1 - The Outsiders – Western Governments, the UN and NGOs

Summary

Whereas the outlook of the OAU polity was unfailingly hostile towards a concept of human rights based on the UDHR, by the mid-1970s public opinion in the developed world had become equally and oppositely convinced of the moral imperative of human rights. Such was the ardour that Moyn would characterise this period as one in which ‘the moral world of Westerners shifted’ and Henkin would refer to ‘The Age of Rights’. The supreme validation would come with the award in 1977 of the Nobel Peace Prize to Amnesty International (AI). One measure of this ‘shift’ was the dramatic increase in the number of NGOs so that, by the end of the 1970s, it was estimated that in the United States and United Kingdom alone there were more than 200 human rights NGOs, fifty of which maintained a lobbying presence in Washington. Moreover, alongside this rise in the number of NGOs there was also an explosion in membership. The US section of AI, for example, saw its membership surge over the period 1970 to 1976 from around 3,000–6,000 to 35,000–50,000 members. As for the UN, as of 1979, the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) had granted consultative status to more than 700 NGOs.

As only a few NGOs had the capability to intercede directly with the governments they sought to accuse, the main recourse for NGOs was to apply such political pressure on Western governments as would compel them to accommodate a higher priority for human rights in their foreign policies than they had hitherto been minded to do. To that end, NGOs began to form coordinated lobby groups to direct that pressure: In the US, the Coalition for a New Foreign and Military Policy, which set up the Human Rights Working Group as its first task force, and in the UK, the Human Rights Network. Responding to these pressures, governments in the UK (the Labour Party) and US (President Carter) were elected in 1974 and 1976 on a manifesto pledge committing them to a human-rights-based foreign policy. Even France, now with few remaining colonial territories, ratified the 1950 European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (ECHR) in 1974.