Ideological (Mis)Use of Human Rights - David Chandler

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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 08-goodhart-chap07.indd 118 12/9/08 3:05:56 PM
y the United States, Canada, the Soviet Union, and most European states including Turkey—and for President Carter’s declaration in his 1977 inaugural speech that ‘our commitment to human rights must be absolute’ (Sellars, 2002, p. 118). Human rights were on the agenda, but there was still little understanding of these as universal norms, rather than as a weapon in Cold War geo-politics. From 1975 onwards, human rights were institutionalized as part of Cold War political exchanges through the establishment of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). Th e Helsinki process of East–West negotiations gradually institutionalized mechanisms of human rights monitoring and information provision under the Human Dimension Mechanism—which allowed OSCE member states to raise issues of human rights concern with other member states. Th is process was used on over a hundred occasions but, on all but one (Hungary’s use against Romania over disturbances in Transylvania), the raising of human rights concerns was directly linked to geopolitical divisions (Bloed, 1993; Brett, 1993). As long as the Cold War persisted and human rights issues were used as weapons in the geo-political divide, it was clear that there would be no support for the idea that human KEY POINTS Human Rights and International Intervention With the end of the Cold War, human rights concerns shift ed from the margins to the mainstream of international concerns as universal humanitarianism appeared to be a feasible possibility. Western states and international institutions had a much greater freedom to act in the international sphere with the attenuation of Cold War rivalries freeing policy from narrow geo-strategic concerns. Th e new possibilities for intervention and aspirations for a more universal framework of policy making were increasingly expressed through the expanding discourse of human rights. Th ere were relatively few critical voices until the 1999 Kosovo war—waged unilaterally (without UN Security Council support) by NATO states against Serbia—brought to a head concerns about the potential misuse or abuse of concerns of humanitarianism IDEOLOGICAL (MIS)USE OF HUMAN RIGHTS 119 rights concerns could undermine sovereignty. Only in the 1990s did human rights appear to be a subject of concern in their own right, so important as to challenge the rights of states and existing frameworks of diplomatic relations and of policy-making priorities. Universal human rights claims could help provide moral legitimacy to international institutions, but did not undermine or challenge the state-based international order. Because human rights claims had no socially constituted legal subject they empowered nation states as their agents, deciding on the content of these rights and the means of their enforcement. During the Cold War, human rights claims were heavily politicized and subordinate to the interests of power, used by both the US and the Soviet Union to achieve instrumental ends. Human rights were equated for ideological reasons with civil and political rights in the West and with social and economic rights by Soviet states. and human rights. In particular, there was concern about the idea of ‘humanitarian war’ tying human rights advocacy with the preponderant use of US military power. In the following sections, the relationship between human rights claims, humanitarian advocacy, international law, and military intervention will be examined with a particular focus on the ethical, legal, and political questions raised by the Kosovo war. Human Rights and Humanitarianism It was in the humanitarian sphere that the shift from formal views of rights, based on rational autonomous subjects, to ethical views of rights, based on a lack of capacity and the need for external advocacy and 08-goodhart-chap07.indd 119 12/9/08 3:05:57 PM
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