Download Human Rights after the Second World War A

Human Rights after the Second World War
A paper presented by Dr Tom Buchanan at the Euroclio/Europaeum conference, The
Hague, 25 April 2008
In 2002 Kisten Sellars published a book entitled The Rise and Rise of Human Rights1.
Although her thesis was, in fact, a critical one, the title nicely encapsulates a central
theme of the post-war world. Of course, Sellars’ book was written prior to the “war on
terror”: had the book been written a few years later the idea of a relentless forward
march of human rights might well not have seemed so compelling. Even so, we still
live in a world in which concerns about human rights have an unprecedented salience:
just in recent weeks, from Zimbabwe to Darfur and Tibet we have seen human rights
held up as an international standard of behaviour. In the words of one expert, Jack
Donnelly, with a rather ungainly but telling formulation, human rights have become a
“hegemonic political discourse”2 of the modern age.
Where has this powerful discourse come from? We can look back to crucial moments
such as the UN Charter in 1945 and above all the signing of the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights (UDHR) in December 1948 which – with hindsight – take on a great
significance. However, declarations alone do not bind governments or force them to
alter course. We should note Harold Laski’s comment in 1947 that he feared that the
UDHR may be just as fraudulent as the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact for the renunciation
of war: “introduced with an enthusiasm only surpassed by the contempt with
which it was ignored by its signatories…”3. This is the kind of comment that
attracts the interest of the historian. After all, the Kellogg-Briand Pact is barely
remembered, let alone commemorated today. Therefore, Laski’s comment reminds us
that there was nothing inevitable about the “rise and rise” of human rights and no
invisible hand at work. Human rights were promoted by human agency, and that can
be analysed by historians.
Essentially there were three different factors at work here: 1) legal processes: the
determination of new international law, the setting of new norms of behaviour and the
emergence of a specialist branch of the law; 2) actions taken by states, both
individually and collectively in international organisations and treaties; 3) activism
independent of the state by individuals, political parties and non-governmental
organisations (NGOs), which can foster changes in public attitudes and, therefore,
have an impact on government policy. These did not necessarily all work together or
at the same time; hence, 1) and 2) were more influential in the immediate post-war
period, while 3) became very important in forcing the pace from the 1960s onwards.
1945: why human rights?
It was by no means obvious that human rights would be accorded this role in the postwar world. First, in the 1920s and 1930s the emphasis had been on minority, not
universal, rights. Secondly, historically, “human rights” had been associated with the
Left, notably in the French Republican tradition. Thirdly, human rights were not a
“popular” cause in the post-war world, and were not being promoted by any particular
political party. Fourthly, there was a perception that this was an essentially “Western”
concept: speaking a language and embodying a political heritage that had no
particular resonance in Asia and Africa. And finally, the most powerful states did not
necessarily welcome the greater emphasis on rights – quite apart from the Soviet
Union, we should note the reluctance of the European colonial powers, or those which
were embarking on wholesale social democratic reform and the increase in central
state power. As Andrew Moravcsik has written apropos the European Convention of
1950: “There is a real theoretical puzzle here. Why should any government,
democratic or dictatorial, favour establishing an effective independent
international authority, the sole purpose of which is to constrain its domestic
sovereignty in such an unprecedentedly invasive and overtly nonmajoritarian
manner?”4
At the same time, there was undoubtedly a desire for a new beginning in 1945, and an
expectation had been created by wartime developments such as Roosevelt’s “Four
Freedoms” speech and the Atlantic Charter. These were reflected in the UN Charter,
and from that stemmed the idea of an international “Bill of Rights”. However, there
was a long and tortuous road from the UN founding conference in San Francisco to
the signing of the UDHR in December 1948, a process described very well in Mary
Ann Glendon’s book A world made new5. The UDHR represented a tremendous
achievement, in very difficult conditions, but it was also the final gasp of post-war
multilateralist idealism prior to the onset of the Cold War. In formal terms, there was
no further practical progress on implementing the ideals contained in the Declaration
until the signing of two Covenants in 1966 regarding political and socio-economic
rights.
The 1950 “Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms” pointed the
way ahead, at least within Western Europe: universal aspirations gave way to a more
limited, yet more concrete, agreement, based on compromise between the various
participant states. (The right to a free election was not even included amongst the
initial articles and had to be added in 1952 as a Protocol). As Moravscik has argued,
this was not driven by the idealism of Britain and France, the larger democracies, but
rather by the fears of the former dictatorships and their smaller neighbours – a fear of
the return of fascism or, indeed, of the coming of Communism. Indeed, Pierre-Henri
Teitgen, the principal architect of the Convention, regularly alluded to the need for
some kind of alarm system that would warn states against embarking on the “long
road which leads…even to Buchenwald and Dachau”6. The ECHR was initially
largely of symbolic importance. As Mikael Rask Madsen has argued, the major
significance of the 1950s lies precisely in the taking of small steps, building trust
amongst the European states that were party to the Convention, and laying the
foundation for the greater legal activism in the 1960s7.
1960s: the emergence of activism
For much of the 1950s there was little evidence of any “hegemonic political
discourse” of human rights. In a Europe divided by the Cold War, human rights were
clearly being denied in Eastern Europe, but also by states allied to the West in NATO
such as Portugal and Greece. Meanwhile Western colonial powers were busily
denying human rights to populations in Algeria, Kenya, Cyprus and elsewhere. There
was little sign that the “universalism” of the UDHR had been internalised. As I have
argued, governments were not being challenged on the principle of human rights so
long as the Left campaigned against political imprisonment and torture under Franco
and Salazar, while Catholics and conservatives campaigned in support of those
persecuted under Communism8. As Bertrand Russell commented in 1956: “Mankind
is divided into two classes: those who object to infringements to civil liberties in
Russia, but not in the US; and those who object to them in the US, and not in
Russia. There seems to be hardly anyone who just objects to infringements of
civil liberties”9.
This began to change from the mid-1950s. A key date was 28 May 1961, when Peter
Benenson’s article on “The Forgotten Prisoners” in The Observer laid the basis for
Amnesty International. The article was immediately reported in Le Monde, Die Welt
and other European papers. Benenson deliberately invoked the UDHR as the cornerstone for his appeal, but also emphasised how little attention had been paid to the
denial of basic human rights in the intervening 13 years of its existence. The article
produced a powerful, spontaneous response across Western Europe. Within months
Amnesty, initially conceived of as a year-long campaign on behalf of the “prisoners of
conscience” turned into a permanent voluntary organisation with branches both in
Britain and – albeit patchily – in Europe and the USA.
During the 1960s and 70s there was considerable evidence of a changing sensibility
with regard to human rights.
• There was increasing pressure on governments that violated human rights from
both NGOs and inter-state bodies. For instance, the Greek “Colonels” regime of
1967-74 was heavily criticised both by Amnesty International and by the Council
of Europe. With the consolidation of democracy in Spain, Portugal and Greece
from the mid-1970s, and the winding down of colonial conflicts, one could say
that, from a West European perspective, human rights issues increasingly
happened “elsewhere”, notably in Latin America, South Africa and the USSR.
• The growth of an ideal of “Europe” as a realm of human rights. Hence, a
commitment to human rights was built into the Draft Treaty of the failed
European Political Community (1953). No explicit reference was made to human
rights in the Treaty of Rome (1957), but the poor human rights record of the
Franco regime (criticised, for instance, in the European Parliament) was a major
obstacle to Spain’s ambition to join the EEC in the 1960s.
• The steady development of the mechanism of the European Convention – and its
extension (eg, Britain accepts the right of individual petition from 1966 onwards;
France finally ratifies the Convention in 1974).
• The use of human rights as a tool in international relations. One has to be careful
here as some governments – notably the USA in the 1970s – somewhat shortsightedly saw the possibility of using human rights for their own purposes during
the Cold War. (Hence, in the 1980s the Reagan administration was in turn
criticised on human rights grounds for its policy in Central America and
elsewhere). Even so, the 1975 Helsinki Final Accords are highly significant as the
first time that human rights norms had been built into international agreements –
to be ignored at their peril.
I will leave this brief overview of the post-war history of human rights at this
significant juncture. The 1975 Helsinki Accords not only marked a radical new
departure in international relations but also, by creating a benchmark by which
signatories could be judged, conjured up a new wave of activism: Human Rights
Watch in the West and Charter 77 (and other smaller “Helsinki Watch” groups)
within the Soviet Bloc10. The seal was set on the growing influence – and legitimacy –
of activism with the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Amnesty International in 1977.
Conclusion:
In the discussions that preceded the ECHR Pierre-Henri Teitgen spoke movingly of
his father’s arrival at Buchenwald, where he saw a sign which read “Just or unjust,
the Fatherland”. His response in 1949 was that henceforth in Europe there should be
only “just Fatherlands”11. As I have argued, there were many obstacles that stood in
the way of this objective and there was no sudden rush to embrace human rights
wholeheartedly. However, the emerging tension between legal, political and activist
forces proved constructive. By the mid-1970s much had been achieved in Western
Europe which was now beginning to look outwards to a wider world in many parts of
which democratic rights were still denied. Maybe, then, we are not dealing here with
the “rise and rise” of human rights, but they had (to borrow a phrase from AJP
Taylor) risen all the same.
1
Kirsten Sellars, The rise and rise of human rights, Sutton Publishing, Stroud, UK, 2002.
Jack Donnelly, Universal human rights in theory and practice, 2nd edition, 2003, p.38.
3
Jacques Maritain, (ed), Human rights, 1949, pp. 85-6. Laski was responding to the 1947 UNESCO
worldwide survey of leading intellectuals on the question of human rights,
4
Andrew Moravcsik, “The origins of Human Rights regimes: Democratic delegation in post-war
Europe”, International Organization, 54, 2, Spring 2000, pp.217-52; p.219.
5
Mary Ann Glendon, A world made new: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, Random House, New York, 2002.
6
Cited in A H Robertson, Human rights in Europe, Manchester University Press, 1963, p.6.
7
Mikael Rask Madsen, “From Cold War instrument to supreme European Court: the European Court
of Human Rights at the crossroads of international and national law and politics”, Law & Social
Inquiry, 32, 1, 137-59, Winter 2007.
8
Tom Buchanan, “’The truth will set you free’: The making of Amnesty International”, Journal of
Contemporary History, 37, 4, 2002, pp.575-97.
9
Cited in Hugh Wilford, The CIA, the British Left and the Cold War: Calling the tune?, Frank Cass,
London, 2003, p.216
10
See Daniel C. Thomas, The Helsinki effect, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2001.
11
Cited in A. W. Brian Simpson, Human rights and the end of empire: Britain and the genesis of the
European Convention, Oxford University Press, 2001, p.673.
2