Emma Stone Mackinnon explores the different ways in which the leaders of the Algerian Revolution, Ferhat Abbas, Mohammed Bedjaoui and Frantz Fanon, deployed history, and in particular the French Revolution of 1789, to support the idea of rightful rebellion against French colonial rule. Critically reviewing Reinhart Koselleck’s identification of the French with the ‘modern’ concept of revolution, Mackinnon shows how the Algerians sought variously to present their revolution as the fulfilment and supersession of the legacy of 1789, and the ‘rights’ it had proclaimed. One route, taken by Bedjaoui, was to adapt the arguments for national liberation championed by the Free French theorist René Cassin during World War II (though Cassin then opposed Algerian independence). More radical, Fanon argued that Algeria must cast revolution in a new form. In each case, temporality and history were crucial: in asserting a ‘right to rebellion’, the Algerians were not invoking universal ideals, but contesting and disrupting the narrative of a gradual diffusion of such ideals from a European centre.

This chapter challenges conventional wisdom about intimate connections between the Holocaust and the birth of international human rights law. Facing a human rights consensus designed around deliberate silence on the Holocaust, Jewish internationalists were unable or unwilling to make Jewish legal enslavement under Nazism a primary rationale for the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and subsequent international enforcement mechanisms. Speaking for the victims of the Holocaust gave Jewish internationalists little symbolic moral capital at a time most others did not want to discuss the specific fate of Jews under Nazism. The chapter also discusses early Jewish efforts at institutional-legal entrepreneurialism to develop mechanisms to bring human rights complaints to the UN.

This contribution distinguishes between two forms of rights discourse in the writings and practice of René Cassin. The first position was that of an advocate of humanitarian rights, understood as falling within the laws of war. His work on behalf of disabled WWI veterans was the origin of this commitment. Overlapping with humanitarian rights were human rights, as adumbrated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights he helped to draft and to persuade the UN to adopt in December 1948. Human rights set down a supranational standard against which all nations had to measure their actions in peacetime as well as in wartime. The problem was that when Cassin dealt with the Jewish population of Palestine, he saw their cause in terms of human rights, the right to form their own state, whereas when he approached the question of Palestinian rights, he framed them in terms of humanitarian rights. The same was true for Muslims in Algeria. He failed to speak out on human rights violations both in Israel and in Algeria during the ongoing Arab–Israeli conflict and during the Algerian War of Independence. His universalism fractured when it came to violent conflicts between Europeans and non-Europeans in decolonization after 1945.