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Nightmare and Noble Dream: The 1993 World Conference on Human Rights

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Susan Marks
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Extract

The World Conference on Human Rights, which took place in Vienna in June 1993, was convened by the United Nations with three principal aims. The Conference was to evaluate progress made in the field of human rights in the period since the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948; to consider the relationship between human rights and other priority concerns of the world community, such as development and democratisation; and to examine ways of strengthening the protection afforded human rights and improving the United Nations' human rights programme. An earlier UN conference on human rights had been held in Teheran in 1968 and the General Assembly decided that, 25 years later, reconsideration was appropriate. This decision, taken in 1989, seemed vindicated as events following the fall of the Berlin Wall opened up new opportunities, as well as new dangers.

Type
Shorter Articles
Information
The Cambridge Law Journal , Volume 53 , Issue 1 , March 1994 , pp. 54 - 62
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge Law Journal and Contributors 1994

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References

1 See provisional agenda, adopted by the General Assembly in Resolution 47/122 on 18 December 1992, and reprinted as UN Doc. A/Conf. 157/1.Google Scholar

2 See The Guardian, 15 June 1993.

3 UN Doc. A/Conf. 157/22, 3.

4 UN Doc. A/Conf. 157/23. References herein to the “Declaration” and to individual paragraphs are references to this document.

5 For an instructive account of the debate, see Renteln, , “The Unanswered Challenge of Relativism and the Consequences for Human Rights” (1985) 7 Human Rights Quarterly 514.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 See, e.g., Report of the Regional Meeting for Asia, Bangkok Declaration, para. 8: UN Doc. A/Conf. 157/ASRM/8; A/Conf. 157/PC/59, 5.

7 Perhaps the most far-reaching is the European Convention for the Prevention of Torture, under which a Committee is empowered to visit all places of detention within the territory of states parties, with almost no advance notice.

8 See UN A/Conf. 157/PC/L.4.

9 Ibid.

10 Proclamation of Teheran, para. 13, reprinted in UN, Human Rights: A Compilation of International Instruments, Vol. I (First Part) (Geneva, 1993), 51.Google Scholar

11 Statement to the Conference by Liu Huaqiu, Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs of China, 15 June 1993: see UN Press Release HR/VIE/10, 13.Google Scholar

12 See the drafting proposals by the United States of America in UN Docs. A/Conf. 157/PC/L.6 and A/Conf. 157/PC/L. 29.

13 See UN Doc. A/Conf. 157/PC/L.2. See also Report of the Regional Meeting for Asia. Bangkok Declaration, para. 4: UN Doc. A/Conf. 157/ASRM/8; A/Conf. 157/PC/59, 4.

14 As an expert from Madagascar speaking at a Council of Europe pre-World Conference meeting put it: “We do not know whether [the structural adjustment programmes] will make it possible to wipe out poverty, but what we have observed so far is that they arc in the process of wiping out the poor”. See Ramaholimihaso, Madeleine, “Democracy Development and Human Rights”in Council of Europe, “Human Rights at the Dawn of the 21st Century”, reprinted in UN Doc. A/Conf. 157/PC/66/Add. 1, 43, at 47.Google Scholar

15 See the drafting proposal by the United States of America in UN Docs. A/Conf. 157/PC./L.5.

16 They functioned, for instance, out of the UN office in Vienna, while other human rights organs were served by the UN's Centre for Human Rights in Geneva.

17 See especially the Report submitted to the Conference by the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM). UN Doc. A/Conf. 157/PC/61/Add.17.

18 See in this regard the report commissioned by the General Assembly and prepared by Philip Alston on “Effective Implementation of International Instruments on Human Rights, Including Reporting Obligations under International Instruments on Human Rights”, Interim Report on Updated Study, UN Doc. A/Conf. 157/PC/62/Add.11/Rev.I.

19 See report commissioned by the UN Centre of Human Rights and prepared by Maria Vassiliou on “Strengthening of the United Nations Human Rights Programme: One of the Priorities of the Organization”, UN Doc. A/Conf./157/PC/60/Add.7, 35.

20 See Amnesty International, “Facing Up to the Failures: Proposals for Improving the Protectionof Human Rights by the United Nations”, reprinted in UN Doc. A/Conf. 157/PC/62/Add. I.

21 See, e.g., Report of the Regional Meeting for Latin America and the Caribbean, San José Declaration, para. 25: UN Doc. A/Conf. 157/LACRM/15; A/Conf. 157/PC/58, 7. See also drafting proposals of the United States of America and Denmark in UN Doc. A/Conf. 157/PC/L.27, 10–12.

22 See, e.g., the drafting proposals of Mexico, Sri Lanka and China in UN Doc. A/Conf. 157/PC/L.27, 15.

23 Hart, H.L.A.,“American Jurisprudence through English Eyes: the Nightmare and the Noble Dream”, reprinted in Hart, H.L.A., Essays in Jurisprudence and Philosophy (Oxford, 1983), 123 at 144.CrossRefGoogle Scholar