The Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Fifty Years and Beyond

Yael Danieli, Elsa Stamatopoulou, Clarence Dias

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351840965
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Containing contributions by specialists from the intergovernmental and non-governmental worlds and voices of victim/survivors, the book critically reviews the international and regional human rights systems established over the past 50 years in terms of their effectiveness for the victims of human rights violations, and provides future directions for the promotion and protection of human rights.

Part I

Introduction

Voices

A Tribute to Human Rights

Elie Wiesel

The defense of human rights has, in the last fifty years, become a kind of worldwide secular religion. It has attracted millions of members and sympathizers. It is often non-political, although the context of its endeavors is. Its mission is to defend victims of injustice and despair, and in the field of therapy to heal those whose mind and soul have been mutilated, wherever they exist and whoever they are. Young and old, white or black, well-established citizens or recently arrived refugees: let their rights as human beings be violated, and there will always be a person, a group who will rise to their defense.

Why so late? Were there no political prisoners, oppressed men and women of conscience, persecuted ethnic or religious communities anywhere before 1948? Granted, here and there small groups of intellectuals and political activists did their best to alert public opinion to large-scale human disasters, but their scope was limited as was their concrete impact on decision makers.

Today, things have changed. Thanks to the quick pace of the information flow, people’s awareness has been heightened. Today the concern for human rights is part of government policy in many lands, in ours above all. Statesmen, high officials, and diplomats serve as moral watchmen, each in his or her specific area of responsibility. They make it their business to know and let other people know each time an opposition member is punished, a journalist stifled, a prisoner tortured. Social or political persecution is no longer shrouded in mystery. Crimes against humanity are part of the public domain. Protests are then being issued, sanctions envisaged.

But even if the protests bear no fruit, they are not useless; they serve as a message to the victims: you will not be abandoned, you have not been forgotten. For the prisoner, nothing is more important. Faced with the tormentor’s power to intimidate, blackmail, and terrorize, the prisoner is afraid only of being repudiated by his or her friends, given up by society.

In this respect, the battle must continue. Read reports by our own government and by Amnesty International, Helsinki Watch, or the various Lawyer’s committees, and you will ascertain—not without sadness—that there are still prisoners of conscience in the world, and that torture is still being used in many places.

And so—the victims still need allies and friends such as the editors and authors whose writings are to be found in this volume. In defending them, we declare that human rights include not only the right to freedom and dignity, but the right to solidarity.

Introduction

In the fifty years since the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, international action has moved from human rights standard-setting and promotion to the protection of human rights through the development of a nexus of global, regional, and national mechanisms. Clear connections have been made between human rights and correlative duties to respect, protect, promote, and fulfill human rights. The interrelatedness, interdependence, and indivisibility of civil, cultural, economic, political, and social rights has been recognized. The challenge is now to enter what United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan has called “an age of prevention,”¹ including prevention of human rights violations that, in many cases, spur violent conflicts and tragic devastation.

Although the focus of the international human rights machinery has been the human person, states have been slow and often reluctant to address the plight of those directly affected, namely the victim/survivors of human rights violations. Seen in historical perspective, the late recognition of the possibility of direct access of the victim to international bodies in order “to bring the state to trial,” should be viewed in the context of decades of Cold War geopolitics and reticence by governments to allow UN mechanisms of control to come into effect [1]. Overpoliticization of human rights debates has often resulted, not only in inaction or ineffective action, but even when taken, such action has mainly focused on condemning culprit governments, and has barely extended to issues of reparation, including restitution, compensation, and assistance to and rehabilitation of those who have suffered. De-facing the “human” out of “human rights” has often been a convenient way of bluntly absorbing this agenda under ultimate political expediencies of governments. Although the UN has prepared studies and adopted relevant standards, still missing from the international human rights agenda is concern with remediation addressed in and of its own right.

Effective remediation would serve as a deterrent as well, also insofar as sanctions against and punishment of violators are integral elements of remediation, thus contributing considerably to both prevention and protection. Impunity for perpetrators and lack of remedial measures for victims/survivors are two sides of the same coin. Justice must include both a formal and fair judicial process for all concerned and the implementation of relevant court decisions as well as reparation in all its dimensions, including the moral, to victims by governments and society as a whole. The attainment of justice through the accountability of the perpetrators and the process of redress are all critical to healing for victims [2].

It is undeniable that the human rights protection efforts by the United Nations and other intergovernmental organizations have achieved results, saved lives, and averted abuses, even if the number of successes has been extremely modest by comparison to all those in need of help. There are many whose cases have not been brought before the international human rights bodies, due to lack of information about available human rights mechanisms, or, even worse, because of the sheer impossibility of people’s trapped voices to reach the outside world.

The global communications revolution has certainly helped strengthen international solidarity campaigns and urgent action appeals against human rights violations. It has, however, also prompted a culture of greed, over-consumption, and, through the Internet and otherwise, a culture that turns people, especially women, children, and migrant workers, into commodities.

An earlier volume, “International Responses to Traumatic Stress,” [3] commemorating the 50th anniversary of the United Nations, broadly outlined how the UN system as a whole, and related NGOs, have responded to grave and widespread traumatizing events. This volume concentrates specifically on the international human rights system and evaluates this system critically from the point of view of whether it has reached the people by protecting individual human beings or averting their victimization.

The focus on victims or potential victims, implicit or explicit, in the chapters of the book, does not imply viewing as passive those who have suffered from human rights violations. As stated by the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, in the Epilogue to this volume, the language of human rights is empowering. For example, while in the past the term “vulnerable groups” was common, the World Conference on Human Rights in 1993 developed the term “groups rendered vulnerable” and, today, even the latter term is used with discomfort, lest it convey a sense of passivity.

Since the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the issue of special rights for special groups continues to be raised. The norms of the Declaration are clearly universally applicable, but the particular problems faced by women, children, indigenous peoples, the disabled—to mention but a few—have prompted governments and, often concerned groups themselves, to promote the adoption of specialized standards and the establishment of specialized mechanisms. This has occasionally resulted in a certain, even if unwanted, marginalization of such groups instead of bringing them into the mainstream of the human rights regime. Women’s human rights are a case in point. Historic developments over the past fifty years have allowed us to observe a full circle, both conceptual and institutional, on women’s rights. Women’s rights were originally incorporated in the mandate of the UN Commission on Human Rights; a specialized Commission on the Status of Women was then created; this subsequently resulted in the marginalization of women’s human rights issues; and, finally, through extraordinary non-governmental and governmental action at the Global Conferences in Vienna and Beijing, in 1993 and 1995, the circle was successfully completed: women’s human rights were mainstreamed within the human rights structures and the specialized bodies dealing with women, and the Commission on the Status of Women and the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women—were strengthened; the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) was created. This unique example of a circle completed and a balance achieved between mainstreaming and specialization could be usefully analyzed by other groups with special human rights concerns.

A review of fifty years of international human rights action reveals clearly that there is a need for participatory, people-centered approaches to all aspects of human rights promotion and protection to supplement professional elite and state-centered approaches. The positive impact of the participation of indigenous peoples and of women at UN fora provide very useful examples.

At the national level, people-centered approaches to human rights are gradually emerging from the grassroots where people themselves are struggling to become determining players in human rights standard-setting, monitoring, and enforcement [4]. Mounting frustration of communities over government inaction in implementing human rights has led to popular mobilization around the adoption of national laws or international human rights standards. Communities affected by intense economic deprivation, often resulting from environmental degradation, have joined forces with non-governmental organizations to monitor their governments’ implementation of human rights. “Alternative law groups,” “Peoples Tribunals,” and letter petitions to courts have been some of the means used. The result has often been increasing and officially recognized participation, through state institutions, of communities in deciding on their own economic, political, and social development.

Challenges to human rights posed by globalization and non-state actors must be met. These are created by intergovernmental institutions of finance, trade and development, transnational and national corporations, and fundamentalist civil society. The traditional concept of human rights as defining the relation between the individual and the state needs to be expanded further. The participation of women’s movements in the global conferences of the past decade has already resulted in the recognition that the violation of human dignity, not only in the public, but also in the private sphere, constitutes a violation of human rights.

Non-state actors in the globalized economy must be brought into line with the international human rights standards developed over the past fifty years. Crippling external debt obliges developing countries to adopt the International Monetary Fund’s structural adjustment programs with devastating effects on economic, social, and cultural rights. An avalanche of privatization and deregulation has created unprecedented global lawlessness with corporations being largely accountable to no one as regards human rights [5]. In the present environment of weakening state powers and increasing power of the global economy, it would be short-sighted to ignore the impact of these non-state actors on the human rights of millions. Creative ways must be found to address this issue. The current challenges faced by the International Labour Organization (ILO) in the implementation of international labor standards, as well as the recent efforts to draft a Multilateral Agreement on Investments within the framework of the Organization for European Cooperation and Development, are eloquent examples in this respect.

International human rights activism has resulted in an awareness that human rights must be incorporated into an increasing number of areas of international work. The challenge is now to move from this awareness to the effective integration of human rights, in a way that human rights analysis, based on established international human rights standards, will be included in the political, peace, development, environment, social, and other areas of international activity. This need makes particularly relevant the development of expertise in professions other than law and political science, the traditional “carriers” of human rights. As awareness of human rights increases, the interdisciplinary, integrative cooperation among a variety of professions [2, Introduction, pp. 1–17] in fact, advances the promotion and protection of human rights. This very book is the outcome of the editors’ convictions of the necessity for a multidisciplinary approach to human rights. The chapters on the trauma of human rights violation and denial demonstrate eloquently the important and innovative role of health, including mental health, professionals and the extraordinarily rich practice and research in this field.

The purpose of this book is to evaluate fifty years of international action in the field of human rights following the adoption of the Universal Declaration, and to address future challenges. The ultimate yardstick that the authors were asked to keep in mind is the extent to which the different aims of the international human rights system have reached the victims of human rights violations and have prevented victimization, rather than merely focusing on the institutional development of the system itself. Thus, the aspiration of the book has been to portray the dialogue and the interrelationship of the system with the lives of people. The contributors are prominent specialists from around the world associated with non-governmental and intergovernmental organizations, the academy, or, in the case of the “voices” that appear among the chapters, they are individuals whose personal stories add a particular dimension to the understanding of human rights.

The book thus discusses the whole spectrum of international human rights action. The first substantive part of the volume is an overview of the international human rights standards and mechanisms within the UN system developed by the UN, ILO, and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and includes an evaluation of UN human rights field operations and of the efforts to create an International Criminal Court. The second part focuses on the human rights struggles of specific groups: women, children, indigenous peoples, minorities, refugees, migrants, the homeless, the disabled, the mentally ill, the elderly, and those discriminated against on the basis of sexual orientation. The third part discusses international efforts to promote a culture of human rights through institution-building and human rights education. The fourth part evaluates regional human rights action in Africa, the Americas, Asia and the Pacific, Western Europe, and East and Central Europe. The fifth part provides an overview of the specialized contribution of the health professions to the field of trauma of human rights denial and violation. The sixth part focuses on recent efforts to integrate human rights into other major areas of international action, in particular peace and security, development, including extreme poverty, the environment and challenges posed...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• FOREWORD
• REFLECTIONS BY NOBEL LAUREATES
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• PART I. INTRODUCTION
• PART II. THE UNITED NATIONS HUMAN RIGHTS SYSTEM
• PART III. HUMAN RIGHTS OF SPECIFIC GROUPS: CONCEPTUAL AND INSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT
• PART IV. CREATING A CULTURE OF HUMAN RIGHTS
• PART V. INTERFACE BETWEEN GLOBAL AND REGIONAL PROTECTION AND PROMOTION OF HUMAN RIGHTS
• PART VI. THE TRAUMA OF HUMAN RIGHTS DENIAL AND VIOLATION
• PART VII. MAINSTREAMING HUMAN RIGHTS
• EPILOGUE
• CONTRIBUTORS
• INDEX