mechanisms, as well as the overall professionalism of its work throughout the Reagan and Bush administrations.

Under the Clinton administration, the human rights bureau in the State Department was renamed the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, and began to put increasing emphasis on human rights and free market democracy. In large measure, Clinton’s foreign policy was shaped by moral concerns, which have been the basis for US military interventions in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo. This human rights imperative also led to the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in support of the September 1998 Security Council resolution, which, while not specifically authorizing international force, demanded the cessation of hostilities in Kosovo.

WAR CRIME COMMISSIONS AND TRIBUNALS

As has been the case in Kososvo and in other human rights “hot spots,” armed conflicts all too often lead to massive human rights abuses. The international media in 1992 reported horrifying practices of “ethnic cleansing” in the Bosnian conflict, including reports of torture, systematic rape, and prisoners beaten to death. The Commission on Human Rights and the UN Security Council convened emergency meetings to condemn the abuses and appointed a high-level rapporteur, a former Polish prime minister, to gather authoritative information on conditions in the Serbian-run camps.

In appointing a special rapporteur assisted by human rights field monitors, the Human Rights Commission dramatically advanced the scope of human rights monitoring. Once an accurate account of violations was obtained, the United Nations publicized the truth about the atrocities, mobilized public pressure to stop them, and supported economic sanctions against Serbia.

This experience of an independent rapporteur proved valuable and highlighted the need for earlier coordinated action. Hence, in 1994 the post of High Commissioner for Human Rights was established to provide overall coordination for monitoring and preventing human rights abuses. However, the new high commissioner was appointed the day before the genocidal atrocities in Rwanda began, and efforts to stop the killing there were hampered by the unwillingness of member states to interfere. Again, an emergency session of the UN Commission established a special rapporteur with wide authority to investigate, and a war crimes commission and tribunal was quickly established for Rwanda.

The war crime tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda have proceeded with difficulty, and each has convicted several middle-level officials of crimes against humanity. Administering even partial justice contributes to healing these war-ravaged societies, much like the healing attributed to the truth commissions in Argentina and South Africa. A dramatic breakthrough came with the extradition by Serbian authorities of their former leader, Slobodan Milosevic, to face a UN war crimes tribunal at the Hague.

In mid-1998, a UN conference in Rome agreed by a vote of 120 to 7 on a treaty to establish a permanent International Criminal Court to bring to justice the world’s worst perpetrators of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Under international law such universal crimes already can be prosecuted by any nation; hence the government of Spain has been seeking to try General Pinochet for crimes committed against Spanish nationals during his despotic rule of Chile. The issue of Pinochet’s culpability was taken up by a Chilean court, which concluded that his poor health prevented a trial.

The Clinton administration opposed the international court on grounds that hostile states might use it for politically motivated prosecutions against US soldiers. Since US security commitments in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East entail foreign assignment of over 200,000 American troops, the concern is quite plausible. However, with assurance that US jurisdiction for cases involving American soldiers would govern, President Clinton in the final days of his presidency signed the International Court Convention.

Secretary of State Colin Powell has asserted that the Bush administration will not submit the Convention to the Senate. This administration, generally, has shown a low regard for international treaties and for the United Nations. In part, because this attitude is resented by other UN members, the United States recently lost its seat on the Human Rights Commission. The Bush administration has taken a low-key approach to human rights, and asserts it will regain the seat next year.

WORLD CONFERENCE ON HUMAN RIGHTS

The issue of human rights breeds confrontation: it touches on a government’s resources of power, and on its links to its citizens. In 1993, the Vienna World Conference on Human Rights was convened to stress the universality of human rights and to gain wider endorsement of the human rights treaties. Some nations contested universality, claiming that particular cultures and traditions render some of the norms invalid. The essence of the quarrel was national sovereignty, and non-interference in the internal affairs of states. Attacks against universality were on two levels:

     a) whether the United Nations or other monitoring entities can decide what constitutes human rights in a sovereign nation, or require other than voluntary compliance; and

     b) whether civil and political rights are preeminent over economic and social rights, and if the rights of individuals should take precedence over the interests of the community or state.

For instance, does China’s concern for having adequate food for its people, an economic right, allow it to dictate a one-child policy that negates the civil rights of Chinese parents?

The countries favoring economic and social rights expressed an anti-Western fury, intensified by persistent American downplaying of these rights. Indonesia’s foreign minister, for example, proclaimed to the 1993 conference that “no country, or group of countries” can be “judge, jury, and executioner over other countries” by demanding compliance, rather than cooperation, with particular human rights norms.

Under strong pressure from US women’s rights activists, who were represented in force at the Vienna Conference, the Clinton administration defused the quarrel by a compromise acceptance of the UN-sponsored “Declaration on the Right to Development,” and by affirming that economic and social rights are as important as civil and political rights.

The compromise enabled full Vienna Conference endorsement of a declaration of the universality and equal applicability of all human rights, and the call for ratification of the principal human rights treaties by the year 2000. While 120-150 nations subscribe to the principal treaties, a number of countries which vocally challenge universality (including China, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Pakistan) are not parties to them.

To date, nine human rights treaties have been ratified by most nations and become international law. In the past decade, the US Congress has ratified five of these major treaties, i.e., those relating to Genocide; Torture; Racial Discrimination; the Civil and Political Covenant; and the Rights of the Child. However, a 1994 effort to gain US ratification of the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women failed in Senate committee. Today the United States and Saudi Arabia remain the only two holdouts on that treaty.

Overall, though, it is an encouraging development that the great majority of governments have committed themselves, at least on paper, to adhere to certain standards in the treatment of their nationals. They also have accepted, in principle, the right of other governments and international institutions to hold them to those standards. With the end of the Cold War, the transitions in Central and Eastern Europe, Eastern Asia, Latin America, and southern Africa have substantially increased the number of governments willing to adhere to international standards for the respect and protection of human rights.

What has been achieved in the latter half of the past century is a landmark legacy. But much remains to be done. With crimes against humanity in the Congo, widespread hunger in North Korea and Africa, genocide rampant in the Sudan, women deprived of virtually all rights in Afghanistan, and widespread child abuse, the protective web of human rights has yet to be spun for those whose rights are not fulfilled.

On the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Human Rights, Czech President Havel rightly observed, “The life of those who scorn human rights is much more difficult than before, because for the first time in history there is a valid and globally respected standard to which we can point and in whose name we can act to combat injustices.”

How best to combat these injustices and deal with the world’s many ethnic conflicts and human rights violations will concern Americans and the international community well into the new millennium.

Maurice J. Williams (CC ’71) was State Department undersecretary, deputy director of the Agency for International Development, and assistant secretary-general of the United Nations. He is an adjunct assistant professor at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida.

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