The History of Human Rights

There is an interesting — and, I think, controversial — account of the history of the contemporary human rights regime that was published by Samuel Moyn in The Nation at the very end of the summer. Its argument is an adaptation from his new book, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, which I’m hoping to read very soon.

I say that the piece is controversial because I have a fundamental disagreement with its central tenet … and I suspect I’m not the only one. In short, Moyn wants to argue that human rights really came into their own only in the 1970s and that, quite possibly, their time has since passed:

The Universal Declaration was less the annunciation of a new age than a funeral wreath laid on the grave of wartime hopes. The world looked up for a moment. Then it returned to the postwar agendas that had crystallized at the same time that the United Nations emerged. A better way to think about human rights in the 1940s is to come to grips with why they had no function to play then, compared with the ideological circumstances three decades later, when they made their true breakthrough.

To make the case in favor of the 1970s at the expense of the 1940s, Moyn first looks to Jimmy Carter’s inaugural address and the (at the time unheard of) idea of a foreign policy built around human rights. He then takes aim at the 1940s. And, indeed, the crux of his case — in both the 1940s and 1970s — revolves around the idea of domestic politics. The problem with human rights from their founding moment in 1948 is that “they were restricted to international organization, in the form of the new United Nations. They didn’t take hold in popular language and they inspired no popular movement.” By contrast, with Carter’s presidency, human rights were taken to be a concept that might impact a state’s foreign policy:

Carter’s words sparked an intense debate at every level of government and society, and in political capitals across the Atlantic Ocean, about what it would entail to shape a foreign policy based on the principle of human rights

This account is almost entirely different from the one that I provide in the concluding chapter of my book. Indeed, I place a great deal of weight on what I take to be the deliberative, democratic drafting process whose result was the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, going so far as to claim that “the process by which it was drafted and the deliberations surrounding the subsequent human rights instruments represent the best possible proof of the universal applicability of the rights that they espouse.”

To my mind, then, it seems quite problematic to say that the Universal Declaration had virtually no impact and that our fondness for it is little more than a wistfulness for a time that never actually existed. And it is not only problematic because it means challenging the auspicious birth of the contemporary human rights regime from the ashes of the Holocaust.

As I argue in my book, Moyn’s account fails to take into account

an entire group of increasingly inclusive institutions [that] has arisen from this auspicious beginning. The process that began with the drafting of the Declaration has evolved to include such diverse entities as the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women, the draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child. In addition, it is notable that the newly-independent states of the Organization of African Unity went on to draft their own declaration of rights – the African [Banjul] Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights – that recognizes their desire “to co-ordinate and intensify their co-operation and efforts to achieve a better life for the peoples of Africa and to promote international co-operation having due regard to the Charter of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”

While the documents that I mention here are all relatively recent ones, and thus might support Moyn’s point more than my own, we could also point to the drafting of the ICCPR, ICESCR, and Genocide Convention (all of which took place a good deal prior to Carter’s inauguration). We might also point to the establishment of the European Court of Human Rights or to the Hungarian Revolution, in which revolutionaries — and the UN committee that investigated the matter — made clear use of the language of human rights against the Soviet Union.

All of these examples, to my mind, put the lie to Moyn’s account of the lack of enthusiasm and lack of impact of the idea of human rights from its inception in 1948. But they do not necessarily change the question to which he turns at the end of his article, namely “what to do with the progressive moral energy to which human rights have been tethered in their short career. Is the order of the day to reinvest it or to redirect it?”

Clearly reinvestment is my answer, especially if redirection is the only other option. But I suppose I challenge not only his premise (about human rights inaugurated in the 1970s) but also his assertion that the idea of human rights no longer has much force. I would submit that the various ad hoc tribunals and the International Criminal Court, not to mention the work of groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, amount to much more than simply “satisying morality” (in the words of Tony Judt, who Moyn approvingly cites). In Moyn’s mind (and Judt’s), “The antipolitics of human rights ‘misled a generation of young activists into believing that, conventional avenues of change being hopelessly clogged, they should forsake political organization for single-issue, non-governmental groups unsullied by compromise.’”

But, for me, this argument is what is ultimately misleading. It’s a mistake to think that the movement in support of enforcing international human rights is somehow anti-political, just as it is a mistake to think that the idea of human rights came and went in the space of something like thirty years. Some human rights activists might be focused on a single issue and they might prefer to work in an arena somehow “unsullied by compromise,” but not any of the ones with whom I’ve worked. What’s more, the international lawyers who are interested in bringing an end to impunity by putting dictators and war criminals in the dock are defintiely not of this opinion.

My sense, in fact, is that to arrive at this position — the one that Moyn quotes Judt as staking out — is not to look particularly closely at the human rights work that is actually going on out in the world today. Out there — even if no one in the Obama administration is championing them in the way that Carter did back in 1977 — human rights are very much on the minds and in the mouths of a great many people who are hard at work on moving forward that universalist project that was inaugurated by Eleanor Roosevelt and her UN committee in 1948.