No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Whatever happened to Human Rights?*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 October 2009
Extract
Whatever happened to Human Rights? Like you, I think it is an odd title for a lecture; but in the end I settled for it rather than the alternative which sounded even odder—whatever has not happened to Human Rights since their grand eruption, forty years ago? Only ten years before that, the expression was still unfamiliar in the English-speaking world. The expression ‘The Rights of Man’ was familiar enough, but it did not necessarily mean the same thing and I cannot see that it was often seriously used with the same intention. ‘Human Rights’ only began to come into use through the second half of the Second World War. It was found apt for describing what the United Nations conceived themselves as fighting for, and what they undertook to do something constructive.about when the fighting was over. They gave it prominence in general terms in their Charter of principles and plans for the post-war world, and left the working-out of the Human Rights details to a committee (the embryo of the present Human Rights Commission). After about two years’ work, its draft Declaration then went back to the UN's debating mills and after being not too badly messed about was accepted nem con by the. General Assembly on 10 December 1948. An idea which, depending on your cultural point of view was either impressively old or excitingly new, had gone into orbit.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © British International Studies Association 1990
References
1 The Charter's explicit references to human rights are to be found in the preamble (second clause) and articles 1(3), 13(lb), 55(c), 62(2), 68, and 76(c). The UN stages through which the business went were, after the insertion of those references at the San Francisc o conference: the Human Rights Commission and its drafting committees; ECOSOC and its special Human Rights Committee; the 3rd Committee of the General Assembly; and finally the General Assembly itself.
2 Adam Weiler, a gifted and much-liked undergraduate student of International Relations at the University of Sussex (School of European Studies), died in 1970 in the Sinai desert while performing his duties as a reserve officer in the IDF. This biennial lecture is given in memory of him.
3 An 1864 comment, cited by Norman, E. R. in ‘Cardinal Manning and the Temporal Power’, his contribution to Beales, Derek and Best, Geoffrey (eds.), History, Society and the Churches. Essays in Honour of Owen Chadwick (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 235–256 at 250.Google Scholar
4 Thus described (and dated September 1933) by Cassin, René at p. 354 of Marc Agi, De I'idée de I'universalité comme fondatrice du concept des Droits de I'Homme, d'aprés la vie et l'oeuvre de René Cassin (Antibes, 1980).Google Scholar
5 Lauterpacht's powerful expression of this opinion, at a meeting of the International Law Association (in Brussels), had much impressed John Humphrey, director of the UN's Human Rights Division. His enthusiasm for it was promptly reported to Whitehall by the UK's delegation to the UN. The Foreign Office remained unmoved, replying, on 17 February 1948, that Lauterpacht read too much into the Charter's word ‘promote’, which meant no more than an obligation to ‘elaborat e a Bill of Rights and take adequate measures for the enforcement of that Bill’. FO 371/72800 u. n. e. 621 and 626, in the British Public Records Office, hereafter referred to as PRO.
6 The USA's shift away from its original confident line was meticulously charted by the FO. See especially (in the PRO) FO 371/67605 u. n. e. 664, 67606 u. n. e. 728 and 776, and 67607 u. n. e. 1848.
7 Worse, it aided and abetted wickedness and duplicity. After the FO's men Phillips and Gore-Booth had had a working lunch in Washington with the State Department's Hendricks and Hyde, Phillips reported that he had ‘said that opinion in the UK was frankly a little tired of Declarations which provided insincere Governments with an easy passport for virtue without the assumption of any of the obligations …’ FO 371/67607 u. n. e. 1848, 18 September 1947.
8 FO 371/72811 u. n. e. 3939, 23 September 1948, Pt. I para. 5, and u. n. e. 4175, 24 October 1948.
9 Cassin told his biographer (in the long interview dated 9 January 1969 which fills pp. 349–57 of the book), ‘Le mot “universelle”, je l'ai improvisé en séance’, and he was the more gratified by its instant reception because it made up for his earlier disappointment that the Declaration did not begin (as had his ‘Avant-projet’ for it), ‘Nous, peuples des Nations Unies …’. Agi, De l'idée, p. 355.
10 States parties to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights are at the very least obliged to submit to its Human Rights Committee regular reports ‘on the measures they have adopted which give effect to the rights recognized [by the Covenant] and on the progress made in the enjoyment of those rights’. They may opt also to let the Committee receive complaints from other States parties (Article 41) and even from its own individual subjects (the ‘optional protocol’).
11 Sir Mohammed Zafrulla Khan was a member of the Ahmadi sect.
12 Agi, , De l'idée, p. 355Google Scholar. Cassin went on to recognize that this was to incorporate socialist doctrine, which he located in France and Latin America as well as the Soviet bloc. He recalled how he had been involved in his own country's endeavours, in 1936 (the year of The Popular Front), to modernize the 1789 Declaration, and how ‘ll y avait en tête “le droit à la vie”.’
13 Whether it is possible to reckon precisely the birth-date of the idea of the European Convention, I know not. But its impetus clearly came as part of Western Europe's stance in face of Eastern Europe's submission to Soviet hegemony. An affirmation of faith in human rights was made in the Brussels Treaty for collective security (Britain, France and Benelux) in March 1948, and it was high on the agenda of the movement for a Council of Europe, crucially boosted at a Congress in The Hague two months later. By early autumn the Cabinet Office's brief for the UK's delegation at the UN, as it geared up for the last lap on the Universal Declaration, could go so far as to say: ‘For the delegation's confidential information it should be added here that the Foreign Office has been considering the advisability of holding formal consultations with the Brussels Treaty powers with a view to drafting a Western Union Covenant of Human Rights which would be acceptable to these powers. The advantage of such action would be that it would be more likely than the Human Rights Commission to produce a document of high quality, and the Western Union powers would be in a position to insist that the standard of the Covenant eventually drafted by the Human Rights Commission should be equally high.’ FO 371/72811 u. n. e. 3939, para. 37. The European Convention (whose preamble lays as much explicit emphasis on Fundamental Freedoms as on Human Rights) was signed on 4 November 1950.
14 Agi, , De I'idee, p. 185.Google Scholar
15 Article 29(1): ‘Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.’
16 This document, famous in French human rights literature as the ‘Avant-Projet Cassin’, is reproduced in Agi, , De I'id'e, pp. 321–326.Google Scholar
17 Quotations from, respectively, Agi, , De I'id'e, pp. 235, 232, 177.Google Scholar
18 Cassin's Nobel Prize acceptance speech is given in Agi, , De I'idée, pp. 341–345Google Scholar also, in a slightly different version, in Habermann, Frederick W. (ed.), Nobel Lectures: Peace (1951–1970), vol. 3 (Amsterdam etc., 1972), pp. 394–407.Google Scholar
19 That striking and suitable phrase occurs in Agi, , De I'idée, p. 214Google Scholar. One may guess it to be Agi's own, despite the modest inverted commas.
20 Best, Geoffrey (ed.), The Permanent Revolution. The French Revolution and its Legacy, 1789–1989 (London, 1988), pp. 101–128, ‘The French Revolution and Human Rights’.Google Scholar
21 FO 371/72802 u. n. e. 1212, 19 March 1948. Although they appear to have sought to dodge him, the Foreign Office lawyers carefully mulled over Mr Bienenfeld's argument, the core of which on this occasion could not have been more weighty—the case for power to derogate: ‘It is of essential importance to state in detail which of the human rights and how far they may be restricted in time of war or public emergency.’ From the tone and sense of the office minutes which followed, it rather looks as if the FO men (to whom was added Miss Gutteridge) had not previously considered the question of derogations.
22 The quotation is from Agi, , De I'idée, p. 187.Google Scholar
23 Alston's articles in Netherlands International Law Review 29 (1982), pp. 307–322Google Scholar, and in American Journal of International Law (1984), pp. 607–621Google Scholar; Meron's, , in American Journal of International Law 80 (1986), pp. 1–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
24 The first thoughts of Geoffrey Wilson, the lawyer the Foreign Office brought in to lead on this side of their work (and to provide its delegation with legal and forensic expertise beyond the powers of the Foreign Secretary's appointee, his old Trade Union chum Mr Dukes) are in FO 371/67487 u. n. e. 1928. Those files contain no earlier draft. Subsequent versions may be read in 67604 u. n. e. 443 and 67606 u.n.e. 1171.