ABA Journal - May 2009

CHASING A DREAM
Living up to the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights remains a struggle

BY KRISTIN CHOO

THE UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS CAME INTO existence amid the still-smoldering rubble of World War II. The hope was that the citizens of the planet would not be forced to endure that kind of carnage again. But 60 years later, reality still hasn’t caught up with the dream.

Both sides of the story were explored in depth at a recent ABA program commemorating the U.N. General Assembly’s vote on Dec. 10, 1948, to adopt the declaration. None of the U.N.’s 58 members then dissented, but there were two absences and eight abstentions: Saudi Arabia, South Africa and the members of the

Soviet bloc.

While the declaration has no binding legal effect, it became a pillar of customary law in the postwar world and gave birth to the modern human rights movement. The declaration served as the basis for two binding U.N. human rights agreements: the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Several human rights institutions, including the European Court of Human Rights, the International Criminal Court and the U.N. Human Rights Council, created by the General

Jerome

Assembly in 2006, can trace their

Shestack

roots to the declaration.

The principle of universality was a key achievement of the declaration, said Michael Posner, president of Human Rights First, an advocacy group based in New York City. “It said that, by virtue of our humanity, every person on this Earth is entitled to certain core protections,” Posner said during a panel discussion. “It doesn’t matter what your citizenship is. It doesn’t matter if you have a green card. It doesn’t even matter if your government doesn’t believe it. You have those rights.”

The declaration also transformed human rights from a domestic matter for each nation to address as it saw fit into an issue of international concern, Posner told the multinational gathering at the Manhattan headquarters of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York.

But despite these achievements, Posner and other speakers voiced concern that the human rights movement has stalled in recent years.

Some said it is particularly troubling that some of the worst violations of human rights law in recent years have been attributed to permanent

For more Read the Declaration of Human Rights and related documents ABAJournal.com /magazine

PHOTOGRAPH BY ZAVE SMITH

members of the U.N. Security Council—including China, Russia and the United States—in pursuit of policies to fight terrorism.

“If permanent members of the Security Council flagrantly violate international law and the rules of human rights, they send a terrible message to the world,” said Hans Corell, a Swedish lawyer and former U.N. legal counsel and undersecretary-general for legal affairs.

HIGH HOPES

U.S. GOVERNMENT POLICIES DURING
the Bush administration came in for
widespread criticism at the same
time that speakers expressed
strong hopes that the Obama
administration will make hu-
man rights a policy priority.
Posner said U.S. policy tra-
ditionally has been based on
the idea of exceptionalism—
“that sense that we are so
good at this that we don’t
need to be bound by interna-
tional standards.” But in re-
cent years it also turned
sharply away from human
rights principles expressed in
the universal declaration. “It’s
the notion that these core val-
ues underlying all of what the
human rights regime is about
have been trumped by a new
theory of national security,”
he said. “It’s the notion that
war trumps law.”
Soon after taking office in
January, President Barack
Obama announced that the
Guantanamo detention facili-
ty would be closed and that
policies for interrogating detainees
would be changed, but there is pres-
sure on the new administration to do
more.

On March 31, Obama announced that the United States would run for a seat on the U.N. Human Rights Council—a body the U.S. refused to join under the Bush administration—when elections are held this month.