International Human Rights Midterm

The UDHR as a Political Project

"Concerted efforts to build a public and worldwide consensus around the idea of human rights, including political strategies, diplomatic initiatives, agreement of explicit principles, and conclusion of an international accord." (Waltz 2001, p.45) In a fundamental sense, the UDHR is a composite and negotiated text. "The genesis of each article, and each part of each article, was a dynamic process in which many minds, interests, backgrounds, legal systems and ideological persuasions played their respective determining roles." (Malik)

The Humphrey Draft

• The drafting group was not inventing rights out of whole cloth. • The Secretariat had provided them with a review of the most fundamental and widely shared principles to have emerged over humanity's long, ongoing process of reflection on freedom. • Aiming for comprehensiveness, John Humphrey had instructed his staff at the UN to study all the world's existing constitutions and rights instruments, as well as the suggestions that had poured into the Secretariat from members of the Commission, outside organizations, and even from various interested individuals. • two contemporary declarations: • the draft of a "Pan American" declaration then in deliberation in Latin America • the 1944 "Statement of Essential Human Rights" produced on the basis of a study sponsored by the American Law Institute (ALI), a prestigious organization of judges, practitioners, and academics dedicated to the improvement of the law. • The Latin American draft, prepared for the predecessor of the Organization of American States. • It represented a harvest of the main elements of the continental European, as well as Anglo-American, rights traditions; • it accompanied its list of rights with a list of duties; • it was supranational; and • it proclaimed that "the essential rights of man are not derived from the fact that he is a national of a certain state, but are based upon attributes of his human personality." • One of its framers, Felix Nieto del Rio of Chile, served briefly on the first UN Human Rights Commission before being replace by Hernán Santa Cruz. • The group sponsored by the American Law Institute had consulted experts from "Arabic, British, Canadian, Chinese, French, pre-Nazi German, Italian, Indian, Latin American, Polish, Soviet Russian and Spanish" countries and cultures in order to "ascertain to what extent there can be worldwide agreement respecting rights." • After poring over all this material, Humphrey and his top aide, Émile Giraud, came up with a list of forty-eight items that represented, in Humphrey's view, the common core of the documents and proposals his staff had collected. • The Secretariat has put all this together and included every conceivable right which the Drafting Committee might want to discuss. • Humphrey's draft provided the drafting committee with a distillation of nearly two hundred years of efforts to articulate the most basic human values in terms of rights. • It contained the first-generation political and civil rights found in the British, French, and American revolutionary declarations of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: protections of life, liberty, and property; and freedoms of speech, religion, and assembly. • It also included the second-generation economic and social rights found in late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century constitutions such as those of Sweden, Norway, the Soviet Union, and several Latin American countries: rights to work, education, and basic subsistence.

What are human rights?

"Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, 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." (Article 2 of the UDHR) "Human rights are representations of human relations that emerge from struggle." (Roberts 2015)

The San Francisco Conference (The Rise of Human Rights in International Politics)

(April, 1945) - delegates from 45 states, including a number of individuals who hoped that the new organization would concern itself with much more than collective security. (e.g. Romulo, Evatt, and Malik along with the delegates from the Latin American states) - Many had been inspired by Allied descriptions of the war as a fight for freedom and democracy. - FDR's 1941 "Four Freedom" Speech: linking future peace and security to respect for freedom of speech and expression, freedom to worship God in one's own way, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. - they determined to hold the Allies to their wartime rhetoric. - [Colonialism] The objective of promoting the "self-determination of peoples' was included among the purposes of the UN in the Charter's Preamble. - [Non-discrimination] Human rights belong to everyone "without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion." - [Economic and social justice] Strengthened the Charter's provision for an Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) making it a "principal organ" of the UN, alongside the Security Council. - [Inclusion of a transnational declaration of rights in the UN Charter] - The Great Powers had gone along with the human rights language, but they made sure that the Charter protected their national sovereignty "Nothing contained in this present Charter shall authorize the UN to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any State, or shall require the Members to submit such matters to settlement under the present Charter; but this principle shall not prejudice the application of enforcement measures under Chapter VII." - Chapter VII's exception to that principle, limited to situations where the SC determines that international peace and security are threatened, could be controlled by any of the Big Five through their veto power.

Yalta (The Rise of Human Rights in International Politics)

(February, 1945): - The most controversial items involved the USSR's plans for the security of its frontiers from any resurgence of German military ambitions. - Bulgaria and Romania were under Soviet control and the USSR had occupied Warsaw just two weeks before the conference. In January, the USSR had recognized a committee of Polish Communists and sympathizers as the legitimate provisional government of Poland. - Churchill, hoping to dilute the Soviet Union's power on the European continent, proposed that France should have an active role in policing postwar Europe. He was ultimately successful in obtaining a seat for France as the fifth permanent member of the UNSC. - The Soviet Union's position that there should be no exception to the veto power substantially prevailed.

The first session of the Human Rights Commission

(Jan 27 to Feb 10, 1947) • Great divides 1) Between the Soviet-bloc representatives and others 2) Between the philosophically inclined and the more practical- minded members 3) Between representatives of small and weak nations and the major powers 4) Between proponents of enforceable instruments and supporters of a declaration of principles Consensus, however, .... • The drafting committee should take account of the constitutions of UN member states. • The bill should be short, expressive, and easy to understand.

Political Dissent (The Calculus of Human Rights Abuse)

- Dissenters, especially when governments feel insure in power, are ripe targets for abuse. - To stay in power, officials under attack censor, arrest, or otherwise constrain their political opponents, and the methods they use are often abusive.

Crime and Abuse Systems (The Calculus of Human Rights Abuse)

- Many acts of abuse—and many perpetrators along with their delegates and institutions—coexist and even depend on on another like an ecosystem.

Poverty and Inequality (The Calculus of Human Rights Abuse)

- Poverty tends to highlight scarcity and breed competition for resources. In response, unrest and conflict encourage governments to abuse rights to restore order, or take a bigger piece of the pie for themselves. - Inequality generates social discontent and political instability - "there are incentives for the "haves" in society to engage in rent- seeking behavior within government institutions, to maintain control of their resources, and to exclude access to those resources by the "have nots" in ways that use coercive means that undermine the protection of personal integrity rights"

Illiberalism (see also Casey et al.'s (2010) detailed account of democracy and semi-democracy) (The Calculus of Human Rights Abuse)

- Rulers pursue other priorities, such as accumulating resources or holding on to power through patronage to certain elites. - Some see human rights abuses as a way to preserve their power and personal security - A massive centralization of unchecked power provides both motives and opportunities for the state to use its capacity to crush those in its way - Abuses are less difficult to hide and less likely to be costly for rulers.

Conflict and Cultures of Violence (The Calculus of Human Rights Abuse)

- War creates opportunities for abuse along with cycles of violence that shape people's understanding of acceptable behavior. - Conflict helps to legitimize abuses by making them seem justified--an unfortunate necessity for a greater good—or even noble - All forms of violence—perhaps especially the extreme violence of war— teach and breed cycles of aggression in a society, much like violence in a home creates cycles of violence in a family - Conflict erodes social ties while creating crisis environments and cultures

Intolerance and Dehumanization (The Calculus of Human Rights Abuse)

- racism, religious fundamentalism, political fractionalism, and other such ideas can dehumanize people by stripping them of their dignity or individuality, making them seem to be less worthy of respect.

How to obtain international cooperation for human rights protection?

-Standard Setting -Monitoring -Enforcement: Naming and Shaming, Economic -Sanctions and Punishment, Military Intervention? -Rewards -Awareness

The Rise of Human Rights in International Politics

-The promotion of fundamental rights and freedoms was far from central to the thinking of any of the Big Three as they debated the shape and purpose of the United Nations. -International lawyers regarded a state's treatment of its own citizens, with rare exceptions, as that nation's own business (The principle of sovereignty). -That began to change, however. -Appalling details of the Nazi reign of terror were coming to light and the Allies faced the question of how to deal with major war criminals in the waning days of the war. -(Finally...) The support of the U.S. State Department by agreeing to a Human Rights Commission: NGO (mostly US based) influences, including Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant groups, legal associations, and labor and peace organizations. -The efforts from the small country delegates with 45 voting powers and influences. Brazil, Canada, Chile, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Egypt, France, Haiti, India, Mexico, New Zealand, Panama, and Uruguay kept up the pressure for giving human rights an even higher profile in the Charter. -The shocking first photographs from the concentration camps. -By the time the UN Charter was completed on June 26, 1945, principles of human rights were woven into its text as several points. -The affirmation of equal rights in the Preamble, so far ahead of the realities of the time, was reinforced in Article 1 of the Charter, which recites the purposes of the UN. -In Article 56, the nations solemnly pledged themselves to promote those rights and freedoms. -Among the tasks assigned to the ECOSOC was that of establishing commissions in economic and social fields for the promotion of human rights. The U.S. Senate approved the UN Charter by an overwhelming majority, 89-2. -The Charter did not say what those rights might be, and no one knew whether any rights really could be said to be universal, in the sense of being acceptable to all nations and peoples, including those not yet represented in the UN.

Cultural relativism and cultural imperialism

1) Many peoples living in non-Western nations or under colonial rule, especially those in sub-Saharan Africa, were not represented in the United Nations in 1948. 2) Most of the Declaration's rights first appeared in the European and North or South American documents on which John Humphrey based the original draft. Those statements are accurate, but do they destroy the universality of the Declaration?

4 Distinct roles of small states (Waltz 2001, 46)

1) Small state delegations bore witness to the proceedings that produced the text of the UDHR. 2) Their representatives also participated actively in the debates. 3) Delegates from certain small powers accepted vital leadership roles 4) On some issues they fought hard to see their concerns reflected in the final text.

A Coordination Game

A couple agreed to meet for a date this evening, but cannot agree where to go. The husband would prefer to go to the movie. The wife would rather go to the opera. Both would prefer to go to the same place rather than different ones. Where should they go? -Two pure strategy Nash equilibria, one where both go to the opera and another where both go to the movie. -The two pure strategy Nash equilibria are unfair; one player consistently does better than the other. -The final outcome will depend on the bargaining power between the two.

The Southern Cone

Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay • Under military dictatorships in 1970s and 1980s

Advocates and Partisans

Cold War tensions gave texture to the UDHR discussions and often the interests of small states coincided with Soviet bloc positions, but when small states offered passionate defense of an issue, it generally emanated from their own direct experience from colonial rule and racism by Western powers. a) Small states defended the place of socioeconomic rights in the UDHR. b) Small states defended women's rights. Malik could fairly say, "The genesis of each article, and each part of each article, was a dynamic process in which many minds, interests, backgrounds, legal systems and ideological persuasions played their respective determining roles."

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights

December 10, 1948 A first international project to set up a common standard of human rights. Drafted by representatives with different legal and cultural backgrounds from all regions of the world. Adopted by the UNGA in Paris on 10 December 1948. It sets out, for the first time, fundamental human rights to be universally protected and it has been translated into over 500 languages.

Dumbarton Oaks (The Rise of Human Rights in International Politics)

Dumbarton Oaks (August 21, 1944 to October 7, 1944): - The draft proposals for the UN Charter - The most divisive issue was the structure and powers of the Security Council 1. US: a state should not be allowed to exercise its veto power in a dispute to which it was a party 2. USSR: there should be no exceptions to the veto power - Unable to resolve the issue, the diplomats left it to be settled in person by Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt, who were soon to meet in Yalta. - human rights were mentioned only once, at the suggestion of the U.S.

the Nuremberg Principles

In August 1945, six months after Yalta, the Allies issued the Nuremberg Principles. It stated that... To wage a war of aggression was a crime against international society and that to persecute, oppress, or do violence to individuals or minorities on political, racial, or religious grounds in connection with such a war or to exterminate, enslave, or deport civilian populations, was a crime against humanity. But the issue of peacetime violations of human dignity was left untouched... The Great Powers were not going to take the initiative in making human rights a centerpiece of their postwar arrangements. It was not in their interest to do so.

Major Fault Lines during the Initial Drafting Stage

The issue of the future of colonial dependencies - U.S.: the evolution of the British colonies into independent states and free trading partners. - U.K.: they would become self-governing dominions in a special relationship, including trade relations, with one another and the mother country. - own economic and military aims in post WWII. • Freedom of movement - People who have been against the present governments and if they stay at home or go home will probably be killed. - Communist govts from the Eastern European regimes: war refugees who did not want to return to their countries of origin were mostly quislings or traitors. - E.R: let the displaced persons be free to make their own decisions - The majority of the third committee agreed. • USSR: • The right to freedom of movement, the right to a nationality, a nation's right to accord asylum to political refugees, and protections against arbitrary expulsion from a country • Their presence in an international declaration as a threat to the principle of national sovereignty. • USSR: The Sub-Commission on the Prevention of Discrimination and the Protection of Minorities was established • UK, France, and US: The Sub-Commission on Freedom of Information and the Press • This was but the beginning of continual finger-pointing by American and Soviet UN representatives at the respective weaknesses of their countries. • Implementation and Enforcement mechanism - Australia and India: an international bill of rights would be meaningless without some machinery of enforcement. Hodgson put forward a proposal for an entirely new sort of legal institution - an International Court of Human Rights that could hear complaints from individuals that their rights had been infringed by their own governments. - US: since the problem of implementation was bound to be time- consuming, it should be taken up after the bill of rights was completed. - The European Court of Human Rights in 1959 - Individual complaints procedure under the ICCPR in 1976

The Prisoner's Dilemma

Two men, Thing 1 and Thing 2, were arrested after an armed robbery. The police had enough evidence to convict the two for the theft of the get-away car, but not enough to convict them for the actual armed robbery. However, if the police could get a confession from either of the two men they could conceivably convict them both for the armed robbery. The police locked the two men in two separate rooms and gave them each the same offer: 1) If Thing 1 confessed and Thing 2 stayed silent, then Thing 1 would go scot-free and Thing 2 would be charged for the robbery and get 10 years in jail. This worked the other way around as well. 2) If Thing 2 confessed and Thing 1 stayed silent, Thing 1 would receive the 10 years. 3) If Thing 1 confessed and Thing 2 confessed as well, then they would both receive 7 years in jail. 4) If both Thing 1 and Thing 2 stayed silent, then they would both receive 2 years in prison for the get-away car robbery. The two prisoners are left to make their decision without any way to contact each other. The question is: what did each person choose? - Assuming that each acts in his own best interests. (Confess, Confess) is the Nash equilibrium. It is the worst possible outcome for both! Trade war or arms race Make it a repeated game based on reciprocity

Backdrop of politics

• "Long Telegram" of George Kenan from the Moscow Embassy: The Soviet regime, while not likely to be moved by appeals to reason or humanity, would often back off when faced with strength. • Churchill's "Iron Curtain" speech, warning against the danger of Soviet hegemonic ambitions. • The Cold War politics began to emerge... - The Truman Doctrine in March 1947: provide military aid to Greece and Turkey - The Marshall Plan: provide economic aid to Western Europe to recover from the devastation of the war. • USSR was supporting Mao's Communist insurgents and the Truman administration was cool toward the corrupt Kuomintang military regime. • There was the controversy precipitated by Britain's decision, in Feb 1947, to relinquish the Palestine mandate she had held since the end of WWI. • Malik was emerging as a leading spokesman for the Arab League. • This could not but put a strain on his relationship with Cassin, who had lost twenty-nine relatives, including his sister, in concentration camps. Cassin ardently supported a Jewish homeland, and by 1947, Mrs. Roosevelt did too, here initial reservations overcome by her dismay at the reluctance of many countries, including her own, to accept Jewish war refugees. • Meanwhile, the planning for a UN Human Rights Commission slowly went forward and the Committee's most important recommendation was the first project of the permanent Human Rights Commission should be to write a bill of human rights.

What might universality mean in a multicultural world?

• "Rights are relative to local conditions and many so-called human rights are merely parochial Western notions inapplicable to Chinese circumstances." • One of the most influential framers of the UDHR was P. C. Chang - who "believed that rights are for everyone, not just westerners." • The UDHR takes into full account the individual as member of the social group of which he is part, whose sanctioned modes of life shape his behavior, and with whose fate his own is thus inextricably bound. • The UNESCO philosophers' report: • Where basic human values are concerned, cultural diversity has been exaggerated. • It found that, after consulting with Confucian, Hindu, Muslim, and European thinkers, that a core of fundamental principles was widely shared in countries that had not yet adopted rights instruments and in cultures that had not embraced the language of rights. • Basic human rights rest on "common convictions", even though those convictions "are stated in terms of different philosophic principles and on the background of divergent political and economic systems." • The philosophers can agree that even people who seem to be far apart in theory can agree that certain things are so terrible in practice that no one will publicly approve them and that certain things are so good in practice that no one will publicly oppose them. • Such an implicit agreement existed...

The metaphor of disease

• "Subversives" were an infection. • The armed forces were the nation's antibodies. • An infected member of the body politic had to be isolated (detained) to stop the spread of the disease. • If a treatment was possible, so much the better - although even a cure might be painful (torture). • If the member was beyond repair, permanent surgical removal (death) was demanded. • What mattered was the long-run health of the body politic, not its individual members. • Uruguay carried this ideology to its totalitarian extreme. • A scheme of political reliability rating - Certificates of Democratic Background - was established. - A: political reliability - B: "suspect" rating, subject to police scrutiny and harassment - C: "offense", were absolutely banned from public employment (i.e., having been involved in a protest march twenty years earlier) • The military sought to penetrate and "purify" all aspects of Uruguayan social life. - Each school received a new, politically reliable director - each class was given a "teacher's aide" to take notes on the behavior of students and teachers. - a permit was required to hold a birthday party - elections for captains of amateur soccer teams were supervised by the military, which could veto the results. - A public performance of Ravel's Piano Concerto for the Left Hand was banned because of its sinister title.

The State and Human Rights Violations

• "The modern state has emerged as both the principal threat to the enjoyment of human rights and the essential institution for their effective implementation and enforcement" (Donnelly 2003: 35).

Torture and Disappearances (southern cone cases)

• A distinguished feature of repression in the Southern Cone was the extensive use of disappearance. - extrajudicial detentions, usually accompanied by torture, often followed by death. - Argentina was the worst case.

Conclusion to human rights violations and suppression

• A particular view of the reasons why people engage in human rights abuses. • Most perpetrators of abuse reason and rationalize; they are not biologically or mentally disabled, and most are not impulsive criminals acting on whims. • They have goals, shaped by the contextual circumstances. • They calculate, to the best of their knowledge, the advantages and disadvantages of various ways of accomplishing it. • Frequently, they are part of systems of people and institutions acting collectively, supporting the behavior. • They rationalize their decisions, and convince themselves that their behavior is acceptable and even just. • This vision of human rights abuse has a major policy implication: responses to human rights abuses that are based on telling perpetrators that their actions are immoral and illegal are unlikely to be effective unless the laws are seen as legitimate and backed up by believable consequences for lawbreaking. • Coercion and Persuasion.

Uruguay: Domestic Political Background

• A widely admired democratic welfare state that provided education and health care for all in the past. • In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Uruguay suffered a gradual but complete political collapse. • Uruguay's government was weakened by a political stalemate between its two dominant parties. • The economy was beset by high inflation and persistent labor unrest. • The Tupamaros, one of Latin America's most dramatic and successful urban guerilla groups, were waging a war of terrorism against the Uruguayan state and society. • Civil liberties were temporarily suspended in 1968, 1970, and 1971 to permit unrestricted military action against the guerillas. • In 1972, the government declared an even more stringent state of internal war and passed a new Law of National Security, which created special security offenses. • In June 1973, President Bordaberry unilaterally suspended most remaining constitutional rights and closed the National Assembly. • For the next three years he was the public face of the military government, until he too was forced from office.

Torture and disappearances in Argentina

• After the return of civilian government, the Argentine National Commission on Disappeared Persons (CONADEP) documented - 8,960 disappearances, a figure that probably underestimated the total by one-third or more. - 340 clandestine detention and torture centers, involving about 700 military officers and organized in 5 zones, 35 subzones, and 210 areas. • Thekidnappersoperatedwithsuchimpunitythatonlyonedisappearanceinten occurred in unknown circumstances. - Three-fifths took place in the home of the victim, with witnesses present during the abduction. - The mere passing of an unmarked green four-door Ford Falcon, the car of choice of the arresting squads, was enough to spread terror. • The Navy Mechanics School (ESMA) in Buenos Aires was Argentina's most important clandestine detention center. • Torture at ESMA was so extensive that it became virtually a routinized, bureaucratic activity.

The UDHR's "Everyone"

• An individual who is constituted, in important ways, by and through relationships with others. • "Everyone" is envisioned as uniquely valuable in himself, but "Everyone" is expected to act toward others "in a spirit of brotherhood." • "Everyone" is depicted as situated in a variety of specifically named, real- life relationships of mutual dependency: families, communities, religious group, workplaces, associations, societies, cultures, nations, and an emerging international order. • Though its main body devoted to basic individual freedoms, the Declaration begins with an exhortation to act in "a spirit of brotherhood" and ends with community, order, and society. • That departure from classical individualism while rejecting collectivism is the hallmark of dignitarian rights instruments such as the UDHR. • In the years since its adoption, the Declaration's aspiration to universality has been reinforced by endorsements from most of the nations that were not present at its creation. • Specific references to the Declaration were made in the immediate post-independence constitutions of Algeria, Burundi, Cameroon, Chad, Congo, Dahomey, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Rwanda, Senegal, Somalia, Togo, and Upper Volta. • The Soviet Union's abstention in 1948 was finally nullified when it endorsed the Helsinki Accords in 1975. • All in all, it has been estimated that the Declaration has inspired or served as a model for the rights provisions of some ninety constitutions. • The framers never envisioned that the document's "common standard of achievement" would or should produce completely uniform practices.

Rationales of human rights violations

• Are perpetrators insane, irrational, or psychologically (or biologically) abnormal? • Adolf Hitler or Kim Jong-un? • It is easy to see the superficial appeal of the "crazy man" hypothesis and the more general idea that human rights abuses are acts of madness or uncontrollable urges. • It is uncomfortable, yet essential, to realize that sane people could deliberately commit such horrible acts. • Even apparently normal, educated people who hold conventional moral values and socially acceptable roles in society are capable of violence toward others in some circumstances that are not even dire or extreme. With little prodding, average people will become abusive if they can justify their behavior. • The 1963 Milgram Experiment: https://youtu.be/yr5cjyokVUs - He examined justifications for acts of genocide offered by those accused at the WWII, Nuremberg War Criminal Trials. Their defense was based on "obedience" - that they were just following orders from their superiors. - an experiment focusing on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience. • How do individuals weigh the costs and benefits of abuse and how do they justify their choices? • This may offer a fuller explanation of how abuse arises and persists.

Argentina: Domestic Political Background

• Argentina experienced a period of democratic rule from 1916 until 1930. • After WWII, the populist leader Juan Perón ruled Argentina as an elected president for a decade. • In 1955, he was overthrown in a military coup. • Civilian governments were prevented from completing their terms in office by military coups in 1966 and 1973. • But the military was not able to impose its preferred candidates when the country returned to civilian rule. ØThe "failure of semidemocracy:" the alternation of ineffective civilian and military regimes • In the mid-1970s, an already-unstable political situation was made much worse by the incompetence and corruption of the civilian government. • The Montoneros and the Revolutionary Army of the People (ERP) were waging urban and rural guerilla warfare against the Argentine state and society. • The Argentine Right, with the support of the military and security forces, responded with assassinations of leftist students, lawyers, journalists, and trade unionists, in addition to guerrillas. • In October 1975, five months before the overthrow of the civilian government, Army Commander-in-Chief Jorge Rafael Videla warned that "as many people will die in Argentina as is necessary to restore order." • In 1976, Videla, who had become president, delivered on his promise of violence, if not order.

The National Security Doctrine

• At ESMA the complete license the torturers had to do what they wanted with their prisoners seems to have acted on them like an addiction. • But at least some of the brutality was the work of professionals pursuing what they saw as defense of the nation. • National security doctrines provided an all-encompassing ideological framework for the military regimes of the Southern Cone. -The state was viewed as the central institution of society. -The military in turn was seen as the central institution of the state, the only organization with the combination of insight, commitment, and resources needed to protect the interests and values of the nation. • The "Subversive" Threat üThe nation and its value were seen as under assault from an international conspiracy that was centered on, but by no means limited to, international communism. -Progressive Catholicism appears at the top, and new growths at the bottom include human rights organizations, women's rights, pacifism, nonaggression, disarmament, the Rotary Club, Lions Club, and junior chambers of commerce. -The main branches off the trunk are Communist parties, the extreme totalitarian right (nazism and fascism), Socialist parties, liberal democracy, revolutionary front parties, Protestants, sectarians and anti-Christians, armed revolutionary organizations, and "indirect aggression." • "Indirect aggression": • Drug addiction, alcoholism, prostitution, gambling, political liberalism, economic liberalism, lay education, trade union corruption, hippiness, pornography, homosexuality, divorce, art, newspapers, television, cinema, theater, magazines, and books. • To counter such a threat, all-out war is necessary.

Counter argument to diversity in UDHR drafting

• But what about the educational backgrounds or professional experiences of men like Chang and Malik? They must have been westernized. • But their performance in the Human Rights Commission suggests something rather different. • Not only each contribute significant insights from his own culture, but each possessed an exceptional ability to understand other cultures and to "translate" concepts from one frame of reference to another. • There was remarkably little disagreement regarding its basic substance, despite intense wrangling over some specifics. • At every state, even the Communist bloc and Saudi Arabia voted in favor of most of the articles when they were taken up one by one. • The traditional political and civil rights - the ones now most often labeled "Western" - were the least controversial all. • The fact that it was the product of cooperation among so many nations, gave the UDHR great moral authority. • Not every country in the world had its say, but many did, and their response supported the UNESCO philosophers' conclusion that a few basic practical concepts of human rights are so widely shared that they may be viewed as implicit in man's nature as a member of society.

Nunca Más (Never Again)

• Elections, or at least the transfer of power from one elected civilian government to another are sometimes seen as the solution for human rights problems. • Successor regimes face the problem of dealing with those responsible for human rights violations under the old order. • How to deal with the torturers and murderers and their superiors - especially when the guilty retain considerable political power and control the weaponry that once before supported their dictatorial rule? • Defining the terms of retributive justice is part of a process of national reconciliation necessary to keep the wounds inflicted under military rule from festering. • Two weeks before the election that brought a return to civilian rule, the Argentine junta issued a Law of National Reconciliation that created a blanket amnesty for all offenses connected with the "war against subversion." • However, Raúl Alfonsin delivered on his campaign promise that all nine members of the three military juntas that had run Argentina from 1976 to 1982 would be prosecuted. • Alfonsin created the CONADEP, which would conduct an official investigation of the Dirty War. • CONADEP's September 1984 report contained over 50,000 pages of documentation and provided an extensive, official, public accounting of the Dirty War. • The summary, published under the title Nunca Más became an instant best-seller. • Nunca Más finally recognized and publicly memorialized the victims, whose very existence had for so long been officially denied. • Truth, however, is only a first step. • Punishment or pardon usually follows, and preventing future abuses must be a high priority. • Impunity in the Southern Cone states and Commission for Truth and Reconciliation (TRC).

Cassin's draft

• His Preamble explained the "why" of the Declaration. • His introductory provisions affirmed the equal rights of every member of the human family and embodied concepts of man and society that were neither individualist nor collectivist. • The rights themselves were arranged according to the logic of the introductory article or general principles, proceeding from those belonging to the individual as such to the rights of persons in social and political relationships. • The draft that Humphrey had loosely organized by topic began to take on a more organic structure, a beginning, middle, and end. • Most of the ideas in Humphrey's draft ultimately found their way into the Universal Declaration, and the "logical arrangement" contributed by Cassin held firm. • It was about this time that the committee began to use the term declaration more often than bill.

Resistance

• How did the resistance start and how did it succeed? Argentina's Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo: https://youtu.be/HUQzUyDuWSg. - On April 30, 1977, 14 middle-aged women, frustrated in their search for their disappeared children through official channels, met publicly in the Plaza de Mayo, the main square of Buenos Aires, in front of the Casa Rosada, the president's residence and seat of government. - Their weekly Thursday afternoon vigil - white scarves on their heads, silently walking around the square - became a symbol of both the cruelty of the military regime and the refusal of at least some ordinary people to bow to repression. - By 1980, they had almost 5,000 members and were able to set up a small office. • Several other human rights NGOs operated in Argentina. • The Center for Legal and Social Studies (CELS) was established in the summer of 1979 to investigate individual cases involving the security forces. Within a year of its founding, CELS had become affiliated with both the Geneva-based International Commission of Jurists and the New York-based International League for Human Rights. • The Argentine Human Rights Commission (CADHU) was formed in 1975 to protest right-wing death-squad killings. It was forced to exile in 1976 but opened branches in Geneva, Mexico, Rome, and Washington to spread information about the nature of the repression in Argentina. • Although SERPAJ was a religious organization, and the Ecumenical Movement for Human Rights (MEDH) was active, the Catholic church as an institution was not part of the opposition in Argentina. • In Chile, by contrast, the Church was at the center of the human rights movements. - The Committee of Cooperation for Peace (COPACHI) was formed in October 1973, the month after the coup, under the leadership of the bishops of Chile's Catholic and Lutheran churches. - As in much of the rest of Latin America, the Catholic church could do things that were impossible for lay organizations and even other churches. • In addition to aiding victims and their families, human rights NGOs were an important source of information. • The lists of disappeared people prepared by CELS and APDH provided much of the factual basis for initial UN and OAS action. -Human rights NGOs also allowed Argentineans and Chileans a limited opportunity to struggle against, rather than simply acquiesce in, military rule and the Dirty War. -In Uruguay the system of repression was so totalitarian that no effective local human rights NGOs were able to function until the final two or three years of military rule.

Human Rights NGOs (southern cone)

• If the Southern Cone provides a particularly striking example of human rights violations, it also provides a moving example of resistance.

Chile: Domestic Political Background

• In 1970, Salvador Allende became the world's first freely elected Marxist president. • Allende intensified the economic and social reforms. ü Large agricultural estates were expropriated. ü Key private industries and banks were nationalized, including Chile's copper industry. ü Social services were expanded. ØThe ideological polarization was resulted. Øthe military coup of September 11, 1973 Økilled Allende and removed his government from power Øa repressive military regime ruled until 1990.

Begin works of UN

• In June 1946 the Commission on Human Rights was established, along with a separate Commission on the Status of Women. The human rights commissioners would be representatives of eighteen member states, with five from what were still being called the Great Powers. Thirteen seats would be rotated at staggered three-year intervals among the other nations. • The new body was given the task of preparing an international bill of rights and devising means for its implementation. • Eleanor Roosevelt (Chairman), P.C. Chang (vice chairman), and Charles Malik (rapporteur).

What of the fact that the initial elaboration of these concepts as "rights" was a European phenomenon?

• It is true that the Declaration's provisions were derived from provisions of the world's existing and proposed constitutions and rights instruments - that is, mostly from countries with well- developed legal traditions. • But the label "Western" obscures the fact that the Declaration's acceptance in non-Western setting was facilitated by the very features that made it seem "foreign" to a large part of the West: Britain and the United States. • The Declaration was far more influenced by the modern dignitarian rights tradition of continental Europe and Latin America than by the more individualistic documents of Anglo-American lineage.

1) Participation by developing countries in the framing of the UDHR

• It was by no means negligible. • In 1948, large parts of Africa and some Asian countries remained under colonial rule; and the defeated Axis powers - Japan, Germany, Italy, and their allies - were excluded. • But Chang, Malik, Romulo, Mehta, and Santa Cruz were among the most influential, active, and independent members of the Human Rights Commission. • The members of the third committee, who discussed every line of the draft over two months in the fall of 1948, represented a wide variety of cultures. • On the third committee, besides Europeans and North Americans, there were six members from Asia - giants such as China, India, and Pakistan, plus Burma, the Philippines, and Siam. • Islamic culture was predominant in nine nations -- Afghanistan, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, Yemen - and strong in India and Lebanon. • Three countries had large Buddhist populations - Burma, China, and Siam. • Only four were from the African continent - Ethiopia, Liberia, Egypt, and South Africa. • Numerous and outspoken Latin American countries. • Six of the European members belonged to the Communist bloc.

Repression in Uruguay

• Its style was significantly different. • Almost all the disappeared reappeared, usually in prison, after having been severely tortured. • Only 44 Uruguayans who disappeared in Uruguay remained unaccounted for at the end of military rule. • The per capita rate of permanent disappearances in Uruguay was only about one-fifth the Chilean rate and one-twentieth the Argentinean rate. • But about 60,000 people, roughly 2 percent of the population, were detained, giving Uruguay the highest per capita rate of political prisoners and torture victims in all of Latin America. - Virtually everyone in the country at least knew of someone who had been detained. • This was an extraordinarily powerful technique of state terror. • There was a division of labor between the clandestine detention centers, which specialized in physical abuse, and the official prisons, which specialized in psychological abuse. • The prison regimen was carefully calculated to dehumanize and break people who had already suffered excruciating physical torture. • Prisoners were never referred to by name, always by number - or by insulting epithet: "cockroach," "rat," "apesto". • Peepholes and listening devices were common, and broken prisoners were used as informants. • Even families were incorporated into the routine of torture.

Economic Reform and Economic and Social Rights

• National purification in the Southern Cone also had a major economic dimension. • Chile: - In 1975 the junta applied what it called a "Shock Treatment". - Government spending declined by more than a quarter. - Public investment was cut in half. • Uruguay and Argentina: - similar plans, although somewhat less vigorously. - to privatize the economy and to weaken or destroy the organized labor. • The forced march toward free markets resulted in a rapid decline in living standards. - Real wages and salaries in Chile were about one-third lower in 1976 than in 1970. - In Argentina infant mortality increased dramatically. • After the initial shock, the economies of the Southern Cone began to recover, especially in Chile. - Although most of the benefits of growth were concentrated in the hands of a small elite, employment and real wages did increase, and inflation declined. - Economic success helped to calm at least some of the discontent with military rule. - In fact, in all three countries the military counted on economic success to deflect attention from, or compensate for, repression. • The economic and political victims of the national security state: The Left, trade unions, other autonomous social groups, and dissidents of all sorts, as well as ordinary citizens who were more or less accidently caught in the system. • The beneficiaries: Some members of the upper and middle classes certainly profited from the privatization of the economy and the lifting of government controls. But, the turn to free markets left local industrialists extremely vulnerable to foreign competition. The military amply rewarded itself, the Uruguayan spending on education declined from 24.3 percent to 16.6 percent of the budget, while military spending rose from 13.9 percent to 26.2 percent.

Remaining puzzles of human rights violations

• Not all governments under threat are committing mass human rights violations because such state practices are costly. • Then, why do we still observe them? • Human rights violations as a principal-agent problem.

Rationalization of human rights violations

• People commit acts of human rights abuse because they believe they are doing their job. • When it comes to abuses carried out the orders of a government, military leaders, or some other organizational authority, the hands-on perpetrators who carry out the dirty deeds are often looking for ways to please their superiors, save their own lives or livelihoods, or protect some deeply held conviction. • But they know the decisions are morally questionable so perpetrators look to particular political, economic, or cultural norms when justifying abusive practices. • One implication is that perpetrators often act knowingly. They hurt others because they believe they will gain something from the abuse, not because they do not realize what they are doing. • 3 ways that perpetrators rationalize their crimes 1. Exceptional circumstances 2. Avoidance 3. Routinization

Calculus of Abuse

• Superiority • Intelligence • Revenge • Monetary benefits • Penalties • Deterrence

The Collapse of Military Rule (southern cone)

• The Argentine military finally fell from power after it lost a conventional war with Britain over control of the obscure Falkland Islands. - Having attacked its own people, brought the economy to the brink of ruin, and then embarrassed itself and the country before the entire world, the Argentine military had little choice but to permit a return to civilian government. - On October 30, 1983, Raùl Alfonsin won an absolute majority in the national presidential election. Chile • The economy collapsed in ruin in the early 1980s. • In 1982, per capita gross domestic product declined 15.8 percent. • By March 1983, one-third of the labor force was unemployed. • Between 1981 and 1985, the legal minimum wage lost between one-fifth and one-half of its purchasing power. • Close to one-half of the children were malnourished. • A wave of bankruptcies brought hard times even to the middle and upper -Working-class residential neighborhoods began to organize. -The old political parties began to act, cautiously, in public. -Opposition increased in all sectors of society. -In June 1983, strikes by truck drivers and copper miners represented labor's first major challenge since the coup. -On July 2 and 3, a successful general strike was held. -Between May and November a series of Days of National Protest culminated in a demonstration by close to one million people in downtown Santiago. -1983 became known in Chile as 'the year when people lost their fear. -On October 5, 1988, the military turned to a plebiscite to legitimate its rule. The majority of Chileans rejected a new eight-year term for Pinochet. -On December 14, 1989, an opposition alliance of seventeen parties, led by Patricio Aylwin, won the first relatively free elections in Chile in nearly two decades. Uruguay -The Uruguayan military was also hit hard by the economic crisis of the early 1980s. -By 1984, real wages were less than half of their 1968 levels, and more than 10 percent of the population had left the country, including one- seventh of the country's university graduates and close to one-fifth of the economically active population of the capital city of Montevideo. -The military ultimately proved unwilling to adopt the Chilean strategy of increased repression in the face of growing opposition. -Elections were held in 1984 and a freely elected civilian government returned to power in 1985, even without a Falklands-like blunder.

UNESCO report

• The UN's Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization recruited some of the leading thinkers of the day for a Committee on the Theoretical Bases of Human Rights. • The philosophers' group began its work in March by sending a questionnaire to statesmen and scholars around the world - including such notables as Gandhi, de Chardin, Groce, Huxley, and de Madariaga - soliciting their views on the idea of a universal declaration of human rights.

Expansion of member states of the UN in the 1950s...

• The balance of power in the General Assembly had shifted... • 16 new member states joined the UN in 1955 • Many Latin American countries retreating their pro-U.S. positions • Small and relatively weak nations found strength in numbers and in support from the Soviet Union, but often little common ground. • They called the UNDR as an instrument of neocolonialism and in attacks on its universality in the name of cultural integrity, self-determination of peoples, or national sovereignty. • In some cases the motivations are self-serving. • Such criticisms ring false from the lips of some of the world's worst rights violators.

The formulation of social and economic rights

• The most time-consuming subject • ER's presence assured that FDR's "four freedoms," which included freedom from want, would be a constant touchstone for all members of the Commission. • Whether they should be specifically enumerated? • How they should be phrased? • How and by whom they should be implemented? • The Communist countries: • Gave priority to social and economic rights, wanted them to be accompanied by corresponding civic duties, and insisted that the state should be the primary enforcer. • Most of the other participants, including Cassin, Malik, Romulo, Roosevelt, and Santa Cruz: • advocated a balance between the traditional political and civil rights on the one hand and the newer social and economic rights on the other.

Reduced 8 to 4 drafters....(UDHR)

• The subcommittee, composed of Cassin, Malik, Wilson, and Mrs. Roosevelt, immediately went to work. • A single drafter, René Cassin • To undertake the writing of a draft Declaration, based on those articles in the Secretariat outline which he considered should go into a Declaration. • His redraft consisted of a Preamble, six introductory articles, thirty-six substantive articles grouped analytically under eight headings, and two concluding provisions on implementation.

UDHR: Declaration or Convention?

• UK: put forward the Foreign Office bill and urged the committee to prepare a covenant rather than a statement full of high-sounding generalities. • US: favored a broad Declaration, to be followed eventually "by conventions on particular subjects which might have the binding force of treaties." • The group adopted a compromise satisfactory neither the U.S. nor UK: they would work on both types of document at the same time.

Repression in Chile

• Was very similar, although the number of deaths was much lower.

The most heated discussion: political philosophy

• What is man? • Communist delegates: - human liberty consists in perfect harmony between the individual and the community and the common interest, as embodied in the state, takes priority over individual claims. - The rights of the individual must be seen in relation to the individual obligations to the community, which is the main body which provides for his existence, and the enjoyment of the human rights which belong to him. We cannot divide the individual from society. Malik's four principles to guide the work of the Commission: 1. The human person is more important than any national or cultural group to which he may belong 2. A person's mind and conscience are his most sacred and inviolable possessions 3. Any pressure from the state, church, or any other group aimed at coercing consent is unacceptable. 4. Since groups, as well as individuals, may be right or wrong, the individual's freedom of conscience must be supreme. Malik: • human beings are both individual and social. • The human person, though bound by social responsibilities, nevertheless has "the right to say no to any social pressure, and to legal protection of that right so that the person who dares to say no will not be physically eliminated. • He agreed with the English representative that one must pay the price of the benefits one receives from the state, but sometimes, he added, "the price is too high." • The danger of the present age was not that the state is not strong enough... but that social claims are in danger of snuffing out any real personal liberty. • The human person, in his ultimate freedom, is in mortal danger today from the totalitarian state, and that after every allowance is made for full social responsibility, the state in all its functions is for the sake of the free human person, and that this doctrine should be reflected in the proposed Bill of Rights. Mrs. Roosevelt - It is not exactly that you set the individual apart from his society, but you recognize that within any society the individual must have rights that are guarded. • UK delegation has a similar view with the USSR. • A significant difference between Roosevelt and Malik. • She had spoken of the primacy of the individual, while he preferred to use the term person to emphasize the social dimension of personhood and to avoid connotations of radical autonomy and self- sufficiency. • That more capacious notion of personhood was to have great influence on the Declaration, as would Malik's insistence, to the annoyance of the Soviets, upon the distinction between society and the state.

The Calculus of Human Rights Abuse

• Why do abusers behave the way they do? • Human rights abuses are normally planned and organized, and they frequently engage networks of people and institutions - not as a single impetuous action by one person or institution, but rather as a series of decisions and actions by many interrelated participants. • A government employs repression when it feels threatened in its strength and power and when it has the opportunity and will to use violence against its citizens. • 6 "contextual" factors 1. Conflict and Cultures of Violence 2. Illiberalism (see also Casey et al.'s (2010) detailed account of democracy and semi-democracy) 3. Political Dissent 4. Poverty and Inequality 5. Intolerance and Dehumanization 6. Crime and Abuse Systems Contextual factors do not directly cause people to commit human rights crimes. Nevertheless, they create situations and perceptions that allow people to believe that abuses will get them what they want at a price they are willing to pay.

The Main Questions about human rights violations

• Why does abuse arise in the first place? - The context for abuse • Why do abusive practices persist? - The rationales to commit and justify human rights abuses • How do law and power might have an impact on abusive behavior? - Not how to make state-based enforcement smarter and more powerful but... - how to constrain state institutions and ensure the agents who perform state functions remain in line.