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Human Rights in the 1980s: Revolutionary Growth or Unanticipated Erosion?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

R. C. Johansen
R. C. Johansen
Affiliation:
the Institute for World Order
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Abstract

All people are entitled to share human rights equally. Claims to respect rights may —indeed often must—be made against “foreign” governments and peoples as well as one's own. As interdependence deepens, more human rights problems require global solutions; yet sovereignty inhibits cooperation. Thus the present international system impedes advancement of human rights. Even within countries, tensions are growing between human rights and national sovereignty because governments can no longer fulfill traditional functions. To prevent a decline in human rights caused by the rising incongruity between the few who make decisions nationally and the many who are affected by them globally, individuals, private organizations, and intergovernmental institutions must play an expanded role in shaping foreign policy making within a new framework of human rights.

Type
Review Articles
Information
World Politics , Volume 35 , Issue 2 , January 1983 , pp. 286 - 314
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1983

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References

1 Morgenthau, quoted in Thompson, Kenneth W., “Tensions Between Human Rights and National Sovereign Rights,” in Center for Study of the American Experience, Rights and Responsibilities: International, Social, and Individual Dimensions (Los Angeles: University of Southern California Press, 1980), 131.Google Scholar

2 Derian, , “Human Rights and International Law,” Department of State Bulletin, Vol. 81 (January 1981), 21–23, at 23.Google Scholar

3 For example, Ernest Lefever, the Reagan Administration's original nominee for the post previously held by Derian, stated: “The U.S. Government has no responsibility—and certainly no authority—to promote human rights in other sovereign states.” New York Times, May 21, 1981.

4 Approximately 65 states have agreed, through ratification of one or both of these basic covenants, to make them legally binding.

5 Articles 55 and 56 of the United Nations Charter.

6 Preamble, Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The text is in Henkin, 140.

7 Joyce, James Avery elaborates this point in The New Politics of Human Rights (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1978), 45–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 Of course, not everyone would agree. Hedley Bull, for one, denies that a human rights consensus exists: “The Universality of Human Rights,” Journal of International Studies (London), VIII (Autumn 1979), 155–59. He limits his concept of human rights to a traditional understanding of freedoms, such as of speech and the press. The claim of McDougal, Lasswell, and Chen is based on a much more comprehensive concept embedded in values of human dignity; here, wide consensus does exist, at least on the avoidance of unnecessary suffering, with individuals as the direct recipients of the respect derived from the values. It is, of course, possible to believe that most civil liberties are of Western derivation, and still to hold that other human rights (such as prohibition of torture) are universal. Peter L. Berger takes this view in “Are Human Rights Universal?” Commentary, Vol. 64 (September 1977), 60–63. For an excellent discussion that transcends Western concepts of human rights, see Ajami, Fouad, “Human Rights and World Order Politics,” Alternatives: A Journal of World Policy, in (March 1978), 351–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Another penetrating analysis, which places most recent interpretations of human rights in a single framework, is Falk, Richard, “Comparative Protection of Human Rights in Capitalist and Socialist Third World Countries,” Universal Human Rights, 1 (April-June 1979), 3–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 A perceptive but little noticed study of the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs concludes that the new international norms and treaties for human rights “make deep inroads into the internal political and social structure of States…. Here we are perceiving the contours of an emerging new legal order. That the realization of human rights has now become a legitimate subject of international concern, represents an attainment that cannot be undone.” Human Rights and Foreign Policy, Memorandum presented to the Lower House of the States General by the Minister for Foreign Affairs and the Minister for Development Cooperation (The Hague: Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 1979), 143.

10 New York Times, March 18, 1977. See also J. Bryan Hehir in Brown and MacLean, 121; Henkin, 137.

11 No one has yet comprehensively operationalized rights and the application of indicators, but Jorge I. Dominguez takes important steps in “Assessing Human Rights Conditions,” in Dominguez, Jorge I., Rodley, Nigel S., Wood, Bryce, and Falk, Richard, Enhancing Global Human Rights (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979), 21–116.Google Scholar He bases his analysis upon the eightfold value framework of Lass well, Harold D. and Kaplan, Abraham in Power and Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950).Google Scholar

12 Thompson (fn. 1), 117.

13 Meyer, Peter, “The International Bill: A Brief History,” in Williams, Paul, ed., The International Bill of Human Rights (Glen Ellen, Calif.: Entwhistle Books, 1981), xxv.Google Scholar

14 Kenneth Thompson notes that “the tension between human rights and national sovereign rights appears at one level to be the classic tension existent in all politics between general and particular or universal and national goals” (fn. I), 113.

15 Carr, , The Twenty Years' Crisis (London: Macmillan, 1939).Google Scholar

16 Rawls, , A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971).Google Scholar

17 This frame of reference was developed in Harold Lasswell and Abraham Kaplan (fn. 11).

18 See Kohler, Gernot, “Global Apartheid,” Alternatives: A Journal of World Policy, IV (October 1978), 263–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19 Meyer (fn. 13), xliv; interview, January 21, 1981.

20 Section 502 B of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, quoted in Brown and MacLean, xi.

21 Although this right is mentioned in the Declaration of Independence, people have been slow to recognize its implications two hundred years later for the conduct of modern war and for weapons of mass destruction. Fouad Ajami (fn. 8), has sought to correct this oversight by emphasizing “the right to survive.” See also Marek Thee, “Militarism and Human Rights: Their Interrelationship,” mimeo (Oslo: International Peace Research Institute, 1981), publication S-19/81, 12–18.

22 For examples of the impact of U.S. economic decisions on other countries, see New York Times, June 15, 1981, and October 26, 1981. Of course, the United States may not want to grant other societies any influence over U.S. economic decisions, even to the extent to which they might reasonably be entitled because of the extraterritorial effects of the latter. Presumably, the point of granting such influence would be to attain in return the influence to which the U.S. population is entitled over the economic decisions of other societies. Almost any fair scheme for managing today's economic interpenetration wrenches conventional thinking about state autonomy and the purpose of diplomacy. Yet a representative, global political process that can calculate the appropriate influence over decisions made by various actors is the minimum required of those who respect human rights.

23 The failure to establish a just international order despite growing interdependence is, of course, one reason some states seek to withdraw from the world system as much as possible. For a discussion of how economic interdependence may lead to a worse plight for the poor than would policies aimed at self-reliance, see Chichilnisky, Gracida and Cole, H.S.D., “Human Rights and Basic Needs in a North-South Context,” in Newberg, Paula R., ed., The Politics of Human Rights (New York: New York University Press, 1980), 113–42.Google Scholar

24 The human interest incorporates all basic human rights. An elaboration of this concept is in Johansen, Robert C., The National Interest and the Human Interest: An Analysis of U.S. Foreign Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 20–27, 364–408.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

25 In his (now widely used) threefold definition of human rights, former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance included no reference to the elimination of genocide or the abolition of war. Yet it is difficult to understand how freedom of the press, for example, can be more important than freedom from a nuclear attack. See Vance, , “Human Rights and Foreign Policy,” Department of State Bulletin, Vol. 76 (May 23, 1977), 505.Google Scholar

26 Thee (fn. 21), 14; see also The Lawyers Committee for International Human Rights, “Conscientious Objection to Military Service as a Human Right,” background paper for the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, mimeo (Spring 1980), 1–22.

27 McDougal, Lasswell, and Chen probably would object to such a sharp distinction between rights and interests, since all decisions involve human rights considerations, regardless of the extent to which interests are at stake. Nonetheless, Brown's principle might still apply if one distinguished among basic rights. For example, the disrespect for life that occurs in torture presumably exceeds any deprivation of rights that would accompany inequity in sharing wealth once basic needs have been met.

28 Falk, Richard makes a serious effort in this direction in Human Rights and State Sovereignty (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1981), esp. 1–62.Google Scholar

29 A typical example is Joyce (fn. 7).

30 On fluctuations in international morality, see Thompson (fn. I), 113–57.

31 This point is made by George W. Shepherd in his excellent review article, “Human Rights and World Public Order,” Journal of 'International Law and Policy, x (Fall 1980), 179–83

32 Derian (fn. 2), 23.

33 For a discussion, see especially the following articles in Nanda: George W. Shepherd, “Transnational Development of Human Rights: The Third World Crucible”; Robert A. Friedlander, “Human Rights Theory and NGO Practice: Where Do We Go From Here?”; Laurie S. Wiseberg and Harry M. Scoble, “Recent Trends in the Expanding Universe of NGOs Dedicated to the Protection of Human Rights”; Art Blaser, “Assessing Human Rights: The NGO Contribution” and Ralston Deffenbaugh, “The Southern Africa Project for the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.”

34 Article 28 of the Universal Declaration specifies that “everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms [of the Declaration] … can be fully realized” (fn. 6), 145.