1.1The emergence of human rights politics in the late 1940s
During an interview for Amnesty Internationalâs Oral History Project, Peter Benenson, the founder of the organisation, affirmed that he much preferred the idea of âcivil libertiesâ to that of âhuman rightsâ.1 Despite these reservations, Amnesty was established as a human rights organisation and has based its activities on the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Amnestyâs history, in fact, is embodied in the history of human rights.
The historical emergence of human rights is far from uncontroversial. Leading scholars on human rights diverge about when they emerged and have situated their origins at different moments in history. According to the American historian Lynn Hunt, for example, human rights first emerged during the eighteenth-century revolutions. Many scholars however, consider that the horrors of the Holocaust were the major impulse behind the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; for others, it is regarded as a product of the Cold War.
Following the first hypothesis raised above, Hunt suggests that human rights were born during the Enlightenment and the âAge of Revolutionâ. According to her account, between 1689 and 1776, rights that were considered exclusive to certain people evolved into human rights or the ârights of manâ (les droits de lâhomme) (Hunt, 2007). Hunt proposes that in the second half of the eighteenth century, popular novels played an important role in the emergence of human rights. By presenting the idea that people were similar because of their feelings, readers tended to identify with the characters, fostering a new understanding of empathy and creating a sense of equality (Hunt, 2007).
According to Hunt, rights should be natural, equal, and universal in order to be considered human rights (Hunt, 2007). Nevertheless, the idea that the rights proclaimed during the eighteenth century could be considered universal is controversial. Although the United States Declaration of Independence states that âall men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happinessâ (Hunt, 2007), its universality is questionable since the Declaration was aimed at the inhabitants of the Northern Colonies and certainly did not include the enslaved Africans or the indigenous population.
Hunt considers that the rights proclaimed in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen during the French Revolution were equal and universal. By declaring that all individuals were equal in the eyes of the law, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, in fact, questioned the system of privileges and hereditary distinctions that formed the monarchical society. Although the Declaration reflected a new view of the rights of the individual, it was aimed exclusively at the French people, as stated in the Third Article: âThe principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. No body nor individual may exercise any authority which does not proceed directly from the nationâ (Hunt, 2007). In summary, Hunt suggests that human rights improved in the eighteenth century. For the author, these changes were evident in new cultural practices, such as epistolary novels, and in the moral campaign for the abolition of torture in the beginning of the 1760s. She argues, ultimately, that once human rights had been proclaimed, they could no longer disappear and would continue to unfold during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Contrary to Huntâs argument, Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, points out that no liberal or radical party of the twentieth century included the ârights of manâ in its programme. During the nineteenth century, those rights had only been invoked to defend the individual against the increasing power of the state and to soften the social insecurity brought on by the Industrial Revolution. Those rights, argued Arendt, became the slogan for the protectors of the underprivileged and for those who could no longer appeal to anything (Arendt, 2009).
According to Arendt, the First World War and its consequences laid bare Europeâs political system, in which national interest had priority over law and over the âRights of Manâ. This became increasingly clear when a growing number of people became stateless, without a government to represent or protect them, generating masses of refugees and ethnic minorities. After the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman Empires, stateless people and ethnic minorities emerged from these multinational states of pre-war Europe (Arendt, 2009). Europe had been devastated, not only in terms of human casualties from the war but also because of the process of disintegration that followed. The Treaty of Versailles imposed by the victorious powers (the United States, Britain, France, and Italy) re-drew the map of Europe according to the right to self-determination and to the claims of various nationalist movements. President Wilson of the United States, an enthusiastic supporter of the principle of self-determination, encouraged the creation of ethnicâlinguistic nation states. The lines drawn on the map, at the time, were intended to weaken Germany and to fill the empty spaces left by the dissolution of the Russian, Habsburg, and Ottoman empires. However, as acknowledged by Arendt, when considering the demographic map of Europe the nation-state principle could not apply to Eastern Europe (Arendt, 2009). For Eric Hobsbawm, this disastrous attempt was in part responsible for the national conflicts which tore the region apart in the 1990s. The First World War had led to millions of deaths and created millions of refugees. The losses in the war, unprecedented in European history, included the deaths of 1.6 million French citizens, 800,000 British, 1.8 million Germans, and 1.5 million Armenians in Turkey â victims of the first genocide of the modern era. Moreover, the First World War forced millions of compulsory âexchanges of populationsâ between states, and generated between four and five million refugees. In sum, 1.5â2 million Russian nationals fled the Russian Revolution, 320,000 Armenians fled genocide, and 1.3 million Greek nationals were repatriated to mainland Greece, principally from Turkey (Hobsbawm, 2013). The League of Nations system for the protection of minorities stems from the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. The victorious powers compelled the states of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Greece, Romania, Austria, Hungary, and Bulgaria to sign treaties granting rights to their minority peoples. The League of Nations was in charge of the enforcement procedure (Fink, 1995).
The League of Nations was established in 1919 as a means of preventing war and conflict, and of protecting minorities within nation-states. The minorities system, which was guaranteed by the League of Nations, recognised for the first time that millions of people lived outside normal legal protection and needed their basic rights to be guaranteed by an outside body. Nevertheless, for scholars such as Arendt, the minorities system admitted that only people of the same national origin could enjoy the legal protection of institutions and that only nationals could be citizens (Arendt, 2009).
For Arendt, since the âRights of Manâ had been considered âinalienableâ, as they were supposed to be independent from all governments, there was no authority invoked for their establishment or institution willing to guarantee them. Thus, at the moment when individuals became stateless or became refugees and therefore lacked their own government, no authority was there to protect them. Although the League of Nations was set up as an all-embracing body to settle problems regarding minority populations and to prevent war and conflicts, it proved to be an almost total failure. The League failed to act against Japan during the invasion of Manchuria in 1931, against Italy in 1935 during the invasion of Ethiopia, against German intervention in the Spanish Civil War of 1936â1939, their invasion of Austria in 1938, and their occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939 (Hobsbawm, 2013).
Arendt pointed to the failure of the inter-war minority protection regime and to the risks of linking rights to national minorities. According to the author, the paradox of human rights was that it became evident that people rather than individuals were the true image of man. Thus, from the beginning, âthe whole question of human rights, therefore, was quickly and inextricably blended with the question of national emancipation; only the emancipated sovereignty of the people, of oneâs people, seemed to be able to insure themâ (Arendt, 2009).
Years later Arendt, in Eichmann in Jerusalem, recognised the importance of the notion of a âcrime against humanityâ, introduced by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg (Arendt, 1963). she criticised the Jerusalem trial of Eichmann, as he was accused chiefly of crimes against the Jewish people rather than crimes against humanity in general (Arendt, 1963).
The concept of âcrimes against humanityâ included
murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war, or persecutions on political, racial, or religious grounds [âŠ] whether or not in violation of domestic law of the country where perpetrated.
The Nuremberg understanding of the Holocaust was originally universalistic insofar as Nazi concentration camps contained not only Jews but also a variety of people: political prisoners, Polish people, and gypsies. For Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, âUltimately, the Nuremberg trials are remembered for establishing the previously unknown legal notion of crimes against humanity, thus providing a legal precedent that has structured public and legal debate about genocide ever sinceâ (Levy & Sznaider, 2012).
In the aftermath of the Second Word War, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was proclaimed. Many philosophers and intellectuals agree that the inhumanity of this war â the Nazi-led genocide of an estimated six million Jews, the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Soviet casualties estimated at 20 million â raised a worldwide awareness of the importance of human rights. In this sense, the proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 has been considered a fundamental landmark for the internationalisation of those rights. Norberto Bobbio, for instance, considered the Universal Declaration to be a beacon of humanityâs consensus on a system of values (Bobbio, 1992).
According to the historian Elisabeth Borgwardt, the modern meaning of the term âhuman rightsâ dates back to the 1940s. She argues that the term did not emerge during the Second World War, but that at this time it was possible to observe a shift in the use of the phrase âhuman rightsâ. Prior to then, the term appeared as a variation of the ârights of manâ or served as a synonym for the term âcivil rightsâ. However, by the end of the Second World War, âhuman rightsâ was associated with fundamental freedoms â the freedom of speech and religion, for example â that distinguished the Allies from their totalitarian rivals (Borgwardt, 2007). As Borgwardt observes, the Atlantic Charter â the joint communiquĂ© issued by Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt on 14 August 1941 â marks an attempt by the United States to internationalise Rooseveltâs New Deal domestic policies. This wartime statement, designed to shape the coming peace, called for the self-determination of peoples, free trade, welfare state provisions, and âa wider and permanent system of general securityâ (Borgwardt, 2007). The Second World War provided an opportunity for the United States to take a leadership role in framing a world order and multilateral institutions that could secure support for the United States and guarantee international stability. As such, Rooseveltâs New Deal vision of a welfare state, international stability, and economic prosperity were framed in more universal terms as âhuman rightsâ.
These Second World War and post-war proclamations and organisations envisioned the individual as the object of protection by the international community, in which the ordinary citizen, in turn, had responsibilities to that community. Such ideas about the dignity of the individual catalysed groups around the world committed to fighting colonialism, racism, and Nazism, and marked an inaugural moment for what became known as the modern doctrine of human rights.
Through a perspective similar to that of Borgwardt, the historian Samuel Moyn saw the articulation of human rights principles in post-war Europe as an essential hallmark of Western civilisation, in contrast to âtotalitarian regimesâ (Moyn, 2011). He points to the conservative and religious sources of human rights at the time of the elaboration of the Universal Declaration. Initially, the role of human rights was not the commitment to the humanisation of global politics through international law. Moyn agrees that the notion of human rights, in the universalist and internationalist sense, dates back to the 1940s, when the United States and Western Europe took a leading role in formulating the UN and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but he claims that they remained marginal (Moyn, 2010). According to the author, the starting point of international human rights occurred later, in the 1970s. For him, human rights only emerged recently because only then did they become int...
