Rights charter a mirror to 'flatter and shame'

By Bernard Besserglik

PARIS (AFP): The human rights movement that has emerged over the past century has succeeded in establishing and codifying a vast array of political, economic and social rights. Its task in the next century will be to see them enforced.

When delegates gathered in Paris and New York last December to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), they could justifiably point to the huge advances made by the human rights cause in the past half-century.

The language of human rights has become part of the daily political agenda, with governments regularly commenting on each other's rights practices, respect for human rights being made a major factor in aid programs, UN operations mounted in sensitive areas to protect rights, and regional human rights bodies springing up around the world.

The delegates could also have had few illusions about man's continuing inhumanity to man.

A glance at the newspapers would have told them of mass graves in Kosovo, brutal political repression in Myanmar, savage civil wars in Algeria and Colombia, slave labor for tens of millions of children, and death from famine and disease, year after year, for millions of others, children and adults alike.

More than 60 governments -- one in three -- employ torture to silence political opposition, according to Amnesty International. Around half still routinely jail prisoners of conscience.

For most of the world's population, Amnesty notes, the rights set out in the Universal Declaration remain little more than a paper promise.

Javier Zuniga, Amnesty's program director for the Americas, describes the Declaration as essentially a wish-list, buttressed by a series of non-binding covenants, backed only by moral sanctions and "still very much without teeth."

The Declaration has given rise to a thicket of treaties, protocols, conventions, committees and working groups, but "we have very few effective mechanisms for protecting human rights," he notes.

The UDHR was born out of the horrors of World War II and the age of dictators that preceded it.

Pioneers in the field of human rights had focussed on the abolition of slavery, the alleviation of suffering in war, or securing the vote for women. The trade union movement had struggled, with considerable success, for the recognition of rights in the work-place.

With the Cold War division of the world into antagonistic blocs, human rights were frequently sacrificed to considerations of real-politic.

Nevertheless the human rights movement as an expression of civil society gained momentum in the 1970s with the mushrooming of groups in Asia, in Latin America and in eastern Europe.

The Helsinki Final Act of 1975 gave encouragement to activists throughout the Soviet bloc, and the collapse of communism meant the world was largely free of the over-arching ideologies that gave primacy to the collective over the individual.

Within a few years the communications revolution -- the spread of fax, satellite television and internet -- destroyed forever the state monopoly on information.

The emergence of groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch meant that a country's human rights practices became a matter of public record, and the stock response by repressive regimes that scrutiny of their record was "interference in their internal affairs" was increasingly seen as invalid.

The past decade has seen the emergence of an informal coalition of small and medium-ranked states allied to a variety of non-governmental organizations to launch global campaigns on specific issues.

They have wielded what Canadian Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy called "soft power" -- a strong moral message coupled with appeals to public goodwill -- seeking a ban on land mines, the end of the use of child soldiers, or the creation of an international criminal court.

The result has been the growth of a genuinely worldwide movement for human rights.

Last year's Rome agreement to set up an International Criminal Court, along with the decision by Britain's Law Lords that former dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet could be extradited to Spain to answer for human rights abuses committed in Chile, were widely perceived as a breakthrough in enforcing human rights.

Impunity is the main factor in human rights violations, Zuniga notes. "The history of human rights is the history of the fight against impunity."

Meanwhile the human rights movement is being criticized for not being culturally sensitive.

The principle of universality has been challenged by Muslims who say that sharia law has divine approval, by the Chinese who say that western rights would destabilize their country, by Singaporeans and Malaysians who say that their prosperity requires an authoritarian framework, and by Africans and Asians who say that a free choice in marriage would undermine the traditional family.

The West has no grounds for complacency. Among the worst offenders, for many rights activists, is the United States which has been slow to incorporate international rights documents into federal law -- it is the only country, apart from Somalia, which has not ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child -- and remains attached to the death penalty, outlawed in more than 100 other countries.

UN chief Kofi Annan was addressing governments the world over when he memorably described the UDHR as "a mirror that at once flatters us and shames us."