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The Fate of Human Rights in the Third World

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Rupert Emerson
Rupert Emerson
Affiliation:
Harvard University
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Abstract

The new Asian and African states have laid much stress on human rights, but have often not lived up to them. The basic right of self-determination has been limited to colonies only. Democratic institutions have generally given way to authoritarian regimes, often run by the military, with popular participation denied rather than encouraged. The right to life, liberty, and security of person has been grossly violated in the cases of millions of refugees, temporary and permanent, in Africa and the Asian subcontinent. Many hundreds of thousands have been killed in domestic conflicts, as in Indonesia, Nigeria, and Burundi. One of the results is the emergence of a double standard: an all-out African and Asian attack upon the denial of human rights involved in colonialism and racial discrimination, but a refusal to face up to massive violations of human rights in the Third World itself.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 27 , Issue 2 , January 1975 , pp. 201 - 226
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1975

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References

1 Barbados, Iraq, Kenya, Lebanon, Libya, Madagascar, Syria, and Tunisia were the Third-World ratifiers as of that date. Thirty-five ratifications are required to bring each of the Covenants into effect, but only twenty-three had been received. The United States had neither signed nor ratified. The Soviet Union and four members of the Soviet bloc, plus Yugoslavia, were among the most recent ratifiers. See E/CN.4/ 907/Rev. 10 (December 13, 1973).

2 Mazrui, Ali A., “The United Nations and Some African Political Attitudes” in Gregg, Robert W. and Barkun, Michael, eds., The United Nations System and Its Functions (Princeton, N.J. (1968), 47Google Scholar.

3 See General Assembly Resolution 2105 (XX) of 1965 and its successor resolutions in other years.

4 Ayouty, Yassin El, “Africa's ‘Burning Issues’ and United Nations Action,” Issue (African Studies Association, Waltham, Mass.), III, No. 3 (1972), 46Google Scholar. In a companion article in the succeeding number of Issue, he pointed out that Afro-Asian states were generally unwilling to accept a condemnation of terrorism where it was invoked as a weapon in national liberation struggles (p. 43).

5 David H. Bayley has rightly pointed out that completeness in empirical researching into human rights in the new states cannot be expected because of the number of these states and their unwillingness to confess to restrictions of human rights. “A survey of the fortunes of liberty in all of these nations would be a task for many men and would require the expenditure of years of effort.” Public Liberties in the New States (Chicago (1964), 5Google Scholar.

6 See Emerson, Rupert, From Empire to Nation (Cambridge, Mass, (1960)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Part Four; Emerson, , Self-Determination Revisited in the Era of Decolonization, Occasional Paper No. 9, Harvard University Center for International Affairs (December 1964)Google Scholar; and “Self-Determination,” American Journal of International Law, LXV (July 1971)Google Scholar. See also Sureda, A. Rigo, The Evolution of the Right of Self-Determination (Leiden (1973)Google Scholar.

7 Article 27 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights does pro- vide that persons belonging to ethnic, religious, or linguistic minorities “shall not be denied the right, in community with the other members of their group, to enjoy their own culture, to profess and practice their own religion, or to use their own language,” but very little use has been made of this provision.

8 Kahin, George McT., The Asian-African Conference (Ithaca, N.Y. (1956), 80–81Google Scholar.

9 “There are no new states in Asia or Africa, whether monarchies or republics, in which the elites who demanded independence did not, at the moment just prior to their success, believe that self-government and democratic government were identical … something like liberal democracy was generally thought to be prerequisite for the new order of things.” Shils, Edward, “The Fortunes of Constitutional Government,” in Hallowell, John H., ed., Development: For What? (Durham, N.C. (1964), 103,113.Google Scholar

10 Edward Feit has put forward the provocative suggestion that the most successful form of government in sub-Saharan Africa was the colonial administrative regime. He contends that much of the military upheaval in Africa can be construed as an effort to recover this administrative system without the colonial power. “Pen, Sword, and People,” World Politics, XXV (January 1973), 272–73Google Scholar.

11 For a discussion of preventive detention and related methods of dealing with the disfavored, see David H. Bayley (fn. 5), chap. II. Bayley also deals with freedom of the press, of association, and from discrimination.

12 See Zolberg, Aristide R., Creating Political Order: The Party-States of West Africa (Chicago (1966), 30Google Scholar. In 1953 the UN General Assembly, laying out the factors involved in full self-government, looked to the existence of more than one political party as a criterion. Res. 742 (VIII).

13 Tanzania inaugurated a significant experiment in 1965, when President Nyerere and the ruling Tanganyika African National Union allowed two TANU candidates to stand for each seat, with all phases of the election strictly controlled by the party.

14 Cited by Melady, T. P., “Non-Alignment in Africa,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 362 (November 1965), 61Google Scholar. A note might be added in passing: “In Kenya, the only opposition party has been proscribed and its leaders detained as the country prepares for a somewhat overdue election.” The Review (International Commission of Jurists), No. 4 (December 1969), 3.Google Scholar

15 See Emerson, Rupert, “The Prospects for Democracy in Africa” in Lofchie, Michael F., ed., The State of the Nations: Constraints on Development in Africa (Berkeley (1971), 245Google Scholar. This essay, which is as relevant to Asia as to Africa, deals with my doubts that democracy is likely to be the wave of the future in the Third-World countries.

16 Mazrui, Ali A., “Consent, Colonialism, and Sovereignty,” Political Studies, x (February 1963), 40–41Google Scholar.

17 Hinden, Rita, “Africa Without Tears,” Encounter, xxvi (May 1966), 56Google Scholar.

18 See Matthews, Robert O., “Refugees and Stability in Africa,” International Organization, xxvi (Winter 1972), 63.Google Scholar

19 India News (Washington, D.C.: Embassy of India, April 22, (1972)Google Scholar. It is dismaying to find in the New York Times of June 11, 1973, a headline: “Rising Bangladesh Unrest Marked by 2,000 Killings.”

20 See the Report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (U N document E/5306, June 14, 1973), 13Google Scholar. For later figures, see the 1974 annual Report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (preliminary mimeographed edition of May 15, 1974-E/5484), and UNHCR, the “house organ” published in Switzerland, Supplement to No. 6 (December 1973)Google Scholar. For much valuable additional material, including key documents, see Brooks, Hugh C. and Ayouty, Yassin El, eds., Refugees South of the Sahara (Westport, Conn. (1970)Google Scholar.

21 John Hatch, “Historical Background of the Refugee Problem,” ibid., 16.

22 Personal letter from Young, Crawford, dated Lubumbashi, October 27, 1973Google Scholar.

23 Michael Bowen, Gary Freeman, Kay Miller, Passing By: The United States and Genocide in Burundi (New York, n.d.), 1.

24 Ibid., 5–6.

25 UNHCR, No. 4 (July 1973).

26 See Holborn, Louise W., “The Repatriation and Resettlement of the Southern Sudanese,” Issue, II (Winter 1972), 23–26Google Scholar.

27 New York Times, May 27, 1973Google Scholar. I have also consulted a copy of the full text of the letter.

28 See von der Mehden, Fred R., Comparative Political Violence (Englewood Cliffs, N.J. 1973). 57Google Scholar.

29 See “The Expulsion of West African Aliens,” Journal of Modern African Studies, IX, No. 2 (1971), 205–30Google Scholar.

30 In a Western-oriented “Comparative Study of Freedom” in Freedom at Issue (Freedom House, New York, January-February (1974), 151Google Scholar countries are rated in terms of their political and civil rights and the status of freedom. Of the Asian and African countries dealt with in the present article, only nine are rated as Free, including Israel and Mauritius; only two, Gambia and Botswana, are in Africa. A rating of Partly Free is given to 26, some of which must have crossed the line from Not Free by the slimmest of margins.

31 Sékou Touré, The International Policy of the Democratic Party of Guinea (Re-public of Guinea, n.d. ), VII, 121.

32 See, for example, General Assembly Resolution 2131 (XX), 1965.

33 “The Nigeria-Biafra Crisis,” mimeo (no date or place given; September 1969?).

34 New York Times, July 18, 1973.

35 See fn. 27. For another condemnation of the double standard, see Patel, Hasu H., “General Amin and the Indian Exodus from Uganda,” Issue, 11 (Winter 1972), 21Google Scholar.

36 UN Monthly Chronicle, VIII (October 1971), 124. Writing of “Uganda's Reign of Terror,” Hal Sheets, a Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, concludes that “Nearly thirty years after the founding of the United Nations, there is still no mechanism to protect citizens from the arbitrary madness of governments. Mass murder in Uganda and elsewhere remains, for the United Nations and the United States Government, a distant grief at best.” “The Week in Review,” New York Times, August 4, 1974. The enlargement in recent years of the jurisdiction and powers of the UN Commission on Human Rights and the Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities holds out new hope, but an effective system of intervention on behalf of human rights seems still a remote goal.Google Scholar