2 - Inventing Socialist Human Rights, 1953–1966

Summary

By the 1950s, the SED had to compete with an independent West Germany for international recognition, while also contending with the global politics of human rights emerging out of the Third World. On the one hand, the SED created the Committee for the Protection of Human Rights to campaign against abuses in West Germany, including the imprisonment of Communist Party members who had been deemed a threat to the constitutional order. On the other hand, legal scholar Hermann Klenner developed a philosophy of “socialist human rights” in response to the Third World’s struggle to place self-determination at the centre of the UN agenda. Klenner integrated the idea of self-determination into a Marxist interpretation of rights, claiming that state socialism, human rights and the realisation of state sovereignty in opposition to the imperialist West were, in fact, a singular unified political goal. By the mid-1960s, the Committee for the Protection of Human Rights – using Klenner's new ideological formulations – shifted its focus from West German prisoners to international human rights campaigning.