The Contentious History of the International Bill of Human Rights by Christopher N.J. Roberts

Abstract

The Contentious History of the International Bill of Human Rights, by Christopher N.J. Roberts. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2015. xiv, 237 pp. $32.99 US (paper). Historical scholarship on has been critiqued for using history to affirm the inevitable rise of rights. Human have been presented as the ultimate utopia, rather than an ideology shaped by conscious choices and historical accidents. Several recent studies have therefore highlighted the limitations of the linear and triumphalist narratives that dominate scholarship. These new histories go beyond the triumphs of to draw attention to the underlying tensions and contestations that have shaped the development of the idea. In this book, Christopher Roberts contributes to the emergent genre of contested histories by exploring the conflicts and opposition that underscored the development of the International Bill of Human Rights (IBHR) at its mid-century moment of inception. The story of contemporary rights, Roberts points out, is incomplete without these oppositional narratives because they shaped what has become in our world. Although are held to be a universal good, this book shows that there has not been universal agreement about the nature of the concept. After WWII, individuals, organized groups, nations, conservative leaders, and progressive scholars objected to the emerging idea of universal for numerous reasons. The concept of as a response to the carnage and atrocities of the war was anything but self-evident. The process of drafting a nonbinding Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and binding Covenants was defined by deep-seated disagreements. Imperial powers such as Great Britain and influential political factions in the United States resisted the inclusive discourse promised by universal because it threatened the colonial order and domestic racial hierarchies. In the US, professional organizations such as the American Bar Association, the American Anthropological Association and the American Medical Association rejected parts of the new concept. Even progressive thinkers such as Hannah Arendt and Mohandas Gandhi were skeptical of the value of a universal regime. Beyond the confines of intellectual and diplomatic debates at the United Nations, Roberts shows how opposition to universal also manifested in public discourse. Proponents and opponents of American internationalism sparred loudly in newspapers and magazines, newsreels and radio shows, and on the floor of Congress about the implications of universal for the mixing of the races, the future of colonialism, national sovereignty, and the spread of communism. Roberts cautions, however, that highlighting the opposition to universal should not be read as representing a normatively critical approach to the history of rights. Opposition directed at the UDHR or other instruments were more or less contentions of particular representations of social and political relationships rather than a rejection of human rights per se. …