Preventing Genocide: Practical Steps Toward Early Detection and Effective Action by David A. Hamburg

Author:David A. Hamburg [Hamburg, David A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Human Rights, Social Science, Violence in Society
ISBN: 9781594515576
Google: wIbaAAAAMAAJ
Goodreads: 3270557
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2008-01-15T12:52:12+00:00

Establishing Human Rights After World War II and the Holocaust

Since genocide is the most appalling and egregious form of human rights abuse, and since the promotion and protection of human rights contribute substantially toward elimination of genocide, we have reason to be interested in the growth of the human rights movement, its progress, and its promise for the long term. Professor Louis Henkin of Columbia University, who has studied the human rights movement from its beginning more than fifty years ago, illustrated its remarkable growth, influence, and efficacy in a magisterial essay.3

International concern about the condition of human rights everywhere began early in World War II. Its normative and institutional foundations were established during the decades after the war and continue to the present day. These norms and institutions had furthered the human rights of billions of people by the end of the twentieth century. The universality of human rights became an ideology and is perhaps even the central ideology of the twenty-first century.

Owing to the remarkable leadership and perseverance of Eleanor Roosevelt, this principle received global recognition when the General Assembly of the United Nations approved the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on December 10, 1948, but it was prefigured in President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” message to Congress on January 6, 1941. Speaking before the United States entered the war, President Roosevelt said: “In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms”: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. Shortly thereafter Roosevelt and Churchill expressed, in the Atlantic Charter, their hope to see established “a peace that will afford assurance that all the men in all the lands may live out their lives in freedom free from fear and want.” Thus they gave a prompt reinforcement to the core concept of universal human rights, that every human being has legitimate, recognized claims to specific freedoms and benefits by virtue of being human. They are not gifts owing to grace, love, charity, or compassion but rights that society has a moral, political, and legal obligation to respect and ensure.

The human rights concept grows out of earlier notions of “natural rights” in the writings of Enlightenment thinkers. An ideology of rights, crystallized in the Magna Carta, already existed in England through the common law. Eighteenth-century American and French revolutionaries articulated their own ideas and ideologies of human rights in the U.S. Declaration of Independence (as well as in earlier states’ bills of rights) and in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. In the United States, the Constitution and Bill of Rights made an ideology of rights the heart of its “constitutionalism.”4

This ideology suffered numerous vicissitudes and setbacks. In France, for example, the Reign of Terror swept it away; it was not restored until after World War II.

The United States essentially maintained the ideology of rights proclaimed in its Declaration of Independence—with the degrading exception of slavery.

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