By IPS Correspondents
NEW YORK, Dec 5 2005 (IPS)

Since former U.S. first lady Eleanor Roosevelt presented the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to the United Nations 57 years ago this Saturday, the world has witnessed – and often ignored – some of the most egregious rights violations in modern history.

The list is lengthy: racial segregation and injustice toward people of colour in the United States, Australia and under the apartheid regime of South Africa. The gulags of Russia. Chemical warfare in Vietnam. Attempted genocide in Rwanda, by Idi Amin in Uganda, Pol Pot’s “killing fields” in Cambodia, Sudan’s campaign against the people of Darfur, and the attempted genocide of Kurds in Iraq.

Ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and militia violence in Timor. Child labour. Gender discrimination. Denial of universal suffrage. Increasingly repressive governments from the Middle East and North Africa to Latin America to Asia restricting rights of press freedom and peaceful assembly.

Failure to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. Gross violations of the Geneva Conventions by the U.S. military and “rendition” of so-called ghost prisoners by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency to countries known to torture prisoners. Widespread religious and economic discrimination.

The U.N. itself has also come under fierce criticism regarding its Commission on Human Rights, whose members have often included countries known to be gross violators of basic rights.

But when Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of the then-U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, presented the draft Declaration to the U.N. membership, she said it “is based upon the spiritual fact that man must have freedom in which to develop his full stature and through common effort to raise the level of human dignity.”

But since its adoption by the U.N. General Assembly on Dec. 10, 1948, an estimated 60 million people have died or been maimed by war and human rights abuses. And the number of victims continues to climb.

Some human rights observers examine this record and conclude that the United Nations is a toothless tiger, incapable – or unwilling – to move from rhetoric to action.

Others see the glass as half full and argue that the historic declaration has made a major contribution toward focusing the world’s attention on the preservation of human rights, despite the failings of so many nations.

Among them is Dr. Omid Safi of Colgate University. He told IPS that the Declaration “has had a major worldwide impact on conversations about human rights. One of the best indications of the impact it has had on Muslims is the involvement of the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Shirin Ebadi, who has worked extensively on harmonising Islam and international human rights discourse.”

Also seeing the half-full glass is Chip Pitts, president of the board of the Bill of Rights Defence Committee (BORDC), immediate past chair of Amnesty International USA, and a professor of international human rights at the Stanford Law School.

“A new global scrutiny exists as a result of modern communications, 24-hour media, and the explosion of non-governmental organisations and global and regional enforcement mechanisms” since 1948, he told IPS.

“The Declaration worked incredibly well to establish and proliferate standards,” Pitts said. “The Declaration also offered an integrated view of civil and political rights, on one hand, and economic, social, and cultural rights, on the other.”

“That integrated view was challenged during the Cold War, when the U.S. supported the former rights and the Soviet Union supported only the latter. Space for a newly integrated view opened up briefly during the 1990s, but has been closed again just when it is most needed – during this new century, when the cracks and fissures from globalisation are newly apparent.”

But Dr. Jack N. Behrman, professor emeritus at the University of North Carolina who served as an official in the John F. Kennedy administration, takes a less optimistic view.

He told IPS, “If human rights include non-discrimination and human dignity, it is not possible to have any measure of whether they are better now than before. Exposure of each is still not at all full, and what we do read and hear in the media does not give encouragement that we have improved. In fact, the U.S. practice of torture displays the opposite.”

IPS asked human rights experts to identify the major problems facing the U.N. and what the body could do to overcome them.

BORDC’s Pitts notes that “The international legal mechanisms remain weak – e.g. the state-to-state complaint mechanisms of the U.N. treaty bodies, and the limited rights of individual petition operating there and in the regional human rights bodies.”

“And these limited mechanisms have been weakened by powerful nations lately, especially the United States,” he added.

“For the United States to actively encourage so many nations to undermine fundamental human rights by adopting principles like those at the heart of its own ‘Patriot Act’ – e.g. by condoning arbitrary and secret detention, disappearances, discrimination, reversal of the presumption of innocence and the right to fair trials, of the right to confront your accusers and the evidence against you, of the right to be free from cruel and inhuman treatment – is a tragic setback to global peace, prosperity, and true security.”

Safi thinks “more work can and should be done” in “working with religious reformers who want to find a religious voice for engaging universal human rights discourse… and considering issues such as poverty as central to help translate human rights discourse into a meaningful reality for the lives of the one billion human beings who live on a dollar a day, and for whom human rights discourse sounds like an elitist concern without a meaningful impact on their lives.”

But, according to Behrman: “The U.N. cannot possibly do enough, for it is composed of countries that do not ‘buy into’ the Declaration even if they have signed it. The basic obstacle to doing more is the attitude of individuals, ethnic groups, communities, and nations that supports separation instead of a willingness to embrace humanity.”

Professor Abdullahi An-Na’im of the Emory School of Law in Atlanta voices a similar view. He told IPS, “Upholding and protecting human rights is the responsibility of every government, state, and their citizens, and not of the U.N. as an abstract entity. The U.N. is what its member states make of it, or fail to make of it.”

“Human rights are always violated or protected on the ground, in real time and space, which is always within the jurisdiction of a state, not the U.N. as such,” he continued. “A violation can only happen when some human being does or fails to do something to another human being.”

“That can only be done by the citizens of one state or another, and also within the territory of a state. The protection of human rights will not improve until we all accept our responsibility for this, and stop blaming the U.N. for our failures.”

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