Cold War and human rights

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

The struggle for human rights did not begin at the end of the Second World War. For centuries political associations, religious societies and individuals had been fighting for political freedom, religious tolerance, freedom of expression, freedom of thought and the right to participate in politics. However, the world was awakened by the atrocities of the Second World War and agreed on the solemn documents which stated that every person had certain perpetual and inalienable rights. This was indeed new. Declarations on the rights of the individual had been expressed and signed in earlier centuries. But documents such as the English Magna Carta (1215); the United States’ Declaration of Independence (1776), or the French Declaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen (1789), did not count for all human beings. Even if these documents in principle referred to the rights of all human beings, neither slaves nor minorities nor women were among those included. Neither did these declarations gain broad international support. While The Covenant of the League of Nations of 1919, which obliged signatory countries to secure ‘fair and humane conditions of labour’ as well as minority rights did gain worldwide support, it did not contain anything like a complete account of the rights of the individual.1 The Charter of the United Nations from 1945 was the earliest of the postSecond World War human rights documents. The most influential human rights document of that period was however The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) from 1948. It contained an enumeration of international human rights standards and explicitly stated that they were accorded to all human beings ‘without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status’. Additionally it underlined that ‘no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty’.2 In succeeding documents human rights were defined in comprehensive and detailed catalogues, and their force was at first certified by the ever-expanding number of UN member states – evidence of the important role played by UN human rights diplomacy in this evolution. Since the end of the Second World War human rights conventions havegrown exponentially in number (the most significant ones are included at the end of this chapter). Collected in one volume, human rights conventions currently bulk together to form some 300 printed pages. There were, however, reasons to doubt that conventions on human rights had the impact intended by their founders. Systematic persecution and oppression of political opponents, violation of women’s rights, discrimination because of race and religion, etc., have occurred continuously in all parts of the world. Not only did such violations occur, a large number of sovereign states both tolerated and committed human rights violations even if they had signed several human rights conventions. There were also prominent politicians who argued that preparation and issuing of human rights documents was meaningless grandstand play. Other politicians and human rights activists remained steadfast in their conviction that promoting human rights was an imperative task.3 This book is about these documents, and analyses how they were developed, how they spread, and their effects. The context is the Cold War in Europe and the struggle between democratic capitalism in the West and authoritarian communism in the East.