Human Rights at the UN United Nations Intellectual History Project Ahead of the Curve? UN Ideas and Global Challenges Louis Emmerij, Richard Jolly, and Thomas G. Weiss Unity and Diversity in Development Ideas: Perspectives from the UN Regional Commissions Edited by Yves Berthelot Quantifying the World: UN Ideas and Statistics Michael Ward The UN and Global Political Economy: Trade, Finance, and Development John Toye and Richard Toye UN Contributions to Development Thinking and Practice Richard Jolly, Louis Emmerij, Dharam Ghai, and Frédéric Lapeyre UN Voices: The Struggle for Development and Social Justice Thomas G. Weiss, Tatiana Carayannis, Louis Emmerij, and Richard Jolly Women, Development, and the UN: A Sixty-Year Quest for Equality and Justice Devaki Jain Human Security and the UN: A Critical History S. Neil MacFarlane and Yuen Foong Khong Human Rights at the UN The Political History of Universal Justice Roger Normand and Sarah Zaidi Foreword by Richard A. Falk Indiana University Press Bloomington and Indianapolis This book is a publication of Indiana University Press 601 North Morton Street Bloomington, IN 47404-3797 USA http://iupress.indiana.edu Telephone orders 800-842-6796 Fax orders 812-855-7931 Orders by e-mail [email protected] © 2008 by United Nations Intellectual History Project All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Normand, Roger, date Human rights at the UN : the political history of universal justice / Roger Normand and Sarah Zaidi. p. cm. — (United Nations intellectual history project) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-253-34935-4 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-253-21934-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. United Nations—History. 2. Human rights—History—20th century. I. Zaidi, Sarah. II. Title. JZ4984.5.N67 2008 341.4’8—dc22 2007029689 1 2 3 4 5 13 12 11 10 09 08 Dedication To William Clay Normand (1922–2006) and Taqia Sajida (1926–2006): Your hopes continue in us. Contents Series Editors’ Foreword Louis Emmerij, Richard Jolly, and Thomas G. Weiss ix Foreword by Richard A. Falk xv Preface xxi Acknowledgments xxix List of Abbreviations xxxi Introduction 1 Part 1. Human Rights Foundations in the First Half of the Twentieth Century 27 1 First Expressions of Human Rights Ideas 35 2 The Decline of Human Rights between World Wars 60 3 The Human Rights Crusade in World War II 81 4 Human Rights Politics in the United Nations Charter 107 Part 2. Establishing the UN Human Rights Framework 139 5 Laying the Human Rights Foundation 143 6 The Universal Declaration of Human Rights 177 7 The Human Rights Covenants 197 vii viii contents Part 3. The Impact of Civil Society and Decolonization 243 8 The Human Rights of Special Groups 247 9 The Right to Development 289 10 Human Rights after the Cold War 316 Notes 343 Index 459 About the Authors 487 About the United Nations Intellectual History Project 489 Series Editors’ Foreword It is surprising that there is no comprehensive history of the United Nations family of organizations. True, in the last few years, histories of the UN Devel- opment Programme1 and the World Food Programme2 have been completed, to add to the two histories of UNICEF, the UN Children’s Fund, produced in the 1980s and 1990s.3 And the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization; the World Health Organization; and the UN Conference on Trade and Development have been preparing volumes bringing together different perspectives of the evolution of their own organizations. But sixty years after the founding of the UN, these are still patchy and incomplete. More serious and complete accounts of UN activities and contributions must be expected of all public organizations, especially internationally ac- countable ones, along with enhanced efforts to organize their archives so that independent researchers can also document and analyze dispassionately their efforts, achievements, and shortcomings. All this is an essential part of the record of global governance during the last half century. Faced with this major omission—which has substantial implications for the academic and policy literatures—we decided to undertake the task of writing an intellectual history—that is, a history of the ideas launched or nurtured by the United Nations. Observers should not be put off by what may strike them as a puffed-up billing. The working assumption behind our undertaking is straightforward: ideas and concepts are a main driving force in human progress, and they arguably have been one of the most important contributions of the world organization. And as the various volumes of our project have been completed, our early assumptions about the importance of ideas among the UN’s various contributions, and for its wider influence, have been confirmed by the record. The United Nations Intellectual History Project (UNIHP) was launched in 1999 as an independent research effort based at the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies at The Graduate Center of The City University of New York, with a liaison office in Geneva. We are grateful for the enthusi- ix x series editors’ foreword astic backing from former Secretary-General Kofi Annan and other staff, as well as from scholars and analysts and governments. We are also extremely appreciative for the generosity of the governments of the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Canada, Norway, Switzerland, Finland, and the Republic and Canton of Geneva; of the Ford, Rockefeller, and MacArthur Foundations, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and the Dag Hammar- skjöld and UN Foundations; and an individual contribution of Ms. Alice Lobel of Paris. This support ensures total intellectual and financial independence. Details of this and other aspects of the project can be found on our web site: www.UNhistory.org. The work of the UN can be divided into two broad categories: economic and social development, on the one hand, and peace and security, on the other. The UNIHP is committed to producing fifteen volumes on major themes, mainly in the first arena but penetrating also the second. These vol- umes are all being published in a series by Indiana University Press. Oxford University Press is publishing a related volume titled The Oxford Handbook on the United Nations.4 In addition, the UNIHP has completed an oral history collection of some seventy-nine lengthy interviews of persons who have played major roles in launching and nurturing UN ideas—and sometimes in hindering them! Extracts from these interviews were published in 2005 as UN Voices: The Struggle for Development and Social Justice, and authors of the project’s vari- ous volumes, including this one, have drawn on these interviews to highlight substantive points made in their texts. Full transcripts of the oral histories were made available in electronic form in early 2007 to facilitate work by researchers and other interested persons worldwide. There is no single way to organize research, and certainly not for such an ambitious project as this one. This UN history has been structured by topics—ranging from trade and finance to human rights, from transna- tional corporations to development assistance, from regional perspectives to sustainability. We have selected world-class experts for each topic, and the argument in all of the volumes is the responsibility of the authors whose names appear on the covers. All have been given freedom and responsibility to organize their own digging, analysis, and presentation. Guidance from ourselves as the project directors as well as from peer review groups has been provided to ensure accuracy and fairness in depicting where the ideas came from, how they were developed and disseminated within the UN system, and what happened afterward. We are hoping that future analyses will build upon our series and go beyond. Our intellectual history project is the first, not last, installment in depicting the history of the UN’s contributions to ideas. series editors’ foreword xi Human Rights at the UN: The Political History of Universal Justice is the ninth volume in the series—and in some respects the most challenging and outspoken. Roger Normand and Sarah Zaidi bring to bear an enormous range of professional expertise, country experience, and personal commit- ment as human rights scholars and activists, including recent first-hand involvement in the traumas of Iraq and Afghanistan. They have traced the developments and advances in the main areas of human rights within the UN, from the Charter and the Universal Declaration in the 1940s through the tortuous debate and negotiation of the two conventions on economic, social, and cultural as well as civil and political rights in the 1950s and 1960s and the later developments in the rights of special groups and the right to development in the 1980s to the World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna and the establishment of the Office of the High Commissioner in the 1990s. They deal with the most recent restructuring of the Human Rights Council, whose first session took place in June 2006. At every stage, the authors bring out the different forces and interests behind governments in this story, the vision and roles of some of the key professionals within the UN secretariat, and the important roles played by what we have called the “third UN”—the experts and committed activists in nongovernment positions and organizations that lobby publicly and privately and often contribute expertise to achieve what they think will be a better outcome.