On the Day of
the Pinochet Decision
Remembering the
50th Anniversary of
the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights
By JONATHAN POWER
LONDON - In captivity Augusto Pinochet should perhaps find
time to read Mahatma Gandhi who used to say that one could
assess a civilization by the manner with which it dealt with
minorities and those that disagreed with it. Ralf
Dahrendorf, the eminence grise of European education, made a
similar point in an address before that remarkable
campaigning power-house, the Minority Rights Group. "Defense
of minority rights is the litmus test of liberty and the
rule of law", Professor Dahrendorf said and went on wryly to
note, "ruling interests and beliefs need no protection:
power protects, though it may corrupt as well."
A Martian arriving today could be pardoned for thinking
earthlings had never confronted minority rights issues until
Yugoslavia exploded, so bewitched and bewildered they still
appear to be by the experience. The Cold War was a frozen
blanket that enveloped the whole world, pressing into deep
hybernation, at least until the Gorbachev years, every other
human dilemma. Even President Jimmy Carter, who tried to
make the White House a bully pulpit for human rights, ended
up turning his heaviest guns on malpractices in the Soviet
Union and eastern Europe.
Now it is back to normal weather and human rights, once a
minority concern itself, is one of the new growth
industries. As rulers from China to Malaysia to Chile have
found, abuses are no longer secret, there are no walls of
silence, the electronic age is promoting my brother s keeper
at an unprecedented pace.
It is a new phase but, for all that, it's built on that
precious interlude between the defeat of Hitler and the
opening of the Cold War when a series of remarkable events
took place--the founding of the United Nations, the Bretton
Woods conference and the writing of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights.
Fifty years old next Tuesday, it is a document more
comprehensive than the Magna Carta or the Declaration des
Droits d Homme and more demanding than the Declaration of
Independence or the Communist Manifesto. It covers every
aspect of human well-being and delineates the relationship
of human beings with the government. It is probably the most
important single document that humanity has yet
produced.
In the summer of 1993 at the World Conference on Human
Rights in Vienna the post Cold War groundswell of liberty
was starkly apparent. The principles of the Universal
Declaration approved in 1948 by the UN s then small, and
western dominated, membership of 56 were thrown open to the
whole of the world-wide community for its opinion. In the
end 171 countries reaffirmed the Declaration in all its
essential points. The rear guard action mounted by China,
Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore, among others, to water it
down came to naught.
There are some, seeing human rights riding high, who
cannot resist a shot. One well known commentator, Caroline
Moorhead, writing in Index on Censorship, the magazine that
is the long-standing voice of persecuted writers, writes,
"Have the very triumphs of the human rights lobby, in
agitating so vociferously on behalf of individual prisoners,
actually made political murder a more effective solution for
repressive governments?" Her argument is that it is easier
for governments to "disappear" their critics than risk the
embarassing publicity of holding them in prison. Ms Moorhead
asserted that while making a TV series for PBS in America
she could only find 20 political prisoners.
This is sheer nonsense. Amnesty is still fighting on
behalf of thousands of prisoners of conscience, many, many
more than there are "disappearances". Over the years Amnesty
and its colleagues in the human rights effort have won the
release of tens of thousands of political prisoners. Dozens
of countries have done away with totalitarianism and the
rule of international law is spreading to countries that
once spurned its application. Maybe once in a thousand cases
Amnesty pressure may be counterproductive but for the most
part it has triumphed in country after country, case after
case.
Moreover, thanks in no small part to the campaigning of
Amnesty, Human Rights Watch and other human rights
organisations, the genocide and torture conventions are now
accepted by the vast majority of nations. The Pinochet
judgement by Britain s highest court upholding his arrest is
another major watershed, for it indicates that British law
has now taken on board the writ of these two conventions.
(Interestingly, one of the law lords who decided the case is
married to a long-time member of the staff of Amnesty.)
The most important issue now pressing on the human rights
front is how far and how quickly can this relatively new
sensitivity to international law be pushed? The wars in
ex-Yugoslavia and Rwanda have been responsible for another
major step forward--the creation of ad hoc war crimes
courts. Recently the former prime minister of Rwanda was
successfully prosecuted and convicted of genocide. Only this
week a British Foreign Office minister indicated that the
government would favour a similar institution to deal with
Iraq.
These ad hoc courts, for all their limitations in laying
their hands on suspected war criminals, have provided much
of the impetus for the establishment of a permanent
international criminal court whose creation was approved at
a UN conference in Rome this summer. The U.S. was a lone
voice in the West holding back from voting its approval,
despite President Bill Clinton's earlier enthusiasm for the
concept. Opposition from the Pentagon and the Congress
compelled the Administration to seek what in effect would be
veto powers for the U.S., that would make it almost
impossible for the court ever to prosecute an American
soldier, whatever the circumstances.
Still, the almost unanimous vote in Rome means that a
number of good global citizen states now have the mandate to
take the lead in one more major step of building a world of
laws not of men , in which the powerful and the cruel do not
necessarily get their way and the vulnerable and preyed upon
have the chance to show that no body and no nation is above
the law. Not even Augusto Pinochet.
November 25, 1998
Copyright © 1998 By JONATHAN POWER
Note: I can be reached by phone +44 385 351172 and
e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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