PREFACE

This book, like the field of human rights, has been a long time in gestation. It began as a series of papers delivered to the 2004 meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA) in Washington, D.C. Akira Iriye chaired a panel on the topic “Writing the Global History of Human Rights” that featured contributions by Mark Bradley, Kenneth Cmiel, Alexis Dudden, and Atina Grossmann. The original idea had been to use these essays as a nucleus of a volume on new trends in historiography as part of the Oxford series on Reinterpreting History. Yet the project was dealt a blow by the sudden death of Ken Cmiel, whose energy and leadership in this evolving field has been missed by his friends, colleagues, and peers across the discipline. He had done a great deal to place this field on the agenda of historians, and many of the essays in the collection have their origins in his seminal writings. The volume is dedicated to his memory.

In late 2008, William Hitchcock and Petra Goedde co-chaired a conference at Temple University on “Human Rights as International History.” The event was held, in part, to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and also to gather together work in the field by a new generation of scholars whose fresh arguments and new archival discoveries helped transform human rights scholarship. We are grateful to the International History Workshop and the History Department at Temple for the support we received in hosting that gathering.

Susan Ferber, our always creative and indefatigable editor, saw that by combining the essays from the AHA panel and the Temple event, we had the makings of an outstanding “state of the field” volume. Susan earned our profound gratitude for keeping this project going and prodding us to bring it to fruition, even when it seemed it might not quite make it to the finish line. She is a visionary editor, and we all feel enormously proud of the volume she has done so much to create.

Akira Iriye

Petra Goedde

William I. Hitchcock

CONTRIBUTORS

ALLIDA BLACK manages the Women’s Political Participation Program of the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs. She is also Research Professor of History and International Affairs at the George Washington University, where she chairs the Eleanor Roosevelt Project Advisory Board. She has written widely on Eleanor Roosevelt, women’s human rights, and women’s political engagement. She has coordinated (and is continuing to organize) mentoring and policy workshops on women’s human rights for the United Nations, the Department of State, and a variety of nongovernmental organizations. She is the recipient of the George Washington University Millennium Medal, two honorary doctorates, and several community service and human rights awards.

CARL J. BON TEMPO is Assistant Professor of History at SUNY Albany. He is the author of Americans at the Gate: The United States and Refugees during the Cold War (2008). He currently is working on a history of human rights politics in the United States after the 1970s.

ELIZABETH BORGWARDT is a Fellow at the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences for 2010–11. A historian and lawyer, she will serve as the Richard and Ann Pozen Visiting Professor of Human Rights at the University of Chicago in 2012. She is Associate Professor of History and Law (by courtesy) at Washington University in St. Louis.

MARK PHILIP BRADLEY is Professor of History at the University of Chicago. He is completing a book-length monograph that explores the place of the United States in the global human rights imagination of the twentieth century.

KENNETH CMIEL was Professor of History and the director of the University of Iowa Center for Human Rights until he died suddenly in 2006. He taught intellectual history and the history of human rights at the University of Iowa since 1987. He is the author of Democratic Eloquence: The Fight over Popular Speech in Nineteenth-Century America (1990), based on his Allan Nevins Prize–winning dissertation, “A Home of Another Kind: One Chicago Orphanage and the Tangle of Child Welfare” (1995) and numerous articles on intellectual and human rights history.

G. DANIEL COHEN is Associate Professor of History at Rice University. He specializes in the history of refugees, forced displacement, and human rights law in twentieth-century Europe. His articles on these topics appeared in various journals including The Journal of Contemporary History, Immigrants and Minorities and Geneses. Cohen is the author of In War’s Wake: Europe’s Displaced Persons in the Postwar Order (2011).

ALEXIS DUDDEN is Professor of History at the University of Connecticut where she also directs the program in humanitarian research study. She is author most recently of Troubled Apologies Among Japan, Korea, and the United States (2008) as well as numerous articles and Internet essays. She is currently writing a book about nationalism and the law of the sea in Northeast Asia.

PETRA GOEDDE is Associate Professor of History at Temple University. Her research interests are in U.S. foreign relations, and transnational, culture, and gender history. She is the author of GIs and Germans (2003) and articles on U.S. foreign relations and the globalization of American culture. Her current projects include a history of global culture since 1945 and a book-length study of the global discourse on peace during the cold war.

ATINA GROSSMANN is Professor of History in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Cooper Union in New York City where she teaches Modern German and European History, and Gender Studies. Publications include Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control and Abortion Reform, 1920–1950 (1995) and co-edited volumes on Crimes of War: Guilt and Denial in the Twentieth Century (2002) and After the Nazi Racial State: Difference and Democracy in Germany and Europe (2009), as well as articles on gender and modernity in interwar Germany and history and memory in postwar Germany. Her book Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany (2007, in German, 2011) was awarded the George L. Mosse Prize of the American Historical Association. She is beginning a research project on transnational Jewish refugee stories, “Soviet Central Asia, Iran, and India: Sites of Refuge and Relief for European Jews during World War II.”

WILLIAM I. HITCHCOCK is a Professor of History at the University of Virginia. He has taught at Temple University, Wellesley College, and Yale University. He took his PhD at Yale under Paul Kennedy in 1994 and has authored a number of books on Europe and trans-Atlantic relations. His most recent book, The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe (2008), won the 2009 George Louis Beer Prize from the American Historical Association, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

AKIRA IRIYE is Professor of History Emeritus at Harvard University. He is the author of many books on U.S. foreign relations and global history, among them the Dictionary of Transnational History, co-edited with Pierre Yves Saunier, (2009) and Global Community (2002).

BARBARA KEYS is a historian at the University of Melbourne. She is finishing a book manuscript on the roots of the U.S. turn toward human rights in foreign policy in the 1970s and is starting a project on global anti-torture campaigns from the 1960s through the 1980s.

SAMUEL MOYN is Professor of History at Columbia University, where he has taught since 2001. His most recent book is The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (2010).

PAUL RUBINSON is Assistant Professor of History at Bridgewater State University. His article “Crucified on a Cross of Atoms: Scientists, Politics, and the Test Ban” appeared in Diplomatic History in April 2011. Before earning his PhD from the University of Texas at Austin, he served as a Smith-Richardson Foundation Predoctoral Fellow at International Security Studies, Yale University. He is currently working on a book manuscript titled Containing Science: The U.S. National Security State and Scientists’ Challenge to Nuclear Weapons during the Cold War.

BRAD SIMPSON is Assistant Professor of History and international affairs at Princeton University and the author of Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development and U.S.-Indonesian Relations (2008). He is currently writing a history of the idea self-determination, exploring its political, cultural, and legal descent through post-1945 international politics, and a history of U.S.-Indonesian international relations during the reign of General Suharto (1966–1998).

KELLY J. SHANNON is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Alaska, Anchorage. She received her PhD in history from Temple University in 2010. Her current book project explores the integration of women’s rights concerns into U.S. foreign policy toward the Islamic world since the late 1970s.

SARAH B. SNYDER, Lecturer in International History at University College London, specializes in the Cold War, human rights activism, and United States human rights policy. She is the author of Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War: A Transnational History of the Helsinki Network, as well as articles in Cold War History, Diplomacy and Statecraft, Journal of American Studies, and Journal of Transatlantic Studies. She received her PhD from Georgetown University.

THE HUMAN RIGHTS REVOLUTION

Introduction: Human Rights as History

AKIRA IRIYE AND PETRA GOEDDE

Human rights have a long history, yet their tenure as a historical subject is surprisingly short. Classic works in world history such as William McNeill’s A World History (1967) or J. M. Roberts’s History of the World (1976) discussed slavery, discrimination against women, wartime atrocities, and other violations of individual and group rights. They did not, however, employ the term human rights even though it had entered the international political lexicon long before.¹ The absence of human rights history in these works suggests that even in an era of increased rights consciousness, historians did not consider human rights a useful category of analysis.

As detailed in Kenneth Cmiel’s landmark historiographical essay, first published in 2004 and reprinted in this volume, this neglect was common until the 1990s, when interest in human rights history surged.² Since then, historians have explored the history of human rights both in its theoretical and in its concrete political, legal, social, and cultural manifestations. They have increasingly concentrated on how the universal language of human rights has been applied and negotiated in local social and political settings. They also began to see, as Cmiel suggested, human rights as integral to the history of globalization without losing sight of their local manifestations.³ The essays in this volume bear testimony to the expansion of the field in intellectual, political, and international history. Human rights as a historical subfield has come into its own.

Even though scholars trace human rights discourses to the early Enlightenment debates on natural rights among thinkers such as David Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke and to documents such as the 1789 American Bill of Rights and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, the transnational realization of a human rights agenda long remained elusive.⁴ Human rights campaigns surfaced in different political and social contexts throughout the nineteenth century, among them the campaign against slavery, the women’s rights movement, and the fight for workers’ rights. The first Geneva Convention, ratified by twelve nations in 1864, established the right to humane treatment for captured and wounded enemy soldiers.⁵ The often brutal colonial regimes of the late nineteenth century and the genocides and wars of the first half of the twentieth century, however, dispelled any illusion that these rights manifestations led to a more just and humane world.⁶ Although Woodrow Wilson advocated a system of international laws to regulate relations among nations after World War I, he neglected to add human rights to his Fourteen Points. The main locus of advocacy for human rights thus lay with nongovernmental groups, such as the French Ligue des droits de l’homme, founded in 1898, to protect minorities as a result of the anti-Semitic Dreyfus affair.⁷

The concept of human rights stayed on the margins of high-level international politics throughout World War II. To be sure, Franklin Delano Roosevelt included the defense of human rights in his State of the Union address in January 1941 and repeated the pledge in the Allied powers’ statement of war aims on New Year’s Day 1942.⁸ However, human rights were not included in the Atlantic Charter of August 1941. In January 1942, the Declaration of the United Nations (at the time the name of the alliance of forces against the Axis powers) vowed to “preserve human rights and justice in their own lands as well as in other lands,” but there was no further elaboration on what these rights were or how they should be enforced.⁹ The UN Charter, signed on June 26, 1945, in San Francisco, also enshrined in its preamble “faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small” but remained vague regarding the definition and extent of human rights.¹⁰ It was not until December 10, 1948, that the UN General Assembly ratified the first-ever global declaration of human rights.¹¹

The principal author of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was John Peters Humphrey, a Canadian legal scholar and first director of the Human Rights Division of the United Nations Secretariat. The French jurist René Cassin, a member of the Human Rights Commission, gave it its distinctive structure: articles 1–2 laid out the general principles of human rights, followed by individual rights (articles 3–11); rights of individuals in relation to groups (articles 12–17); spiritual, public, and political rights (articles 18–21); and economic, social, and cultural rights (articles 22–27). Articles 28–30 placed the rights within the broader context of limits, duties, and order.¹² Clean and orderly as the organization of the Declaration was, it could not mask the ambiguities in the wording that led almost immediately to contestations over the meaning of such concepts as freedom and self-determination, as well as the proper relationship among individual, community, and states’ rights. Moreover, it lacked any provision for the enforcement of these rights.

Scholars and practitioners of international law dominated the field of human rights literature from the 1930s to the 1960s, among them Arnold McNair, Hersch Lauterpacht, and Egon Schwelb.¹³ Rarely did their concerns intersect with those of international relations historians. One of the most distinguished works in international relations history published in the 1930s, William Langer’s The Diplomacy of Imperialism, dealt extensively with decision-makers and diplomacy at the turn of the twentieth century, but paid little, if any, attention to the objects of that “diplomacy of imperialism.” Langer did not even address minority rights, an issue of utmost urgency in the 1930s as Jews and other minorities in Europe struggled to escape Nazi persecution.¹⁴ Even if Langer had been eschewing presentism, he must have been aware that during the age of imperialism massive migrations were taking place, not just across the Atlantic but also across the Indian and Pacific oceans, bringing different races and ethnic groups into closer contact than ever before. Samuel Flagg Bemis’s work on U.S.-Latin American relations, published during the war, addressed Nazi racism but did not identify Nazi Germany’s atrocities as human rights violations.¹⁵ Dorothy Borg’s American Policy and the Chinese Revolution, published shortly after the end of World War II as the UN commission drafted the human rights declaration, was likewise silent on race and other human rights issues.¹⁶ In short, as human rights advocates in legal and political circles shifted attention from collective to individual rights, historians remained concerned primarily with great power relations and the nation-state.

Postwar diplomatic historians, in particular, showed utmost skepticism toward the idealistic wave of rights talk. They preferred what they called a “realist” perspective, privileging matters of national security and power politics over issues of human rights and internationalism. George Kennan, Robert E. Osgood, and Henry Kissinger, among others, focused on questions of military and political power rather than ideals and values.¹⁷ The revisionists who challenged them, among them Charles Beard, Charles Tansill, and William Appleman Williams, were equally reluctant to consider ideas, values, and rights, and instead advanced an economic interpretation of international relations.¹⁸

As human rights became a major concern in international politics in the 1960s and 1970s in the aftermath of decolonization, during the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War, it, for the first time, also became a subject of historical inquiry. Among the early works addressing human rights questions were histories of the Holocaust, which proliferated after the 1961 trial in Israel of Adolf Eichmann, one of the major architects of the Nazi extermination of the Jews.¹⁹ Nonetheless, Holocaust literature remained a genre apart from both human rights and international relations literature. The burgeoning rights scholarship of the 1960s and 1970s focused on social issues, such as women’s rights, minority rights, gay and lesbian rights, and ethnic rights. The foreign relations literature began to address issues of race, gender, culture, and ideology in the 1970s, yet explicit works on human rights within the international context remained rare.²⁰

Until the end of the Cold War, the disjuncture between the intensity of human rights advocacy and the neglect of historical exploration of human rights persisted. Only since then have area specialists focused on the history of human rights abuses in particular national contexts, while international historians have explored particular aspects of human rights, including women’s rights and minority rights, as part of state-to-state relations or in conjunction with international nongovernmental organizations.²¹ Contributions by historians to the prominent journal Human Rights Quarterly have steadily increased over the past decade, though law and political science articles still dominate. By the same token, legal and political experts, as well as human rights activists, have begun to recognize the importance of placing their work in historical perspective.²²

Since 1945, human rights have been defined and redefined according to political needs, moral imperatives, and local contexts. Any historical treatment of human rights has to take account of a series of political contestations that occurred at multiple levels. Human rights advocates have disagreed with one another and with political leaders how to define human rights and whether certain rights should take precedence over others. They argued over the universality of human rights and debated the appropriate mechanisms of enforcement. These contestations make it impossible to construct a linear narrative of progress over the past six decades. But that should not lead to the assumption that no progress occurred at all even though human rights are as embattled today as they were sixty years ago. The history of human rights is local and global, particular and universal, and, above all, it is a history of both advances and setbacks.

The battle over how to define human rights in the postwar period almost immediately became entangled in the Cold War struggle between East and West. It included transnational debates about racial discrimination, decolonization, self-determination, infringements on free speech, and economic and social inequalities. Anti-communists in the United States and Western Europe charged that communism itself represented a violation of human rights because it deprived those under its rule of fundamental rights, namely, freedom of expression, freedom of movement, and religious and political freedoms. The Soviets, in turn, branded the capitalist system of the West as a human rights violation against the working poor, because it fostered economic exploitation. In addition, the West’s legacy of imperialism, they charged, violated the right to self-determination of the people in the global South. And most devastating to the United States’ reputation in the non-Western world, the Soviet Union charged the United States with violating the rights of its African American minority. Human rights thus became defined and redefined in the service of the rhetorical Cold War battle between the two superpowers.

Political debates over the definition of human rights also became part of the struggle for decolonization. States that recently won independence from colonial powers or were struggling to gain independence had a deep political stake in defining human rights first and foremost as the right to self-determination. Delegates at the 1955 Bandung Conference, where African and Asian nations sought closer economic and political cooperation and a common strategy to fight colonialism and imperialism, officially declared self-determination as the “first” right, implicitly privileging collective over individual rights. However, in an open letter to the conference delegates, Mahmoud Aboul Fath, Egyptian journalist and publisher, warned not to lose sight of individual human rights, among them the right to free speech. Fath drew on personal experience: Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt’s nationalist leader, had forced Fath into exile after his newspaper published articles sharply critical of his policies.²³ In his letter, Fath implored delegates to adhere to the standards laid out in the Human Rights Declaration. “The violation of human rights,” he warned, “is certainly bad and intolerable when committed by imperialists against peoples on whom they force their authority, but it is also worse and more obnoxious [when] committed by a few nationals against their own people.”²⁴ Fath’s statement alluded to the conflicted attitude of many Third World nationalists toward human rights. They needed to assert the right to self-determination as a collective human right to gain independence but saw little political utility in individual rights. But was self-determination, in fact, a human right? The legal scholar A. W. Brian Simpson did not think so. His definition of human rights encompassed only individual rights and excluded the collective rights of peoples and nations.²⁵ However, even though the UN Declaration did not include a specific reference to self-determination, it did address collective rights in addition to individual rights. Both were of critical importance for the creation of a just postcolonial world.

Even among those who championed both collective and individual rights, disputes arose regarding whether the attainment of certain rights should take precedence over others. When the architects of the UN Declaration distinguished between economic-social and civil-political rights by organizing them in different subsections, they did not intend to create a hierarchy of rights, nor did they see these rights in competition with one another. In practice, however, hierarchies of rights emerged in different political, economic, and social settings.²⁶ Newly independent states in the global South often placed a higher value on social and economic rights, such as rights to housing, food, clothing, education, and medical care, as well as the collective right to self-determination, while rights advocates in the industrialized world invested more energy and activism in the realization of civil and political rights, such as freedom of expression and suffrage. The North–South clash over human rights priorities erupted unexpectedly at the first UN International Women’s Year Conference in Mexico City in 1975. The United Nations had created an official venue where government representatives congregated and an unofficial one, called the Tribune, where nongovernmental women’s organizations met. At the Tribune meeting, Western and non-Western feminists clashed over which rights demanded greater attention. Non-Western feminists argued that attention to economic rights, including support for development, needed to come before attention to the attainment of gender equality. The clash over priorities exposed the gulf that still separated feminists in different parts of the world.²⁷

By the 1970s, women’s rights, environmental rights (for instance, the right to clean water and clean air), and ethnic equality became part of the global human rights discourse. This expansion of the human rights agenda challenged the principle of national sovereignty the UN had steadfastly defended since its inception. If discrimination against women in the workplace or air pollution counted as human rights violations, then corporations, interest groups, and even national governments would become vulnerable to United Nations sanctions. These groups thus undertook a concerted effort to limit the further expansion of the human rights agenda, as well as the UN’s ability to interfere in domestic affairs.

They encountered new activist groups that focused increasingly on the plight of individuals in local and national communities. One of these was Amnesty International, founded in 1961 by the British lawyer and labor activist Peter Benenson.²⁸ Amnesty International’s initial mission was to secure the release of political prisoners through letter-writing campaigns and public pressure on law enforcement agencies and governments. Though its success rate remained sketchy in the ensuing decade, the organization rapidly grew into an international network, expanding its mandate to include women’s rights, children’s rights, and the rights of refugees and torture victims. In the era of 1960s social and political protest movements, the organization’s idealistic public profile and grassroots practices found a receptive audience in the West.²⁹

By focusing on the plight of individuals, Amnesty International tried to remain politically neutral, much to the dismay of those who believed that the human rights abuses in some regimes could not and should not be separated from their political context.³⁰ The organization went so far as to advise local branches to seek adoption of political prisoners in equal proportion from Western countries, the communist world, and the Third World, so as not to seem to take sides in the Cold War conflict. Furthermore, it showed a marked preference for cases with sensationalist potential because they promised greater publicity. Critics charged that this method detracted from human rights violations that deserved equal or greater attention.³¹

The effort to elevate human rights concerns above the level of the Cold War rivalry was visible in the Helsinki Accords of 1975 as well. The accords concluded the multiyear Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), whose participants included Eastern and Western European states, as well as Canada and the United States. Eastern European governments had asked for the meeting to gain Western recognition of the existing postwar borders. In return for the acceptance of the territorial status quo, Western Europeans demanded the inclusion of specific human rights clauses in the final agreement.³² Those clauses included “respect [for] human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief, for all without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion,” and “equal rights and self-determination of peoples.”³³ The accords led to the creation of Helsinki watch groups, nongovernmental organizations that monitored compliance by all signatories, and encouraged Eastern European dissidents to challenge their governments on civil and political rights.³⁴ These human rights dissidents became instrumental in bringing down the communist regimes in 1989.³⁵

The Helsinki Accords also reaffirmed the universality of human rights, a second area of contestation in the postwar period. Cultural differences in the interpretation of human rights had been the subject of some debate during the drafting of the Declaration. Yet the mostly white Euro-American commission quickly rejected suggestions to interpret or enforce human rights differently in different parts of the world. The commission did, in fact, solicit the views of a few prominent non-Western intellectuals before it finalized the wording of the Declaration. Mahatma Gandhi, at the time arguably the Third World’s most revered spiritual leader, declared that he preferred an emphasis on duties rather than rights. He explained that “the very right to live accrues to us only when we do the duty of citizenship of the world.” Instead of a universal declaration of rights, he proposed “to define the duties of Man and Woman and correlate every right to some corresponding duty to be first performed. Every other right can be shown to be a usurpation hardly worth fighting for.” The Chinese philosopher Chung-Shu Lo concurred: he stated that in Chinese social and political discourse rights were enshrined within the language of duties to one’s neighbor.³⁶ Gandhi and Lo did not challenge human rights’ claim to universality. Their reservations concerned the framing of the rights discourse, not its substance.

The universal language of human rights initially served well the needs of Asians and Africans as they struggled for independence from colonial powers. They were able to claim for themselves the same right to self-determination, sovereignty, and free political expression as afforded the original signers of the Human Rights Declaration. In fact, during this early phase of the human rights era, it was the Western colonial powers rather than the Third World representatives who made a case for cultural relativism. In the early 1950s, Belgium, Great Britain, France, and other Western powers eager to hold onto their overseas possessions argued for an exemption clause for colonial territories. Couched in terms of cultural difference, this justification was a thinly veiled expression of racial discrimination. Advocates of the exemption clause argued that giving colonial subjects equal rights would endanger the public order.³⁷ They were, as yet, unprepared, the argument went, to handle responsibly the freedoms granted in the Universal Declaration.

For Africans and Asians, rejection of the political system of colonial governance went hand in hand with the rejection of the cultural system of human rights relativism. Their advocacy for universal human rights found expression not only at the Bandung Conference but also in other documents of the global anticolonial struggle. The African National Congress, for instance, drew heavily on the language of human rights in its 1955 formulation of the Freedom Charter.³⁸ Individual rights, the charter declared, long the prerogative of the white minority population in South Africa, should be extended to all citizens of South Africa, regardless of skin color. It took thirty-five years for those rights to become enshrined in the South African constitution.

One of the unintended consequences of the post-1960s emphasis on multiculturalism, and the attendant cultural turn in academic fields such as anthropology, sociology, literature, and history, was the revival of the cultural-relativism argument of the late 1950s. This time, however, it served the interests of the heirs of those who had earlier fought against it. In the 1990s, some African and Asian government representatives began to chip away at the increasingly expansive definition of human rights. They particularly objected to the inclusion of gender equality and tolerance of homosexuality, and sometimes the right to free speech, declaring them incompatible with non-Western traditions and social customs. For instance, when, in 1991, the United Nations Human Development Program included in its newly created Human Freedom Index a country’s treatment of homosexuals, several states objected vigorously. Kofi Awoonor, Ghana’s ambassador to the UN, claimed that freedom itself was a “value-laden concept that finds expression in different shapes and forms from society to society.” Awonoor, who was also the spokesperson for the Group of 77 in the UN, derided the index as a product “of a particular scholar representing a particular culture seen by many in recent history as linked to the oppression and exploitation of a vast part of our world.”³⁹ In many parts of the world, discussion of rights relating to sexual orientation, reproduction, and gender remained highly contested, making it difficult for women to have their rights recognized.

The defense of cultural relativism widened to what became known as the “Asian values” controversy, which dominated the 1993 UN Human Rights Conference in Vienna. Eager to justify their own authoritarianism, several countries, including China, Iran, Syria, Singapore, and Malaysia, assailed the UDHR as an instrument of Western imperialism. They demanded instead the primacy of the right to national sovereignty over universal claims of human rights.⁴⁰ At a regional meeting of Asian countries at Bangkok the previous spring, Asian delegates stressed the cultural specificity of regional applications of human rights and emphasized national self-determination and sovereignty as key human rights. Article 8 of the Bangkok Declaration contended that “while human rights are universal in nature, they must be considered in the context of a dynamic and evolving process of international norm-setting, bearing in mind the significance of national and regional particularities and various historical, cultural and religious backgrounds.”⁴¹

Asian human rights organizations and leading intellectuals who met at the same time in Bangkok and Vienna immediately challenged the official position. They rejected the cultural-relativism argument and declared instead that “universal human rights are rooted in many cultures,” and that because “human rights are of universal concern and are universal in value, the advocacy of human rights cannot be considered to be an encroachment upon national sovereignty.”⁴² Asian human rights organizations were very much aware of how their governments exploited the debates over cultural relativism to justify human rights abuses. While they acknowledged that cultural differences existed, they argued that universal human rights as defined in the 1948 UDHR applied to all cultures. The Asian NGOs scored a major victory in Vienna with the approval of the creation of the post of a UN Commissioner for Human Rights, a measure opposed by Asian governments because of the potential for further “Western” interference in their internal affairs.⁴³

Asian intellectuals mounted perhaps the strongest challenge to the Asian values argument by questioning the existence of a single Asian culture whose values were different from the “West.” One of them, the Indian economist Amartya Sen dismissed the argument made by Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew and China’s Li Peng that Asian cultures had greater appreciation for authoritarian rule and less appreciation for individual freedoms and civil rights because authoritarianism had produced economic progress in Asia.⁴⁴ Since authoritarianism long preceded economic progress, Sen countered, the origins of that success must lay elsewhere. In addition, he pointed to specific Asian religious and cultural ideas, notably Buddhism, that promoted civic and personal independence over blind obedience to authority. Conversely, he pointed to evidence in Western philosophical and intellectual texts of a deep appreciation and valorization of authoritarianism. Sen’s interpretation of human rights embedded cultural particularities within the framework of human rights universalism.

A final area of contestation occurred on the subject of enforcement. Neither the UN Charter nor the Universal Declaration of Human Rights offered a road map for the enforcement of human rights in international, national, and local contexts. The 1949 Geneva Conventions, too, had to rely on the will and ability of participating nations to enforce adherence. The conventions consisted of a set of four treaties that provided a detailed body of rules concerning the humane treatment of prisoners and victims of war.⁴⁵ The lack of an enforcement provision was deliberate: no support existed for granting the United Nations the power to interfere in the sovereignty of its member states (see Article 2 of the UN Charter), thus giving significant leeway to national and regional bodies to either devise a mechanism for the enforcement of human rights or to treat it with indifference.⁴⁶ The United Nations formulated the ideals but was unwilling to give them teeth. Regional treaties and conventions went much further in this respect, which led to an uneven application of human rights principles around the world.

UN member states only gradually developed enforcement mechanisms often mediated through supplemental continental human rights declarations. The first and most powerful such manifestation came from the Council of Europe, which created the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (ECHR). Enacted in 1953, it guaranteed adherence of all member states to a human rights code and created an international court, the European Court of Human Rights, to adjudicate violations of human rights in Europe.⁴⁷ However, the fourteen signatories of the convention made adherence voluntary. Acceptance of individual petitions was voluntary as well, leaving much of the power of jurisdiction still in the hands of participating states.⁴⁸

Even when U.S. President Jimmy Carter made human rights a cornerstone of his foreign policy agenda in 1977, Cold War considerations restricted his ability to put pressure on many repressive regimes.⁴⁹ Carter’s failure to apply human rights principles consistently to his foreign policy together with the reemergence of Cold War tensions in the late 1970s undermined again the enforcement of human rights in international relations. To be sure, his successor, Ronald Reagan, liberally employed human rights rhetoric to denounce the Soviet Union, but did little to enforce human rights around the world.

In 1979, Latin American states followed the European model with the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. The court created the enforcement mechanisms lacking in the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man, signed more than three decades earlier in April 1948. The court operated under the auspices of the Organization of American States (OAS), a regional foreign policy body created in 1948 to coordinate relations between American states and the rest of the world.⁵⁰ The African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights was established in Arusha, Tanzania, in 2004. The court was authorized to enforce the provisions laid down in the 1981 African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights.⁵¹ Asia, to date, does not have a regional convention on human rights or a judicial body to enforce human rights laws, leaving the interpretation and enforcement of human rights to individual states.

The first global effort to enforce human rights laws came only after the end of the Cold War in the 1990s, when the United Nations set up ad hoc courts to deal with war criminals in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. In 1993, the United Nations Security Council established the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) to try individuals accused of human rights violations in that territory since 1991. Defendants included the former Serbian Prime Minister Slobodan Milošević, former President of the Serbian Republic of Bosnia-Herzgovina, Radovan Karadžić, and former Bosnian Serb military leader Ratko Mladić.⁵²

In 1994, the UN Security Council established the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), a similar ad hoc court to bring to justice perpetrators of the genocide there. The court heard several dozen cases over the next decade and a half and is scheduled to complete its work in 2012. Among its most prominent defendants were Rwanda’s interim Prime Minister Jean Kambanda and Jean-Paul Akayesu, mayor of the town of Tabe where Hutu militants systematically rounded up and killed Tutsis. Both Kambanda and Akayesu received life sentences.⁵³ Even though the United Nations was gradually developing the mechanisms to bring to justice human rights violators in Yugoslavia and Rwanda, countless other offenders in Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Somalia, and elsewhere went untried. In 1998, UN member states agreed to create the International Criminal Court (ICC) as an institution separate from the United Nations, but working in close cooperation with it. By the end of 2010, 114 states had signed on to the court, including most European countries. Notable exceptions included the United States and Israel. The court’s jurisdiction is limited to the prosecution of nationals whose governments belong to the court and in cases where “the investigating or prosecuting State is unwilling or unable to genuinely carry out the investigation or prosecution.”⁵⁴

By the beginning of the twenty-first century, disputes over definition, universality, and enforcement of human rights remained unresolved. In fact, disagreement intensified in the aftermath of the September 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, DC, which claimed almost three thousand lives. The Bush administration justified its pursuit of Al Qaeda terrorists first in Afghanistan, then in Iraq in part by pointing to the Taliban’s and Saddam Hussein’s human rights violations. The revelation of the torture and physical abuse of prisoners in American custody at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, however, brought charges of human rights abuses against the United States itself.⁵⁵ Legal advisers’ efforts to justify abusive interrogation techniques such as waterboarding caused a domestic and international uproar. The incident gravely damaged the reputation of the United States as a champion of universal human rights.⁵⁶ As the U.S. government became entangled in its own rhetorical battle over what constituted torture, human rights violations, most hidden from public view, remained endemic and systematic in many parts of the world.

The evolution of human rights discourse and activism cannot be separated from political, economic, and cultural globalization.⁵⁷ Globalization allowed human rights advocates to move beyond the primacy of the nation-state, though it by no means eliminated the state as a source and a target of activism. Globalization has contributed to the fragmentation of national and international communities by linking the local to the global. It has elevated the importance of new means of communication and information technology. Though imperfect and uneven, global human rights networks broadcast eyewitness testimony and visual images of human rights abuses, thus engaging a global audience in the campaign against perpetrators.⁵⁸ Those efforts have not created an international consensus on the meaning and extent of the human rights regime, however. To the contrary, multiple groups and political constituencies continue to battle over how to define human rights, and these groups often operate in the interest of political expediency rather than moral principle. As a result, the understanding of human rights in the early twenty-first century is possibly more fragmented than ever before.

The essays in this volume examine human rights issues with respect to both political utility and moral principle. They showcase the theoretical and philosophical debates about the meaning of human rights, as well as the practical implications of the emergence of human rights as a political cause in the service of varied international political agendas. Because of the latter, the United States figures prominently in many of the essays. Americans, both governmental and nongovernmental actors, played a significant role in shaping the international human rights discourse. These essays show the multiple and, at times, contradictory facets of those discourses over the past sixty years. Kenneth Cmiel’s chapter analyzes the historiography of human rights through 2004. He identified two major approaches: the exploration of the evolution of the language and meaning of human rights, and the history of human rights activism. For Cmiel, human rights history was inseparable from the processes of globalization, and he encouraged scholars to further explore human rights from a variety of perspectives. The essays that follow demonstrate the richness of those new perspectives both in the early postwar period, when states, organizations, and individuals struggled to make sense of the language and scope of human rights, and since the 1960s, when human rights campaigns turned global.

Focusing on the moment in 1945 when human rights first took center stage in the international arena, Daniel Cohen dispels the popular myth of the close link between the Holocaust and the birth of the human rights regime. Even though several key architects of the Declaration were profoundly and personally affected by the German mass murder of Jews, they did not invoke the Holocaust in the drafting of the document. Instead, Cohen argues, the UDHR and other human rights documents set the stage for the later memorialization of the Holocaust. He regards the human rights revolution as the first instance of philosemitism in the postwar period.

Elizabeth Borgwardt and William Hitchcock explore the meaning and substance of two key human rights texts, the Nuremberg Principles and the Geneva Conventions. Like Cohen, they argue that each document’s meaning and significance expanded over time. Borgwardt shows that the Nuremberg Principles were originally aspirational and highly contested but became inscribed in the international legal system through a process of “thickening.” The principles became constitutionalized through their codification in a variety of national and regional statutes, as well as through their application in domestic and regional disputes over human rights. Hitchcock reveals a similar trajectory for the Geneva Conventions. Like the Nuremberg Principles, the Geneva Conventions had to rely on states and courts to apply them. Hitchcock argues that the human rights principles enshrined in the Geneva Conventions grew in stature, to a point where even the most powerful nations found themselves bound by them. Even if in its original provisions the conventions included scant directive as to the mechanisms of enforcement, by the twenty-first century those mechanisms were firmly in place.

Atina Grossmann moves the theoretical discussion of human rights ideals to the material level of human survival. In the context of postwar Germany, where Jewish survivors of the Holocaust competed with German nationals for food allocation, Grossmann argues that material aid was not just a means to physical survival but became an emotional and ideational symbol of one’s status as war victim and human being. She explains that basic human rights like food and shelter took on political meaning and remained hotly contested in the immediate postwar period. Allida Black provides a bridge to the globalization of human rights by documenting the long and arduous struggle of getting women’s rights recognized as human rights in the United Nations. Black traces the campaign for women’s rights from the early days of the Human Rights Commission under the leadership of Eleanor Roosevelt to the 1995 UN World Conference on Women in Beijing. Black demonstrates the fine line women’s advocates walked between working toward their objectives within the system and establishing separate institutions.

Focusing on the global implications of the human rights discourse since the 1960s, Samuel Moyn explores the nexus between decolonization and human rights rhetoric. He argues that human rights rose in the era when the Allies were stepping back from earlier promises of collective self-determination in which colonized peoples were more directly interested. As decolonization proceeded and their influence in the UN General Assembly grew, the “new states” that arose on the ruins of the empire made self-determination the first human right, implying a fully decolonized world and supporting antiracist and developmental agendas, rather than the individual protections that international human rights eventually connoted. Moyn concludes that while in theory there was no need to champion collective over individual rights, in practice that was often the case. Brad Simpson reveals another dimension of the treachery of hierarchies via a case study of human rights violations in East Timor in the 1970s. As Indonesia placated the Carter administration with a steady trickle of releases of political prisoners, it engaged in massive human rights violations in its struggle to absorb East Timor, a former Portuguese colony that had declared independence in 1975. Simpson’s analysis demonstrates that privileging either individual or collective human rights could not produce a viable human rights regime. He also shows that definitions of self-determination remained hotly contested in the 1970s and resulted not only in competing claims to the “first right” of self-determination but also to human rights abuses in support of that right of self-determination.

Barbara Keys provides another case study from the late 1960s, the international campaign to end torture in Greece. She illustrates how Amnesty International’s documentation of torture in Greece helped fuel an embrace of international human rights as a new cause for American liberals disillusioned by the Vietnam War—a cause that gave special prominence to integrity-of-the-person abuses, such as torture, while neglecting other abuses. The human rights “boom” is typically traced to the 1970s, but Keys shows that its origins and its preoccupation with torture lay, in part, in the 1960s campaign against the Greek junta. Liberals embraced the anti-torture campaign because it allowed them to bypass the traditional political fault lines of the Cold War. The conservative flipside to the liberal campaign against torture is the subject of Carl Bon Tempo’s essay. He examines the 1970s human rights campaign of Freedom House, an American bipartisan foreignpolicy think tank founded in 1941. Unlike Keys’s political liberals, who welcomed the chance to escape the Cold War focus on anti-communism, Freedom House members capitalized on it by offering a distinctly conservative vision of human rights activism that focused on infractions of free speech and free movement in the communist world.

The next two essays offer two perspectives on the human rights discourse with respect to the Soviet Union. Paul Rubinson focuses on a group of prominent U.S. scientists that, until the late 1970s, attempted to bypass Cold War divisions and politics in the interest of global scientific endeavors. However, the imprisonment of scientists who were engaged in the Soviet dissident movement compelled them to become human rights activists on behalf of their Soviet colleagues. Sarah Snyder puts the spotlight on the remarkable transformation of international human rights politics under Gorbachev. She credits the human rights watch groups that emerged in the aftermath of the Helsinki Accords with prompting the Gorbachev regime to change its approach to human rights in the Soviet Union. Her essay demonstrates the important interplay between NGOs and high-level diplomacy in the final years of the Cold War. Both Snyder and Rubinson reveal the central role nongovernmental groups played in advancing the human rights agenda.

Kelly Shannon, like the previous two contributors, reveals the growing power of NGOs in international relations in her explorations of the international campaign during the 1980s and 1990s against female genital mutilation (FGM). That campaign illustrates the expansion of the idea of human rights to include women’s rights, the growing importance of individual rights vis-à-vis the demands of state sovereignty, and the growing strength of human rights universalism over cultural relativism. Though the road to success was fraught with conflicts, even among feminists, Shannon argues that at least in principle, if not in enforcement, by the beginning of the twenty-first century the international community was condemning FGM as a violation of human rights.

Alexis Dudden’s essay takes stock of the history of human rights discourse refracted through the lens of memorialization. She discusses the competing motivations attached to the politics of apology that proliferated dramatically in the 1990s. Using Japan as a case study, Dudden argues that victims demanded an official apology to make their past suffering visible, and thus part of the historical record. The Japanese government, in contrast, offered apologies as a political tool to contain the same past. The former see apology as a starting point for coming to terms with the past, the latter see it as an end point for their accountability. The Japanese case most starkly illustrates the political capital invested in the human rights dialogue at the end of the twentieth century.

Mark Bradley completes the collection with an assessment of sixty years under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. He suggests that we need to set aside the skepticism and triumphalism of human rights history to concentrate on moments of—in Lynn Hunt’s words—“jumps and discontinuities.” He illustrates these jumps and discontinuities by focusing on human rights moments in the 1940s, 1970s, and 1990s.

Kenneth Cmiel, at the end of his essay in this book, struck a tone of uncertainty about the future of both human rights activism and the fate of future scholarship. “Only time will tell,” he surmised, if the enthusiasm about human rights of the 1990s will be undermined by a new cynicism prevalent in the aftermath of 9/11, the same way “the Cold War and decolonization undermined the previous decade’s enthusiasm and stopped the nascent drive for international human rights law in its tracks for the next fifty years.” We might not be able to accurately predict the fate of human rights in the world in the coming decades, but, as this volume shows, human rights as a field of historical inquiry is alive and well, and thriving and expanding as never before. The hope remains that in the future the practice of human rights will expand as well.

NOTES

1. William H. McNeill, A World History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967); J. M. Roberts, History of the World (New York: Knopf, 1976).

2. See Kenneth Cmiel, “The Recent History of Human Rights,” American Historical Review 109, no. 1 (February 2004): 117–35. Reprinted in this volume.

3. Among the works to appear since Cmiel’s historiographical survey are Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision of Human Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); Mary E. Stuckey, Jimmy Carter, Human Rights, and the National Agenda (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2009); Roland Burke, Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, Harvard, 2010). Human Rights Quarterly, the leading journal on human rights scholarship has a heavy emphasis on law and policy, though it has increased its publication of articles by historians. For historical articles see Roland Burke, “‘The Compelling Dialogue of Freedom’: Human Rights at the Bandung Conference,” Human Rights Quarterly 28, no. 4 (2006): 947–65; Charles Rhéaume, “Western Scientists’ Reaction to Andrei Sakharov’s Human Rights Struggle in the Soviet Union, 1968–1989,” Human Rights Quarterly 30, no. 1 (2008): 1–20; Paige Arthur, “How ‘Transitions’ Reshaped Human Rights: A Conceptual History of Transitional Justice,” Human Rights Quarterly 31, no. 2 (2009): 321–67.

4. See Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: Norton, 2007); see also Lynn Hunt, ed. The French Revolution and Human Rights: A Brief Documentary History (Boston: Bedford, 1996).

5. Paul Gordon Lauren, The Evolution of International Human Rights: Visions Seen, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 37–70.

6. See, for instances, the cruel colonial Belgian regime in the Congo, the subject of Adam Hochschild’s book King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998).

7. Lauren, The Evolution of Human Rights, 73. See also William Irvine, Between Justice and Politics: The Ligue des droits de l’homme, 1898-1945 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007).

8. Jan Herman Burgers, “The Road to San Francisco: The Revival of the Human Rights Idea in the Twentieth Century,” Human Rights Quarterly 14, no. 4 (November 1992): 448. Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).

9. Mark Mazower, “The Strange Triumph of Human Rights, 1933–1950,” The Historical Journal 47, no. 2 (June 2004): 385.

10. For the full text of the Charter of the United Nations see the UN website, http://www.un.org/en/documents/charter/index.shtml.

11. For a full text of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights see the UN website, http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/.

12. Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York: Random House, 2001), 174.

13. Hersch Lauterpacht, International Law and Human Rights (New York: F. A. Praeger, 1950); Arnold McNair, The Development of International Justice: Two Lectures Delivered at the Law Center of New York University in December, 1953 (New York: New York University Press, 1954). Egon Schwelb, Human Rights and the International Community: The Roots and Growth of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948–1963 (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1964). Later works include A. W. Brian Simpson, Human Rights and the End of Empire: Britain and the Genesis of the European Convention (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Geoffrey Robertson, Crimes Against Humanity: The Struggle for Global Justice (New York: The New Press, 2000). Among works by political scientists (and political activists) were William Korey, The Key to Human Rights Implementation (New York: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1968); Richard Pierre Claude, Comparative Human Rights (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). Claude became the founding editor of Universal Human Rights, later renamed Human Rights Quarterly. See also Moyn, The Last Utopia, 182–86.

14. William H. Langer, The Diplomacy of Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1935).

15. Samuel Flagg Bemis, The Latin American Policy of the United States (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1943).

16. Dorothy Borg, America’s Policy and the Chinese Revolution, 1925–1928 (New York: Octagon Books, 1947).

17. See for instance, George Kennan, American Diplomacy, 1900–1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951); Robert Endicott Osgood, Ideals and Self-Interest in American Foreign Relations in America’s Foreign Relations: The Great Transformation of the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953); Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995).

18. Charles A. Beard, President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1941: A Study in Appearances and Realities (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1948); Charles Callan Tansill, Back Door to War: The Roosevelt Foreign Policy 1933–1941 (Chicago: H. Regnery Co, 1952); William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (Cleveland, OH: World Pub. Co., 1959, repr. Dell, 1962).

19. See, for instance, Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking, 1963); Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (1961; repr. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1967); Jehuda Bauer, The Holocaust in Historical Perspective (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1978).

20. Among them Michael Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987); Akira Iriye, Power and Culture: The Japanese-American War, 1941–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981); John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon, 1986); Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches & Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (London: Pandora, 1989). Gaddis Smith wrote about human rights as part of his analysis of Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy in Morality, Reason, and Power: American Diplomacy in the Carter Years (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986).

21. See for example H. Gordon Skilling, Charter 77 and Human Rights in Czechoslovakia (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981); Rosemary Foot, Rights Beyond Borders: The Global Community and the Struggle over Human Rights in China (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Lauren, The Evolution of International Human Rights; Glendon, A World Made New.

22. One of the first contributions to the history of human rights was by the political scientist M. Glen Johnson, “Historical Perspectives on Human Rights and U.S. Foreign Policy,” Universal Human Rights 2, no. 3 (July–September 1980): 1–18.

23. According to a 1954 article in Time magazine, Aboul Fath and his brother Hussein’s opposition to Nasserist politics stemmed at least in part from business interests rather than concerns over free speech. See “The Press; Egyptian Uproar,” Time, May 17, 1954.

24. Mahmoud Aboul Fath, letter to Bandung Delegates (April 13, 1955), cited in Roland Burke, “‘The Compelling Dialogue of Freedom’: Human Rights at the Bandung Conference,” Human Rights Quarterly 28, no. 4 (2006): 951. See also Burke Decolonization and the Evolution of Human Rights.

25. A. W. Brian Simpson, Human Rights and the End of Empire: Britain and the Genesis of the European Convention (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 300–301. See also Moyn, The Last Utopia, 84–89; Jan Eckel, “Utopie der Moral, Kalkül der Macht: Menschenrechte in der globalen Politik seit 1945,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 49 (2009): 451; See also Burke, Decolonization and the Evolution of Human Rights, 35–38. For the issue of minority rights after World War I see Mazower, “The Strange Triumph of Human Rights,” 382.

26. See Moyn, The Last Utopia.

27. Christa Wichterich, “Strategische Verschwisterung, multiple Feminismen und die Glokalisierung von Frauenbewegungen,” in Frauenbewegungen weltweit: Aufbrüche, Kontinuitäten, Veränderungen, Hg., Ilse Lenz, Michiko Mae, Karin Klose (Opladen: Leske + Budrich, 2000), 257–58. See also Jocelyn Olcott “Cold War Conflicts and Cheap Cabaret: Sexual Politics at the 1975 United Nations International Women’s Year Conference” Gender and History 22, no. 3 (November 2010): 733–54.

28. Tom Buchanan, “The Truth Will Set You Free! The Making of Amnesty International,” Journal of Contemporary History 37, no. 4 (2002): 575–97.

29. Jonathan Power, Amnesty International: The Human Rights Story (New York: Pergamon Press, 1981); Kirsten Sellars, The Rise and Rise of Human Rights (Stroud: Sutton Publishing Ltd, 2002), 97–113; Stephen Hopgood, Keepers of the Flame: Understanding Amnesty International (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006).

30. Sellars, The Rise and Rise of Human Rights, 97. Sellars argues that despite the official insistence on political neutrality, the leadership was at times strongly partisan in favor of British positions. See also Hopgood, Keepers of the Flame, 4–6.

31. Eckel, “Utopie der Moral, Kalkül der Macht,” 460–61.

32. William Korey, The Promises We Keep: Human Rights, the Helsinki Process, and American Foreign Policy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), 5–9.

33. For a full text of the Helsinki Accords see University of Minnesota Human Rights Library, The Final Act of the Conference on Secuirty and Cooperation in Europe, August 1, 19755, 14 I.L.M. 1292 (Helsinki Declaration); Accessed at http://www1.umn.edu/humanrts/osce/basics/finact75.htm.

34. William Korey, NGOs and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “A Curious Grapevine” (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 242–43.

35. Those dissidents included Andrei Sakharov, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Vaclav Havel. For more detail see Daniel C. Thomas, The Helsinki Effect: International Norms, Human Rights and the Demise of Communism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).

36. Mohandas Gandhi, “Letter addressed to the Director-General of UNESCO,” and Chung-Shu Lo, “Human Rights in the Chinese Tradition,” cited in Glendon, A World Made New, 75.

37. Burke, “The Compelling Dialogue of Freedom,” 962; Burke, Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights, 40.

38. “The Freedom Charter,” reprinted in Third World Quarterly 9, no. 2 (April 1987): 672–77.

39. Kofi Awoonor, “Statement by H.E. Dr. Kofi Awoonor, Ambassador and Permanent Representative of Ghana and Chairman of the Group of 77 in the General Debate of the UNDP Governing Council, June 11th, 1991” (New York: The Group of 77, 1992), 2, cited in Russel Lawrence Barsh, “Measuring Human Rights: Problems of Methodology and Purpose,” Human Rights Quarterly 15, no. 1 (February 1993): 87–88. For a powerful critique of the use of cultural relativism in Iran see Reza Afshari, Human Rights in Iran: The Abuse of Cultural Relativism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 1–13.

40. See the report on the opening day by Elaine Sciolino, “U.S. Rejects Notion that Human Rights Vary by Culture,” New York Times, June 15, 1993.

41. Asian Cultural Forum on Development, Our Voice: Bangkok NGO Declaration on Human Rights (Bangkok, 1993). The African meeting was held in Tunis in November 1992 and stressed the primacy of development as a human right. The Latin American meeting took place in January 1993 and confirmed the universality of human rights. Only the Asian meeting in Bangkok produced controversy. The declaration is reprinted in Asian Cultural Forum on Development, Our Voice, 244.

42. Ibid., 199.

43. William Korey, NGOs and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 273–306. For the full text of the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action (VDPA) see United Nations General Assembly, Distr. General A/Conf.157/23, 12 July 1993, World Conference on Human Rights, accessed online at http://www.unhchr.ch/huridocda/huridoca.nsf/(Symbol)/A.CONF.157.23.En?OpenDocument (accessed June 3, 2009).

44. Amartya Sen, “Human Rights and Asian Values: What Kee Kuan Yew and Le Peng Don’t Understand about Asia,” New Republic, July 14, 1997, 1–9.

45. For a full text of the Geneva Conventions of 1949 see the website of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) at http://www.icrc.org/ihl.nsf/INTRO?OpenView.

46. Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 8.

47. Simpson, Human Rights and the End of Empire.

48. Helen Keller and Alex Stone Sweet, eds., A Europe of Rights: The Impact of the ECHR on National Legal Systems (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 5–11.

49. Gaddis Smith, Morality, Reason, and Power: American Diplomacy in the Carter Years (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986). See also Stuckey, Jimmy Carter, Human Rights, and the National Agenda.

50. Anna P. Schreiber, The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (Leiden, Sijthoff, 1970); J. Scott Davidson, The Inter-American Human Rights System (Brookfield, VT: Dartmouth Publishing Co., 1997). See also Eckel, “Utopie der Moral,” 449–50.

51. Frans Viljoen, International Human Rights in Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

52. Samantha Power, “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 326, 475–76.

53. Ibid., 484–86.

54. See the ICC’s official website at http://www.icc-cpi.int/.

55. For a detailed account of the Abu Ghraib case see Seymour M. Hersh, “Torture at Abu Ghraib,” “Chain of Command,” and “The Gray Zone,” all in The New Yorker, May 10, 2004, 42; May 17, 2004, 38; May 24, 2004, 38.

56. Jane Mayer, “The Memo: How an Internal Effort to Ban the Abuse and Torture of Detainees was Thwarted,” The New Yorker, February 27, 2006, 32.

57. Kenneth Cmiel, “Review Essay: The Recent History of Human Rights,” American Historical Review 109, no. 1 (February 2004): 130.

58. For the importance of communication see Kenneth Cmiel, “The Emergence of Human Rights Politics in the United States,” Journal of American History 86, no. 3 (December 1999): 1231–50.