Ideological (Mis)Use of Human Rights - David Chandler

118 D. CHANDLER
Th e responsibility rests with the member governments
to carry them out.’ (Cited in Lewis, 1998, p. 88.)
Secondly, natural rights were brought into international
relations through the Nuremberg tribunal. Many
human rights advocates argue today that the trial marked
a fundamental legal break in the undermining of the
rights of sovereign state authorities. Th is claim makes
little sense, as with Germany’s unconditional surrender
in 1945, the Allied states who organized the military
tribunal at Nuremberg did this explicitly as occupying
powers with sovereign authority rather than as a supranational
authority (see Laughland, 2007, pp. 53–68).
Where the tribunal broke new legal ground was in using
natural law to overrule positivist law, to argue that the
laws in force at the time in Germany were no defence
against the retrospective crime of ‘waging an aggressive
war’. Th is was justifi ed on the grounds that certain
acts were held to be such heinous crimes that they were
banned by universal principles of humanity (Douzinas,
2007, pp. 21–22). Human rights frameworks were used
to undermine positivist law, to cast the winners of the
War as moral, not merely military, victors.
Human rights frameworks emerged during and at
the close of the Second World War in an attempt to give
moral legitimacy both to the Allies’ actions during the
War and to the post-War international order. While
today the UDHR and the Nuremberg tribunal are
understood to have raised a challenge to the rights of
state sovereignty, this was not the case at the time. Th e
preparatory discussions for the UN Declaration and
the deliberations of the Nuremberg judges both made it
absolutely clear that the sovereign state was the subject
of international law and that sovereignty was not challenged
by any trans-national legal authority. States were
held to be the upholders and enforcers of both the
moral and political order.
Human Rights and the Cold War
Th e habit of reading the rise of human rights consciousness
back to 1945 as a story of the teleological march
of universal ethics and values is one that unfortunately
underplays the radical shift in the importance of human
rights aft er the end of the Cold War. Th e strong consensus
today that universal human rights are a guide to
international policy making is, in fact, a relatively recent
development. For the fi rst twenty years aft er the Second
World War, one of the major journals on international
relations, Foreign Aff airs, did not carry one article on
human rights (Korey, 1999, p. 151). During the bulk of
the Cold War era there was little concern with the implications
of the UDHR on state policy or practice. Until
the 1980s, the majority of academic commentators and
policy makers were not convinced that human rights
concerns or ethical considerations were an appropriate
subject of study when assessing a state’s foreign policy.
Th is is not surprising as human rights claims were
understood to be particular rather than universal. In the
West, human rights claims were interpreted as largely
synonymous with democracy and the free market. Th e
US Government and the human rights organizations
that it funded consistently played down the economic
and social aspirations of the UDHR. As a propaganda
weapon against the Soviet states, Western governments
focused on political and civil freedoms, such as
freedom of movement and information and the right to
leave and return to one’s country. Human rights aspirations
were part of the international agenda, but they
were a constituent part of the Cold War framework and
understood as subordinate to the rights of sovereignty.
Th eir subordination to the geo-political division of
the Cold War was highlighted by the lack of consensus
on moving forward the aspirations of the 1948 Universal
Declaration. In the 1950s, two separate UN committees
were established. Th ese produced two separate international
covenants in 1966, one dealing with civil and
political rights and the other with economic, social,
and cultural rights. Th e opposition of leading Western
states to rights in the economic and social sphere was
highlighted in 1986 when the UNGA adopted the Declaration
on the Right to Development, and the USA, UK,
Germany, and Japan either voted against or abstained
(Mutua, 1996, pp. 606–607).
It was through attempts to overcome divisions within
the US establishment and the need to address the decline
of US credibility abroad, following defeat in Vietnam
and the US-backed overthrow of Salvador Allende’s
government in Chile in 1973, that human rights concerns
were put back on the international agenda (Sellars,
2002). Human rights became the mechanism by which
America’s reputation was to be redeemed. In 1974 the
Congressional report ‘Human Rights in the World
Community: A Call for US Leadership’ set the tone for
Gerald Ford’s inclusion of human rights provisions into
the East–West Helsinki Agreement of 1975—signed
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