Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights

Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights

Bert B. Lockwood, Jr., Series Editor

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

Decolonization

and the Evolution

of International Human Rights

Roland Burke

PENN

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 2010 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Burke, Roland.

   Decolonization and the evolution of international human rights / Roland Burke.

       p. cm. — (Pennsylvania studies in human rights)

   ISBN 978-0-8122-4219-5 (alk. paper)

   Includes bibliographical references and index.

   1. Human rights. 2. Decolonization. I. Title.

JC571.B85 2010

323—dc22                                          2009029042

Contents

Introduction: The Politics of Decolonization and the Evolution of the International Human Rights Project

1. Human Rights and the Birth of the Third World: The Bandung Conference

2. Transforming the End into the Means: The Third World and the Right to Self-Determination

3. Putting the Stamps Back On: Apartheid, Anticolonialism, and the Accidental Birth of a Universal Right to Petition

4. It Is Very Fitting: Celebrating Freedom in the Shah's Iran, the First World Conference on Human Rights, Tehran 1968

5. According to Their Own Norms of Civilization: The Rise of Cultural Relativism and the Decline of Human Rights

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Introduction

The Politics of Decolonization and the Evolution of the International Human Rights Project

the backward countries are in revolt!…[Eleanor Roosevelt] thinks that it is a revolt of the dark skinned people against the white. It is more than that.

—John Humphrey, Director of the Human Rights Division, 7 and 24 November 1950

On 10 December 1948, an overwhelming majority of states adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in a momentous night session of the United Nations General Assembly. It was the culmination of nearly three years of intensive debate, negotiation, and far-reaching philosophical inquiry. The final text drew on more than fifty constitutions, countless written submissions, and the religious and moral traditions of every major belief system in existence. Among the delegations that delivered their assent were those from Afghanistan, Egypt, Taiwan, India, Pakistan, Liberia, Lebanon, Thailand, and the Philippines. Only the communist bloc, apartheid South Africa, and Saudi Arabia withheld their endorsement. Not without reason did the UN proclaim the declaration a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations. For the fifty-eight-member General Assembly, it was an auspicious beginning to its mission to promote human rights around the globe.

This is the story of what happened after the passage of the Universal Declaration, as those fifty-eight members were joined by another fifty-eight, and then almost fifty-eight again, becoming a truly global General Assembly. Between 1950 and 1979, the process of decolonization transformed the UN and the shape of human rights discourse. The Asian, African, and Arab states that coalesced into the self-conscious Third World brought a powerful new set of voices to those of 1948. These Third World diplomats made pivotal contributions to some of the most significant events in the UN human rights project. Their arguments shifted debates that determined the universality of rights. Their votes shaped the two most authoritative instruments of human rights law, the International Covenants. Their activism led to individuals from across the world having petitions heard by a UN that once filed them away in secret. Above all, their very presence was an essential prerequisite to any genuine claim of legislating on behalf of all peoples and all nations, as the assembly had so famously done in the Universal Declaration.

This study seeks to add another dimension to the history of the international struggle for human rights. Through each of these landmarks in the evolution of the UN, I will argue for the central importance of Arab, Asian, and African participation. The impact of these states in the development of the rights program was at least as important as that of the Western democracies, the Soviet bloc, and the ever-growing constellation of NGOs. While the effects of the Cold War and the rise of international civil society have been documented by an impressive array of scholars, the revolutionary influence of decolonization has yet to be fully explored in human rights history.

Yet the importance of the nascent Third World was striking from the earliest moments of UN activity. Less than two years after the 1948 vote, John Humphrey, the first director of the Human Rights Division, was expressing alarm at the rise of a confident group of Arab and Asian delegates. The ‘backward' countries are in revolt! he declared in his diary in November 1950.¹ Eleanor Roosevelt and Charles Malik, major figures in the creation of the Universal Declaration, observed the same phenomenon. Well before the high point of decolonization, the emerging Third World voice had already begun to transform the human rights project.

Within academic literature, a number of scholars have recovered the role of Arab and Asian diplomats in these foundational years. Mary Ann Glendon, Susan Waltz, Paul Gordon Lauren, and Kenneth Cmiel have illuminated the work of key Third World figures in the UN human rights program in the late 1940s and early 1950s.² Most of these studies terminate in the immediate aftermath of the Universal Declaration, long before decolonization's impact was fully apparent. They cover a small chronological range that predates the principal era of Third World activism and so deal with only the earliest period of Third World participation. The years in which decolonization virtually remade the UN, between the late 1950s and mid-1970s, have paradoxically received the least attention.

This study will shed light on those vital years and forgotten voices that have been missing from human rights historiography. It is the first historical account of the influence of decolonization on the UN human rights program, and surveys the three decades in which the anticolonial movement radically altered the human rights agenda. Through its expansive chronological scope, it seeks to show the outcomes of Third World participation, and how Arab, Asian, and African approaches to international human rights changed over time. Using UN transcripts, archives, and the personal papers of key historical actors, it provides a detailed narrative of decolonization's effects on thirty years of UN human rights debates, and a dedicated analysis of the Third World's crucial position in human rights diplomacy.

The first chapter investigates the place of human rights at the founding moment of the Third World, at the 1955 Asian-African Conference in Bandung. It explores the relationship between anticolonial nationalism and individual rights, and the enthusiasm with which the decolonized states embraced the concept of universality. At Bandung, human rights were both a central feature of the political vocabulary and the source of serious debate. When communist China challenged the legitimacy of the Universal Declaration, it was forced into an embarrassing retreat by the smaller Arab, Asian, and African states present, which demanded the declaration's recognition by the conference Final Communiqué.

In Chapter 2, rights and nationalism are discussed in relation to the campaign for a right to self-determination. The self-determination debates reveal the competing tendencies within anticolonialism, and the tension between the struggle for sovereignty and the struggle for rights. The right to self-determination campaign began with two strands, one that exalted sovereignty for its own sake, and one that claimed it as a means to individual freedom. For a decade, these two antagonistic facets of anticolonialism coexisted, until gradually one began to take precedence over the other, consuming it entirely in the 1960s.

Chapters 3 and 4 assess the stunning political shifts of the 1960s, which followed African decolonization and the proliferation of authoritarian regimes across both Asia and Africa. The impact of these changes on one of the most important UN debates, that on the right to petition, is the focus of Chapter 3. Beginning in the late 1940s, Arab and Asian delegates were among the most passionate advocates of a right for victims of human rights abuses to petition the UN. Their campaign failed, obstructed by both the Soviet bloc and the Western states. Ironically, the struggle for the right to petition met with much greater success in the 1960s, when the majority of Third World states were ruled by authoritarian regimes that jealously guarded their sovereignty.

Chapter 4 measures the cumulative effects of decolonization, as exemplified by the First World Conference on Human Rights, held in Tehran in April 1968. Two decades after the adoption of the Universal Declaration, the political rights once embraced by anticolonial nationalists at Bandung were subject to unprecedented attack. Development, modernization, and armed liberation struggle were elevated as the tenets of a disturbing new human rights platform. A confident Afro-Asian majority dominated the proceedings, and sidelined the two superpowers in the process. In response to the Third World assault on traditional human rights, the Western democracies reacted defensively and abandoned promotion of ideas that supposedly defined their political systems.

Chapter 5 traces the provenance of cultural relativist claims in UN discourse, and the rise of this relativist ideology in the rhetoric of Third World diplomacy in the 1970s. During the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, Afro-Asian delegates were the most vocal champions of universality. They made strident demands for universal application of rights a key plank in the attack on colonialism, while the colonial powers responded with well-crafted arguments about the essential cultural differences of their overseas territories. Yet in the late 1960s this universalist position began a precipitous reversal, coincident with the spread of authoritarian governments in Asia and Africa. The 1970s saw the virtual abandonment of universality in a profoundly undemocratic UN. Unlike the first wave of nationalist leaders, these governments denounced human rights as a Western imposition, and emphasized the need for different rights in Third World countries. The most extreme among them rejected the very possibility of universal human rights. Universality, unimpeachably anticolonial in the 1950s, was rendered deeply suspect by the 1980s.

Three main arguments run through this book. First, it argues for the primacy of decolonization as a political force in the evolution of the UN human rights agenda, refuting the assertion that rights were formulated exclusively by the West. Second, it elucidates the multidimensional nature of anticolonialism and its relationship to individual rights, contesting the claim that human rights were little more than a rhetorical weapon for lambasting the Western democracies. Finally, it challenges orthodox assumptions about the overall outcome of decolonization for the human rights program, which have been polarized between those who laud the Third World contribution and those who perceive it as highly detrimental or even disastrous.

Academic experts and East Asian political leaders alike have questioned the very existence of a Third World role in the human rights program. Politicians such as former Singaporean Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew and former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamed have dismissed human rights law as dominated by the West. In July 1997, Mahathir demanded a review of the Universal Declaration, dismissing it as the product of negotiation between superpowers which did not understand the needs of poor countries.³ Kenyan human rights commentator Makau Mutua has written that the levers of power at the United Nations and other international lawmaking forums were out of the reach of the Third World.⁴

Contrary to Mutua's lamentation and the polemics of Mahathir and Lee, I contend that Third World actors were principal arbiters of power in the human rights program almost from its inception. This was not just a corollary of numerical superiority; the power of Third World diplomats was manifest well before decolonization had made their ranks a majority. For almost three decades, the situation in the UN was precisely the opposite of that claimed by Mutua. The levers of power were frequently operated by Arab, Asian, and African delegations. Assertions of Third World impotence would come as a surprise to both Western and Soviet foreign service officers who spent much of their time reacting to Afro-Asian bloc initiatives, and to members of the UN Secretariat, who spent their careers resigned to Third World dominance.

Among scholars of both imperialism and human rights, the status of anticolonialism as a human rights cause has also been sharply criticized. Brian Simpson, in his impressive history of human rights and the end of the British Empire, has argued that the anti-colonial movement was not in essence a human rights movement because its primary aim was not to reduce the power of the state over the individual, that being the defining characteristic of all human rights activism.⁵ This view has been amplified by Reza Afshari in a groundbreaking article that proposes a radical revision of the canonical set of human rights campaigns, with anticolonialism a prominent deletion from the list.⁶

These critiques are properly skeptical of colonial nationalist invocations of human rights, but they are too dismissive of the genuine optimism with which Third World diplomats approached the human rights question, especially in the 1950s. The relationship of rights and anticolonialism combined both political self-interest and natural ideological affinity. Instrumental use of human rights in anticolonial politics was certainly a feature of UN debates, as exemplified by some of the unlikely proponents of universality during the drafting of the two covenants. Equally, there were representatives like Hansa Mehta (India) and Salvador López (Philippines) who were at least as consistent as their Western counterparts. These figures were no more cynical in their use of human rights than the great Western icons of the early UN program.

Most fundamentally of all, scholarship on the role of the Third World is divided between those who view decolonization as generally beneficial to the development of international human rights and those highly critical of its results. Among the leading proponents of the more positive view is Paul Gordon Lauren. Lauren has extolled the commitment to human rights that supposedly characterized the foreign policy of African, Asian, and Arab states, which ensured that human rights was elevated high on the global agenda after World War II.⁷ By contrast, eminent international law expert Louis Henkin has described the politics of decolonization as nothing short of a disaster for human rights. The struggle to end colonialism, he has asserted, also swallowed up the original purpose of cooperation for promotion of human rights.⁸

Neither of these positions has fully captured the complex and contradictory constellation of outcomes that followed decolonization. The politics of anticolonialism both advanced and obstructed the progress of international human rights. In some areas, the Third World's role was undoubtedly positive. It confronted European colonialism and Western racism and demanded the recognition of universal human rights. In others, such as the right of petition, the results were less clear. A number of Arab, Asian, and African diplomats pioneered efforts to recognize individual petitions, while others worked tirelessly to prevent them. Given the diversity of the Afro-Asian bloc and the changing political complexion of the states that constituted it, the consequences of decolonization were inevitably complicated and unpredictable. Their significance, however, was unmistakable.

Explaining the Influence of the Third World in the Human Rights Program

Decolonization's impact on the UN human rights program was disproportionately great compared to other areas of the organization. The UN Third Committee, which dealt with human rights, was viewed as an environment where Third World states could vote as they pleased, without significant consequences for their security or that of the Western democracies. Heavy criticism of the Western powers was permissible, even desirable, in human rights debates, while far less dissent was possible in those involving traditional Cold War politics and security concerns. Negative Western attitudes regarding the status and value of the human rights program greatly magnified the influence of the Third World delegations.

Robert Quentin-Baxter, who represented New Zealand in both the General Assembly and the Commission on Human Rights, has argued that the Third Committee was a forum that afforded much greater independence to the smaller countries outside the political West. In the security and political organs, the West had allies. But as Baxter observed, in the Third Committee the situation was different.⁹

This Committee was, after all, dealing with the realm of theory and there were seldom any immediate practical consequences of decisions taken. Therefore it was much easier for Asian and Latin American countries, in particular, to express their own fervent dislike of colonialism and their strong identification with anti-colonialist forces.

For many Western policy makers and diplomats, Quentin-Baxter observed, the only comfort was a shallow belief that things decided in the Third Committee did not really matter.¹⁰

John Humphrey, director of the Human Rights Division, attributed the chaotic nature of the Third Committee to the unique opportunity it presented to smaller, non-Western states. Writing in January 1952 after another frustrating series of deliberations on the human rights covenants, Humphrey reflected on the emerging dynamics of the Third Committee. The special influence accorded to the small states was, he argued, a major factor in why human rights debates were so hard to conduct.¹¹

It is easier for small delegations to play an important role in a committee which is not ostensibly dealing with the great issues that divide the communist and non-communist world. In the First and Ad Hoc committees the small countries must be kept in line, in the Third all inhibitions disappear.

Human rights were one of the only topics on which the Third World diplomats could express an independent opinion, with little fear of Western or Soviet pressure. It was an opportunity that many embraced.

Western states were content to cede leadership in the human rights program in exchange for solidarity in Cold War security matters elsewhere in the UN, which were accorded much greater priority. Human rights debates were perceived as superfluous to real international diplomacy. Defeats in the Third Committee and Commission on Human Rights were to be taken with equanimity. After all, these losses on human rights issues facilitated victories in the more important political and security bodies, according to the State Department report on the 1952 session of the Third Committee:

The determination of the Arab-Asian and Latin American groups to write their aspirations and grievances into resolutions, and, more important, into treaties will create even greater difficulties next year. It seems likely that, for the foreseeable future, our delegation will continue to be in the minority on many important issues in this Committee. In view of the overriding need of keeping the delegations of the free world united so far as possible in the Political Committees, the Delegation will have to be content to take occasional defeats in the Third Committee, and take them as graciously as possible.¹²

The Third Committee, argued the 1952 report, operated primarily as a safety valve by which the representatives of the smaller countries, which follow the United States in the two Political Committees, let off steam.¹³ It advised that the U.S. should remain quiescent in human rights debates, which were both peripheral and futile. It was essential to avoid undue pressure in trying to sell our causes, especially our lost causes.¹⁴

As early as 1950, Asian, Arab, and Latin American states had seized the initiative on human rights matters, capitalizing on the policy of neglect pursued by the Western powers. Even before African decolonization, when the influx of new states made Third World dominance almost inevitable, the Western states pursued a strategy that cultivated Arab and Asian assertiveness. According to Humphrey, the emergence of Third World leadership was predicated on carefully studied inaction on the part of the West. Because they have not been willing to accept their responsibility, Humphrey wrote in his diary, the logical leaders in the U.N. battle for human rights have lost leadership in the Third Committee to certain demagogic forces.¹⁵ By December 1951, he feared that the whole human rights program had been jeopardized, with the Western democratic countries themselves largely to blame for what has happened.¹⁶ According to Humphrey, if the West had provided some really dynamic leadership there would have been no vacuum which the little demagogues rushed to fill.

Charles Malik, the Lebanese philosopher who had played a central role in the success of the Universal Declaration, also lamented the absence of Western leadership. In June 1949, after the defeat of a proposal to study allegations of human rights abuse, Malik questioned why Britain and the U.S. had failed to take a bolder lead.¹⁷ Malik was wrong. They had, in fact, led the opposition, along with the Soviet Union. By May 1950, his public criticisms were considerably harsher. Interviewed on radio with Eleanor Roosevelt, he urged the West to take a more positive approach to the UN program. He gently rebuked Roosevelt's intonations for caution, to go slowly and to be careful because of the special needs of the great powers. Unimpressed by caution, he pressed for Western leadership. You've got to move faster, Malik declared, you've got to lead the rest of the field more than you have been doing so far.¹⁸ More ominously, he highlighted the consequences of continued somnolence on the part of the great Western democracies. If you don't lead the rest of the world, there are others who will lead it.¹⁹

During the pivotal decade of the 1950s, when the two human rights covenants were being drafted, diplomats from the most powerful Western democracy sat in silence while the debate proceeded around them. Conceived as the successors to the 1948 Universal Declaration, the covenants dominated the human rights agenda for more than fifteen years. Yet following the campaign of U.S. Senator John Bricker, who sought an amendment to restrict the president's treaty making powers, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles withdrew American support from the covenants in 1953. Dulles then instructed the State Department not to participate in covenant debates. The consequences were predictably corrosive for American influence in the human rights program. In its report from the 1957 General Assembly, four years after Dulles's decision was put into effect, the U.S. delegation complained that their instructions demanded a position [that] is defensive or passive for almost two-thirds of the time of the Committee.²⁰ Under orders not to participate, the U.S. representation mournfully sits in silence for approximately half the Committee session and raises its hand only to abstain when votes are taken.²¹

As they witnessed their growing irrelevance, these U.S. diplomats pleaded for a change in instructions relating to the covenants, which were alienating friends and compromising any future U.S. influence. Every time the U.S. refused to offer an opinion, its status among the other delegates was diminished. Friendly regimes, like those from Pakistan, Iran, the Philippines, Liberia, and Canada, time and again fruitlessly sought out the opinions and leadership of the United States. Frustrated by inaction, these states complained to their American counterparts that our silence might be misinterpreted as a lack of interest.²² Given the situation, that was an altogether explicable misinterpretation for them to make.

Such pious non-intervention was not a policy that could be reversed at the State Department's convenience—when the U.S. chose to speak again, it was questionable whether anyone would be interested in hearing what it had to say. One day, the delegation wrote, there would be human rights questions that simply required U.S. participation. Prevailing on these vital points, the report advised, will be difficult if we have remained silent during all the rest of the debate.²³ When the covenants were finally finished, the damage would persist. The delegation warned that We will have lost the momentum of our leadership.

Little Demagogues Versus Flourmill Heiresses: The Nature of Third World Diplomacy

The relative priorities accorded to the human rights program were reflected in the quality of personnel sent by the West and the Third World. Apart from towering figures like René Cassin and Eleanor Roosevelt, for almost two decades between 1950 and 1970 the general performance of Western diplomats was typically weaker than that of their non-Western counterparts. Humphrey complained in 1954 that governments had gotten into the habit of employing the Third Committee as a berth for politically important people who they want to honor with the experience of having sat in a U.N. Committee.²⁴ This practice seems to have been more common among the Western democracies—which sent mistresses and election fundraisers to represent them in the human rights program. It was not the most impressive demonstration of national will.

Mary Lord, Eisenhower's representative to the Commission on Human Rights, embodied the perils of rewarding political allies with a UN appointment. Heiress to the Pillsbury flour fortune, Lord had been heavily involved in Eisenhower's electoral fundraising.²⁵ She had very little knowledge of human rights, and still less diplomatic experience. Although Lord gradually grew into a reasonably capable representative, her early years were marked by gaffes. Before she took up the post, she mistakenly announced that the U.S. had not signed the Universal Declaration because it was too communistic. Even U.S. allies were appalled at her proposals to the 1953 Commission on Human Rights, though admittedly she had been given remarkably bad instructions.²⁶ By the time she had become proficient in the work of the commission, she was rapidly approaching replacement by the appointee of a new administration.

A decade after Lord's departure, Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan castigated the continuing weakness of U.S. diplomats involved in the UN program, and the mindset of the State Department that had appointed them. His opinion was encapsulated in an infamous August 1972 cable to Secretary of State Kissinger.

One plump-minded American official after another had silently or enthusiastically assented to a prolonged slander on American democracy, a sustained advocacy of totalitarian dictatorship. You know why? Because we sent stupid men and worse women to those conferences. And why did we do this? Because the hard-nose Cold Warriors on the Sixth Floor think such things don't matter.²⁷

Moynihan, who viewed human rights as the central struggle of the Cold War, introduced a vastly more assertive style of diplomacy into the General Assembly, and repudiated the traditional policy of neglect and defeatism. Yet his appearance came after nearly twenty years of relatively ineffective U.S. human rights diplomacy in the UN, and it was difficult indeed to prove that the State Department was now serious about human rights, particularly when much of it was not.

When compared to their Third World counterparts, both Western and Soviet diplomats were often at a marked disadvantage by the very existence of their detailed instructions. Monitored and assisted by large foreign service bureaucracies, delegates from the West had only modest scope for initiative, and were accordingly less effective at getting things done in the committee and the Commission on Human Rights. Quentin-Baxter, the veteran New Zealand delegate, observed that in the great debates…people who had to rely on speeches written for them, or on detailed instructions from their governments, were like the crossbowmen at Crecy—absolutely outmaneuvered by the more mobile opponents.²⁸ A similar analysis of Western failure was noted by Humphrey in a 1954 diary entry: In most cases these people can do little more than read out a statement prepared by someone else.²⁹ Because of this lack of autonomy, a half dozen capable people are able by their maneuvering to control the committee in their own interest. More often than not these capable people were from the Arab and Asian group, including the one Humphrey identified as most capable of all, Jamil Baroody, who represented Saudi Arabia.³⁰

Baroody exemplified the impact that a confident, autonomous, and agile delegate could have on the course of human rights debate. In addition to being among the most intellectual and energetic members of the UN, Baroody was granted virtually unprecedented leeway by King Faisal.³¹ One of Baroody's loudest critics, U.S. Ambassador William F. Buckley, observed that this maneuverability was a central reason for his effectiveness. Unlike his peers, Baroody was not afraid of anybody or operating under any restraint.³² This stemmed from the trust Faisal had in Baroody. Buckley argued that it was not conceivable that King Faisal would reproach him on account of anything he said. Without rigid instructions, Baroody was vastly more influential, and often more principled.

By contrast, autonomy and flexibility were actively punished when practiced by Western delegates. In one prominent example, Mary Lord's successor, Marietta Tree, almost lost her job after adding a single word to a draft declaration on racial discrimination in 1964.³³ Tree was one of Ambassador Adlai Stevenson's mistresses, and had been an important supporter of his presidential campaign.³⁴ This did not save her from the wrath of the State Department, however, which on learning of her initiative promptly advised her that a repeat occurrence would see her recalled and sacked the next morning. Tree's future efforts appear to have been uneventfully consonant with State Department wishes.³⁵ Paradoxically, the greater the level of government instruction, the less able a delegate was of actually getting something done in the peculiar and dynamic atmosphere of the Third Committee.³⁶

The little demagogues derided by Humphrey embody the contradictory and multifaceted nature of Third World human rights diplomacy. Figures like Bedia Afnan, Charles Malik, Carlos Romulo, and Jamil Baroody resist easy generalizations. Iraqi delegate Afnan insured the inclusion of equal rights for women in the human rights covenants and denounced cultural relativism, but he fought relentlessly against the proposed High Commissioner for Human Rights. Malik was arguably more committed to anti-communism than was Dulles, but he voted with the Soviet Union to ensure that colonies received equal rights. Romulo was bitterly anticolonial, yet he castigated the hypocrisy of Soviet anticolonialism, and thus alienated a potent ally in the fight against European colonialism. Baroody had been among the eight delegates who abstained on the Universal Declaration, yet in conjunction with Humphrey he developed a serious proposal for studying individual