By Chidi Odinkalu
On this day 75 years ago, on December 10, 1948, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights “as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations”. Forty-eight of the 58 countries eligible voted to approve the Declaration. The Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Saudi Arabia, Soviet Union, South Africa, Ukraine, and Yugoslavia abstained, while Honduras and Yemen absented themselves from the vote altogether. There were no votes against its adoption.
The previous day, on December 9, 1948, they had adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and just three and a half years earlier, in June 1945, 50 countries had signed the Charter of the United Nations establishing the foundations for a new global order at the end of a profoundly ruinous war. In the three years separating the adoption of the UN Charter from the Universal Declaration, more countries emerged to independence, including Korea, India, Indonesia, Philippines, Myanmar, Pakistan, Syria, and Vietnam. In the decade that followed, the cascade of decolonisation arrived Africa.
Two significant events in May 1948 preceded the
adoption of the Universal Declaration. In Bogota, Colombia, the countries of
the Organisation of American States, OAS, proclaimed the American Declaration
on the Rights and Duties of Man, according human rights salience on a regional
scale that had until then been absent. In the same month, the National Party
eked out a win in South Africa’s parliamentary elections, enabling it to take
over power and launch a government founded on the idea of the inherent
supremacy of one race over all others, which many around the world thought had
been defeated with the Nazis in 1945. It was entirely consistent that a country
led by such a party could not bring itself to vote for the Universal
Declaration.
Like the Genocide Convention,
the Universal Declaration was inspired by Nazi atrocities which, in the
explicit language of the text, “outraged the conscience of the world”. It would
have been preferable if that conscience could also have been bothered to notice
the preceding atrocities of colonialism and slavery or the genocides at the
beginning of the 20th century, including those perpetrated by Germany against
the Herero and Namaqua of present day Namibia; King Leopold’s genocide in the
Congo; and the Ottoman genocide against the Armenians. Those went unnoticed
largely because the victims were – in the dominant wisdom of the day – from
expendable races.
Much of what the Declaration promised was aspirational then. Around the world, discrimination was the order of the day. Many of the leading countries at the adoption of the Declaration, notably France, Portugal, Spain and the United Kingdom, were still reluctant to give up their colonies. They could not be taken seriously when they promised not to discriminate because colonialism was founded on an inherent inferiority of colonised peoples.
This inequality was racist. A mere
quarter of a century earlier, these nations had described colonies in the
Covenant of the League of Nations as “inhabited by peoples not yet able to
stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern
world”.
Despite the adoption of
the Slavery Convention in 1926, slavery was also still alive at the time.
Therefore, simple as it was, the proposition that “all human beings are born
free and equal in dignity and rights” was quite radical in 1948. The original draft
had confined that entitlement only to men. Hansa Mehta, the feminist educator
and writer who was India’s first representative to the United Nations Human
Rights Commission, ensured that the final language of the Declaration applied
to everyone, not just men. Her imprint on the final text showed that
decolonisation would profoundly affect the manners and meanings of
international law and relations.
Four days after its
adoption, The Guardian in London editorialised that the Declaration “is no smug
statement of the Western way of life”, calling it “a bold step for the world to
take when there is no government in existence which can guarantee, even to its
more favourite citizens, all the rights laid down”. On the first proposal, the
newspaper was far from accurate; on the second, its insight proved far more
durable.
With respect to the
former, Kathryn Sikkink recalls that it was the Chilean jurist and diplomat,
Álejandro Alvarez, who first proposed the idea of the “international rights of
the individual” to the American Institute of International Law in 1917, which
eventually evolved into the UDHR. The caricature of the Universal Declaration
as some kind of donation by the West to the rest is, therefore, easily shown to
be unfounded.
As to the latter, its
evident shortcomings notwithstanding, the influence of the Declaration has been
seminal. Many of the ideas originally formulated as aspirations in the
Declaration have been transformed into binding law domestically and
internationally. All the current 193 member states of the United Nations
profess fidelity to it with varying degrees of conviction and many have it
enshrined by reference in their national constitutions. Its claims to being
universal, somewhat ostentatious 75 years ago, are closer to reality today.
The Declaration has
inspired a complex of international treaties and mechanisms at global and
regional levels patented for the protection of human rights. Courts of human
rights exist in Africa, the Americas, and Europe. The 22 countries of the Arab
League now have in place an agreement to create one. An active community of
advocates around the world toils to ensure that the guarantees inspired by the
Universal Declaration continue to prosper. It has spawned a grammar appealing
to diplomacy, government at different levels and even to security and
intelligence agencies as they seek to communicate or justify their
actions.
At the landmark of the 75th anniversary of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the evidence of progress is unmistakable,
but so are the challenges. The rise of populist authoritarianism increasingly
endangers the promise of the Declaration and those who work to defend or
realise that promise as well as the integrity of institutions for its
implementation nationally and internationally. In Europe, the United Kingdom is
increasingly voluble with its sovereign skepticism about the European
Convention on Human Rights. In many parts of the world, violent non-state
actors such as insurgents, terror groups, or networks of organised crime now
endanger the mission of the Universal Declaration.
In a world of permanent crises,
the political and diplomatic investments needed to advance human rights are
increasingly in doubt, nowhere more so than in the West, as countries as well
as multilateral institutions direct their attentions to a succession of
pressing crises or foster the idea that the advancement of a more equal world
in freedom and rights can suffer deferral to a convenient future time.
Appealing as this may seem, it is evident on closer examination that nearly all
of these crises are either caused by or the causes of deepening
inequality.
In different parts of the
world, this inequality manifests itself in different ways between people and
communities or between citizens and their governments. Across Africa, for
instance, authoritarian government is on the rise; the right to vote is in
danger from compromised electoral institutions and captured courts; a
metastasis of sovereign debt overhang breeds rising immiseration; fragmentation
and instability have increased conflict, atrocities, and associated
displacement and rootlessness. Violence is a rising cause of death both
directly and also in indirect forms which mostly destitute and endanger
women.
Yet exciting new opportunities
exist on this anniversary for advancing the message of the Universal
Declaration and the mission of a more equal world. The digital revolution, for
instance, makes possible new frontiers of awareness, advocacy, and
accountability. Even as authoritarianism waxes, concentrations of power are
waning in their influence.
Seventy-five years ago, The Guardian called the Universal
Declaration “a stick with which governments and national consciences can be
beaten”. The challenge of the next quarter century to the Centenary of the
Universal Declaration will be to advance its realisation in ways that do not
necessitate anyone feeling clobbered.
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