EUROPEAN UNION WORLD

The Post-Cold War

Since the end of the Cold War, international efforts to promote human rights have been further strengthened.

An example is the creation of a U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, bringing about increased international monitoring. In most countries, the nature and boundaries of human rights have become more deeply entrenched on the national agenda.

As liberal economic ideas have spread through globalization, so have other ideas. Nongovernmental human rights organizations and advocates have become increasingly influential worldwide.

To be sure, raising human rights issues is sometimes still resented by states, as illustrated by the strained relations betweenChinaand its major trading partners in the years following the1989 Tiananmen Squaremassacre of Chinese citizens. And most states still refuse to press international human rights concerns strongly enough to satisfy many human rights NGOs.

There are still regimes in power-inCuba,Burma,North Korea, and elsewhere-that -engage in systematic violation of internationally recognized human rights. And, as documented in the reports of the U.S. Department of State and various NGOs, most countries of the world still have significant human rights problems.

Nonetheless, there is a new willingness within the international community to tackle systematic human rights violations. It is regrettable that, in 1994, the United Nations failed to respond to stop the genocide inRwandawith military intervention. But inEl Salvador, U.N. human rights monitors played an important role in reaching a political settlement and demilitarizing the country after a decade-long civil war.

InSomalia, when the country descended into warlord politics, multilateral military forces intervened to save thousands of civilians from starvation.

In Cambodia, a massive U.N. peacekeeping operation helped to remove Vietnamese forces and contain the Khmer Rouge, promoting a freely elected government. InBosnia, the international community, led by theUnited States, used military force to bring an end to the bloody civil war that had killed some 200,000 people and forced two million others from their homes through systematic “ethnic cleansing.”

Despite the importance of human rights and humanitarian politics, the world community was struggling in the early 2000s to halt vicious, tribal-based strife in the western DarfurprovinceofSudan.

The conflict, characterized as genocide by theUnited Statesand many human rights organizations, has taken tens of thousands of lives and forced more than two million people into refugee camps. African Union Mission troops have been unable to stop the widespread killing and rape, and theUnited Stateshas urged the United Nations to deploy a large peacekeeping force in the country.

At the same time, the international community, including human rights NGOs, has been engaged in responding to the sharp rise in international terrorism highlighted by the September 11, 2001, attacks in the United States and by other al Qaeda attacks around the world, fromIndonesiatoSpain. These same observers have also critiqued the responses to terrorism taken by national governments.