International Human Rights, Decolonisation and Globalisation

Becoming Human

Shelley Wright

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780415862912
• eBook ISBN: 9781134511945
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Covering a diverse range of topics, case studies and theories, the author undertakes a critique of the principal assumptions on which the existing international human rights regime has been constructed. She argues that the decolonization of human rights, and the creation of a global community that is conducive to the well-being of all humans, will require a radical restructuring of our ways of thinking, researching and writing. In contributing to this restructuring she brings together feminist and indigenous approaches as well as postmodern and post-colonial scholarship, engaging directly with some of the prevailing orthodoxies, such as 'universality', 'the individual', 'self-determination', 'cultural relativism', 'globalization' and 'civil society'.

1 A civil religion

There will be peace on earth when everyone's human rights are respected.

(John Humphrey)

As the new century begins international human rights have become a central focus of international relations, law and politics. Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948 declares that ‘all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights’ and that we should all ‘act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood’. But what do these words mean? Who are human rights for? What standards whether individual or collective can be accepted as universally applicable to everyone? What does a ‘spirit of brotherhood’ imply? In other words, what constitutes the ‘humanness’ of human rights?

[W]e have come to understand that what we took to be humanly inclusive problematics, concepts, theories, objective methodologies, and transcendental truths are in fact far less than that. Instead, these products of thought bear the mark of their collective and individual creators, and the creators in turn have been distinctively marked as to gender, class, race, and culture. …Western culture's favored beliefs mirror in sometimes clear and sometimes distorting ways, not the world as it is or as we might want it to be, but the social projects of their historically identifiable creators.

(Harding 1986: 15)

One of Western culture's most favoured beliefs is in the existence of inherent and universal human rights. Yet, after more than fifty years of effort by the United Nations and other bodies the world is still far from the full adoption and implementation of universally recognised human rights for all. The Universal Declaration was meant to be a lasting statement of basic human rights. Nevertheless, when it came to implementing these standards into a binding convention two main covenants had to be drafted (the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966) or ‘ICCPR’ and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966) or ‘ICESCR’). Many subsequent treaties on human rights indicate that turning universally acceptable standards into enforceable norms is very difficult.

This fragmentation and contention over what human rights might mean is particularly curious with regards to the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women 1979. Women constitute more than 50 per cent of the world's population. If the Universal Declaration, covenants and other conventions are inadequate in dealing with women's rights then whose human rights are they? As Hilary Charlesworth has noted, there has been a rather embarrassed silence within the halls of international diplomacy and law-making concerning women's rights (Charlesworth 1998). The fiftieth anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration by the United Nations General Assembly occurred on 10 December 1998. Leading up to the anniversary there was considerable discussion about altering this most basic document better to represent differing cultural perspectives on human rights. Asian countries were particularly insistent while most so-called ‘Western’ nations responded with horror. But regional documents on human rights indicate the existence of significant differences over what human rights are and what they might mean.

The African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights contains civil and political rights similar to those in the European Convention on Human Rights (1950) and the ICCPR. It also contains economic, social and cultural rights as in the European Social Charter, the ICESCR and other conventions. In addition, however, Articles 19 to 24 contain a list of peoples’ rights. These include the right to self-determination, the right to dispose freely of a peoples’ wealth and natural resources, the right to development, the right to peace and the right to a satisfactory environment. This is the only major human rights treaty that explicitly recognises peoples’ rights (other than Common Article 1 of the ICCPR and the ICESCR recognising the right of self-determination), but the reiteration of the other rights is similar to most other regional and global conventions. Although political and civil rights are generally treated separately from economic, social and cultural rights, as in the two main covenants, the African Charter is not alone in grouping them together. But because of the emphasis on group rights peculiar to this Convention the individual human rights that are enumerated cannot in fact be seen in the same light as in, for example, the ICCPR or the European Convention. Individuality, so central to human rights in Western Europe and North America, has a much less central role in the rights of Africans – or at least as they are expressed in the African Charter. In addition this convention sets out a list of duties in Chapter II for each individual covered by the Charter. These include duties towards ‘the family and society, the State and other legally recognised communities, and the international community’. The rights and freedoms contained in the African Charter must be exercised ‘with due regard to the rights of others, collective security, morality and common interest’ (Art. 27). This hybrid formulation illustrates how difficult it is to identify human rights as universally binding in the light of culturally specific or regional needs, whether as an inheritance of a colonial past, or as part of the desire to create a post-colonial present and future.

A major gap in many analyses of human rights is the lack of any deep or complex awareness of the historical context in which they developed. International human rights are intimately connected to a range of issues. The expansion of Europe, including the economic, political, scientific and technological values that have accompanied it, is a crucial factor, although perhaps in ways less obvious than is usually accepted within international human rights discourse. Religious and ethnic struggles are an important issue. Less generally recognised, however, are the changing nature of the patriarchal family in Europe and elsewhere, the development of printing, the chronology of empire through mainstream history, the connection between citizenship and militarism, and the establishment of human rights within Euro-American literate cultures. Where histories of these structures have been referred to they tend to be dominated by one history – the rise of Europe – whose dominance is taken as axiomatic (Landes 1999).

In one sense a focus on the history of European institutions and traditions is an accurate portrayal of the development of such supposedly ‘Western’ traditions as international law and international human rights. But the dominance of the West is not a matter of economic, technological, scientific, political or legal superiority. The ‘lever of riches’ (Mokyr 1990) in the West was the colonial conquest of most of the rest of the world. Despite considerable academic debate over the relative costs and benefits of colonisation and imperialism in Europe it is no coincidence that ‘the rise of Europe’ accompanied its expansion outside the boundaries of western Eurasia (Blaut 1993: 186–206). This expansion involved the dispossession and appropriation of most of the rest of the world. Whatever the particular expenses and burdens this may have imposed on specific European states the overall impact for colonial Europe was access to and acquisition of the world's resources. This resulted in the transformation of European states into centres of world capital, political development and control over legal discourse, including discourses of international law and human rights. This monopoly on the language of power was extended to European colonial settlements established by the English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Russians, Dutch, Danish, Belgians, Italians, Germans and the United States. Even today only Japan really qualifies as an exception to this centralisation of power. Its economic preeminence is both dependent on the European models it adopted with enthusiasm from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, and inherently fragile because of this dependence. International law and human rights are closely connected to this wider colonial history. Part of this connection is reflected in the disturbing lack within human rights discourse of the histories of those people who have been silenced within and because of the Western ‘meta-narrative’, i.e. women, children, the poor, the colonised, the indigenous, the ‘disappeared’. These are the ‘people without history’ in Eric Wolf's evocative phrase (Wolf 1982). These are the people who, when they are brought within the reach of Western rationalist narratives, are treated as objects, static, unchanging, their ‘development’ dependent on biology or nature or tradition and, above all, the guiding hand of white European man.

Although I believe it is necessary to place human rights within the very complex context of European colonial history it is not my intention to demean or destroy the deeply transformative effect human rights or a belief in their efficacy can have. Shirley Scott has posited that international law can be seen as ideology (Scott 1994). Human Rights may also be seen as an aspect of the ideology of international law – as ideas that have power and can enable action. But these ideas are also subject to processes of reexamination and reimagination. They are not immutable. The following chapters are meant as an exploration, a kind of archaeological dig through the past and present of human rights within international law. In particular I would like to examine the ‘humanness’ of rights and how the characterisation of this humanity from a Euro-American perspective affects who gets to be fully human and who doesn't quite make it. My intention is to take a critical perspective. As Charlesworth has said on another occasion:

While there have been lively debates about the relationship between the generations of rights and the best methods of implementing human rights law, there has been a general reluctance to question the basis or value of the international human rights system itself. Analyses of the foundations and scope of international human rights law frequently lapse into heroic or mystical language; it is almost as if this branch of international law were both too valuable and too fragile to sustain critique.

(Charlesworth 1994: 59)

This book is an attempt at bringing together different perspectives and different voices in order to see how they can contribute to a critical analysis of international human rights. I draw freely on feminist and indigenous approaches as well as some postmodern and post-colonial scholarship. I have made no attempt to survey the literature from any of these sources. A direct engagement with some of the prevailing orthodoxies of human rights such as ‘universality’, ‘the individual’, ‘self-determination’, ‘cultural relativism’ and ‘civil society’ is explored. Decolonising human rights, and creating a global community that is conducive to the well-being of all humans and the earth that we share, requires a radical restructuring of our ways of thinking, researching and writing. Linda Tuhiwai Smith describes these processes as ‘indigenizing’ research (Smith 1999: 146–147), or they might be described as ‘feminising’ traditional discourses. The point is not to replace one perspective with another but to decentre our focus of attention in the hope that human rights can be expanded and strengthened. It is an uncomfortable but necessary project (see Anaya 1996; Anghie 1999; Barsh 1994; Battiste and Henderson 2000; Cass 1996; Charlesworth and Chinkin 2000; Knop 1993; Orford 1997; Otto 1996a, 1999; Spivak 1995; Stark 2000).

A critical evaluation of the history of international human rights can be very difficult to sustain. A visit to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, provides a vivid example. The depiction of loss represented within the Museum is sometimes overwhelming in its intensity – the names of European villages emptied of their Jewish populations engraved on the glass walls of the walkways from one exhibit to the next; the tower of photographs from the stetl in Lithuania out of which no survivors came; Eisenhower's determination to visit the camps so that he could be a witness ensuring that no one could deny this, no one could forget; the Temple of Memory on the ground floor with its candles, the flame of remembrance, the names of the death camps around the six sides of its warm orange walls, the quiet dome, the cool silence. The display of Nazi photographs of Aryans and non-Aryans – human and sub-human – is particularly chilling and very familiar. Similar photographs were common within anthropological and ethnographic studies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the same representations can be seen in books and documentary films on Australian Aboriginal people, the indigenous peoples of the Pacific, American Indians, Africans and non-European populations more generally. Individuals from these groups were measured and photographed and their lives dissected in the name of science and the acquisition of knowledge. On the walls of the Museum the faces of the less human are exhibited and compared with the Nazi ideal like mug-shots or a police line-up with no apparent awareness of their resemblance to anthropological representations common in Western academic and popular documents of the time (Francis 1996; Gibbs Smith, Publisher 1999).

The genocide that the twentieth century gave us is most appalling when we realise how familiar it is, how common it has become. The word itself is quite recent, invented by Raphael Lemkin during the worst years of the Second World War (Chalk and Jonassohn 1990: 3–10). His new word and ideas about what it meant first gained currency as the Holocaust ended and an attempt at understanding was first attempted. He and a small group of like-minded scholars and activists were largely responsible for the drafting and passage of the Genocide Convention through the United Nations General Assembly on 9 December 1948, just one day prior to the General Assembly's adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The definition contained in Article 2 of the Convention, for all its flaws, is now generally accepted as the legal definition of genocide in international law (ICTR, Art. 2; ICTY, Art. 4; Rome Statute, Art. 6; UN Rwanda Inquiry 1999).

But the resonance of the images of dehumanisation that occurred during the Holocaust is also a construction, a careful representation of the past designed to recall and move (see Bauer 2001; Junker 2001). Such representations are both necessary and dangerous – necessary because we forget our past at our peril, dangerous because this history is itself a form of forgetting, a burial. Gypsies, gays and lesbians and the physically and mentally disabled were also targeted for elimination by the Nazi regime. Yet they receive little attention in the Washington Holocaust Museum. One small set of displays tucked into a corner acknowledges their loss. History is never ‘just history’. The twentieth century may have given us the word but the practice and policy of genocide is much older. Nor did it end in 1945. We seem to have ended the old century much as we began it: debating humanitarian principles and the nature of international law while preparing for war; using humane impulses and the rhetoric of concern as well as the fervour of nationalism to justify the use of force. To this list we have added denial of our own complicity with violence and exploitation while proclaiming our belief in universal rights for all human beings. We continue to struggle with ideas about the rule of international law while breaching such rules because of the apparent impossibility of resolving our differences in any other way.

Three events in 1999 seemed to encapsulate the difficulties of reconciling history, human rights, violence and the desire to move away from the tragic consequences of the past. On 24 March 1999 NATO began its aerial bombing of Yugoslavia in response to the political stand-off over Kosovo. On that same day the House of Lords announced its second attempt to resolve the problem of General Pinochet's extradition from the United Kingdom to Spain on criminal charges of torture, kidnapping and murder during his term as head of state in Chile (Ex Parte Pinochet 1999). As the world's attention was focused on the Balkans and the legal difficulties of a former South American dictator another unfolding chain of events, the process of self-determination in the former Portuguese colony of East Timor, was struggling with the meaning of autonomy and human rights.

Despite months of harassment and violence nearly 80 per cent of East Timorese people voted for independence on 30 August of that same year. Without the harassment and terror the vote may well have been higher. Close to 100 per cent of all voters lined up to cast their ballot on that day. In some polling stations half the registered voters were waiting as the blue UN ballot boxes arrived early on that morning. Reports of UN monitors, journalists, Catholic Church workers and volunteers with non-governmental organisations tallied with the images that appeared on television screens around the world. Women wore their Sunday best and whole families, including small children, came. The elderly, the young, women and men stood in line with their registration papers and identification in hand waiting to cast their vote of condemnation of Indonesia's rule and their hopes for the future. One old man was quoted afterwards: ‘Now I have voted, now I can die.’ Over and over again the people said they knew they would suffer for this but they had voted for their children. The militia and Indonesian army personnel hovered just out of sight of the cameras. Remembering that close to a quarter of a million East Timorese, around a third of the population, had been killed or had died of starvation and mistreatment during twenty-four years of Indonesian rule made the affirmation of democratic rights all the more poignant and dramatic. The day of ‘Popular Consultation’ was peaceful, but the preceding weeks and months of violence were a mild foretaste of the havoc, murder, terror and intimidation to be inflicted by the pro-Indonesian militias (armed and directed by the Indonesian military) within hours of the announcement of the final tally. It soon became apparent that another Kosovo-type intervention by ‘like-minded countries’, in the words of the New Zealand Minister of Foreign Affairs, or a ‘coalition of the willing’ in the words of the Foreign Minister of Australia, would be necessary to curtail the violence. Two weeks later, after an appalling level of killing, rape and forced removals, the UN finally intervened.

Human rights are often assumed to include only a narrow range of civil and political rights applicable in a relatively confined type of situation. But they have become much more than this. Human rights are an eclectic mixture of civil, political, economic, social, cultural and collective rights engaging us all in an ongoing debate over priorities, relevance and implementation and, at a deeper level, on the meaning of civil society and a humane world. As we enter a new century of economic globalisation these are the issues that will need to be addressed.

We can all agree that torture is a serious infringement of human rights, and many of us support Amnesty International in its efforts at eradicating this practice. The decision of the House of Lords in upholding at least part of the case against General Pinochet, refusing to allow him to hide behind the shield of state sovereignty, was surely right (Ex Parte Pinochet 1999). But what about children sold into sexual slavery, handcuffed to beds or kept in cages and brought out for the benefit of tourists and businessmen who want anonymous sex without the fear of HIV/AIDS? Is this torture? Is the abuse of women, children and even men in the home, or harassment in the workplace, a breach of international human rights? Are the violent dispossession and removal of indigenous peoples and peasants from their land in the name of economic development or national cohesion contrary to international law? If the Albanian Kosovars of Yugoslavia or the East Timorese have a right to be free of violence, ‘ethnic cleansing’ and abuse, then do not these rights also apply to Aceh and West Papua, Tibet, the Karen peoples of Burma, the Kurds, the Palestinians, the Chechens? Are human rights and decolonisation only applicable to the exotic and the strange? Do the Basque people of Spain and France, the Québecois, the Polynesians of Hawaii, the Spanish-speaking population of Puerto Rico also have rights to self-determination?

Human rights are not only about these more obvious forms of violence. Is hunger an abuse of the human right to an adequate standard of living and if so how can this be implemented? What about the high death rates of children from malnutrition, disease and neglect in many parts of the world? The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child has been ratified by every nation on earth with the exceptions of the United States and Somalia. And yet children suffer and die in the thousands every minute of every day. The holocaust of HIV/AIDS is destroying whole generations of the young and strong in much of Su...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• International Human Rights, Decolonisation and Globalisation
• Routledge Studies in International Law
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 A civil religion
• 2 White man’s rights
• 3 Witches, slaves and savages
• 4 Subjects, soldiers and citizens
• 5 Peoples of the book
• 6 Speaking truth to power
• 7 Emerging images
• 8 The death of the hero
• 9 Ghosts in the machine
• 10 Becoming human
• Bibliography
• Index