Human Rights as an International Issue
Today, nearly all states in all regions of the world, at all levels of development, proclaim their commitment to human rights. A government that engages in a consistent pattern of gross human rights violations is widely considered to be illegitimate.
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, massacres of ethnic groups within a country were met with little more than polite statements of disapproval. Less flagrant violations were not even considered a fit subject for diplomatic conversation.
Following the bloodshed of World War II, a global charter for human rights took on a new urgency. Here, Eleanor Roosevelt, widow of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, holds the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
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. In fact, other states and the international community were considered to be under an international legal obligation not to intervene in such matters.
Shock of Holocaust
In the Holocaust during World War Two, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered millions — European Jews, Roma, homosexuals — including men, women, and children. The revulsion at this inconceivable brutality caused an extraordinary intellectual change. The sense of responsibility for the Holocaust generated the pledge that its cruelties should never be repeated. Human rights entered the mainstream of international relations. Prior to the Holocaust some countries had used the excuse that a state’s treatment of its own citizens was a domestic affair. The massacre of one’s own citizens was not an established international legal offense.
The Nuremberg War Crimes
Trials in 1945 helped to change the situation. The trials, at which high-level Nazis were held to account for their actions, 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
However, not everything proceeded smoothly. In the years following World War II, an intense ideological struggle broke out between Communist and capitalist nations, which had repercussions around the world. The “Cold War” lasted until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Just as the United States was sometimes willing to ignore human rights lapses in “friendly” anti-Communist regimes, the Soviet Union was ready to use force when necessary to assure “friendly” totalitarian regimes in its sphere of influence.
Furthermore, few states were willing to allow even multilateral monitoring of national human rights practices, let alone international implementation or enforcement. The United Nations is not a world government. It can do nothing that its member’s sovereign states – do not authorize. During the first two decades of the Cold War, neither bloc was willing to allow the United Nations to do much at all in the field of human rights.
By the mid-1960s, though, 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 attend to 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.
The comprehensiveness of the Covenants, however, demanded that the United Nations shift its human rights work from setting standards to monitoring how states actually follow those standards. This was an area where the organization had made virtually no headway in its first two decades.
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.
