The Limitedness of the UN Human Rights Agenda - Essay Example

The Limitedness of the UN Human Rights Agenda Introduction The United Nations, from the very beginning, has been largely obliged to and focused on the promotion and protection of basic human rights. The makers of the UN Charter added an oath by member states “to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women” (Alfreosson & Eide 1999, p. 66). The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other UN proclamations and treaties make up the heart of international human rights principles. Unfortunately, implementation of the Universal Declaration has been in numerous instances the peak of UN attempts at promoting human rights. The performance of the UN in convincing or obliging member states to respect, implement, and safeguard human rights has been severely unsatisfactory (Freedman 2013, p. 92). This essay tries to answer the question why the UN human rights agenda is very limited? Limitations to the UN Human Rights Agenda For more than sixty years, the UN Commission on Human Rights (CHR) embodied this disappointment. In spite of being the leading UN human rights agency tasked to evaluate human rights actions of its member states and endorsing human rights across the globe, the CHR was reduced into a medium that human rights violators exploited to hinder condemnations of their own actions (Schaefer 2009, p. 139). The poor reputation of CHR intensified over time that previous UN secretary-general Kofi Annan proclaimed, “We have reached a point at which the Commission’s declining credibility has cast a shadow on the reputation of the United Nations system as a whole, and where piecemeal reforms will not be enough” (Schaefer 2009, p. 132). Thus, in March 2006, the General Assembly made a decision to supplant the CHR with the Human Rights Council (HRC) (DeLaet 2014, p. 138). Unfortunately, during the discussions, numerous core principles and changes that had been suggested to guarantee that the HRC would not replicate the errors of CHR was not able to acquire the needed approval in the General Assembly. In consequence, the HRC has been initially ineffective and weak in upholding and supporting basic human rights—a performance that is not likely to get better by involving the United States in the HRC in 2009 (Goodhart 2013, pp. 68-69). Sadly, even the other UN bodies have been weakened by the limitations that plagued the CHR and keep on overwhelming the HRC—the capacity of countries that do not promote or implement human rights to control or influence the system and susceptibility to political manoeuvring intended to weaken their effort (DeLaet 2014, p. 138). For example, although the Third Committee can acquire backing for actions denouncing certain disreputable human rights offenders, most criminals elude even hasty denunciation. The treaty organisations have exploited their power by rereading the documents of their corresponding treaties in ways not ever imagined when the treaties were approved. Several treaty organisations continually reprimand nations for inability to enforce national policies to implement rules as construed by the treaty organisation, whether or not these rules were openly articulated in the treaty (Karns & Mingst 2010, p. 39). Likewise, several special delegates have been inclined to use rhetoric and to promote political programme instead of focusing on their instructions. Another worrying concern that limits the UN human rights agenda is unparalleled authority and power that nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) have attained over the human rights discourse in the international community recently. Their attempts have both improved and humiliated the attention and value of the UN human rights agenda (Goodhart 2013, p.113). NGOs play an important part, usually a bold and perilous task, by delivering factually accurate reports on the status of human rights in nations that reject such inspection. NGOs obviously influence the UN human rights practice, which often is not able or hesitant to deal with human rights issues (Morgan & Turner 2009, p. 91). Nevertheless, the NGOs usually try to wield their authority to coerce nations to accept or conduct questionable or dubious human rights standards at the expense of promoting broadly accepted, basic human rights. More disappointing is the fact that nations that give little importance to political and civil rights have collaborated with benevolent NGOs to effectively blend political and civil rights with cultural, social, and economic ‘rights’ in a way that messes up the duties of the state and discounts an imperative hierarchy of rights (Morgan & Turner 2009, p. 91). Somewhat obviously, the UN has been a defective, sometimes even inefficient medium for promoting basic human rights. The possibilities for better, enhanced performance in the coming years are thin because of the thoroughly protected ideal of universal membership for all countries irrespective of their human rights performance (Freedman 2013, p. 62). This weakens the efficacy of the UN and disrupts the goal and work of human rights agencies. Although working beyond the UN is possibly more promising, such attempts have widely been weakened by general commitment to the belief that the UN is the most valid and correct medium to promote human rights. Such belief is flawed; it has protected nations that disrespect human rights (Claude & Weston 2006, p. 349). Member nations habitually exercise their power in the UN and its human rights agencies to undermine attempts at holding them responsible for their poor human rights record. The ideal way to promote human rights is reassessing the UN-based model of supporting and protecting human rights, abolishing the unnecessary or incompetent sectors of the UN human rights agenda, and collaborating with nations dedicated to promoting political and civil human rights to form another multilateral organisation that will successfully and reliably embark on operations and campaigns to promote these ideals (DeLaet 2014, p. 161). In the 1970s and 1980s, South African representatives complained when Nelson Mandela’s case—an African president incarcerated for his resistance to the South African apartheid system—was made public at the UN. They referred to the UN Charter’s Article 2(7), which states that the UN could not meddle “in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state” (Claude & Weston 2006, p. 296). Numerous nations exploit this tactic. The governments of Zimbabwe, Syria, Sudan, Myanmar, Iran, China, and others officially point to the rule of non-intervention and principle of state sovereignty, especially when they are on the wrong with regard to their international human rights responsibilities (Claude & Weston 2006, p. 296). States that violate human rights usually seek restriction, requesting outsiders to abstain from intervening with their external or internal activities. The conflict between the assertions of those who condemn violations of human rights and those who dispute such intrusion was the subject matter of a lengthy investigation by the English legal expert Hersch Lauterpacht. A prevailing pattern of the latter part of the 20th century, he claimed, was characterised by the sovereign state surrendering to the ‘sovereignty of mankind’. He elaborates this point (Claude & Weston 2006, p. 6): Insofar as the denial of fundamental human rights has been associated with the nation- state asserting the claim to ultimate reality and utterly subordinating the individual to a mystic and absolute personality of its own, the recognition of these rights is a brake upon exclusive and aggressive nationalism, which is the obstacle, both conscious and involuntary, to the idea of a world community under the rule of law. At the global state sovereignty is upheld and even strengthened in the UN human rights agenda—certainly to dispel the worries of the heads of the most powerful nations at the post-World War II period that nothing can prevent it from limiting their national sovereignty (Schaefer 2009, p. 146). Within the UN human rights are observed, monitored, and scrutinised, and national violations of human rights are condemned, yet there are no instruments for their implementation. In fact, sovereignty is openly protected in the UN through which international human rights treaties are set down or established—not merely are they the outcome of thoroughly and rigorously negotiated agreements among NGO representatives and states, but before they are ultimately established nations have the right to give objections to those rules with which they are not fully amenable to (Karns & Mingst 2010, p. 105). An infamous case in point is the objection the United States raised at the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) which tolerated death sentencing or capital punishment, even for young offenders, even though the Convention’s major ideal is the ‘right to life’, and Article 6(5) forbids the enforcement of capital punishment “for crimes committed by persons below eighteen years of age” (Morgan & Turner 2009, p. 91). Although this objection could be in opposition to the essence of the ICCPR, throwing the US into moral criticisms, the UN human rights agenda is created exactly to facilitate the protection of state sovereignty it represents (Morgan & Turner 2009, p. 91). Recently, the gravest peril to state sovereignty for the sake of human rights seems to be the likelihood of ‘humanitarian intervention’ through military force. Nevertheless, the point that powerful nations are capable of exploiting the UN to occupy and depose the heads of a sovereign country for the sake of human rights is one-dimensional; the issue of humanitarian intervention is very complicated. However, it is adequate to emphasise that the sole military intervention that seems not to have been intensely driven by geopolitical tactic or tension over economic assets, the NATO intervention in Kosovo, not merely had no UN directive but was in fact defended or rationalised with regard to the ‘vital interest’ of an operating liberal democracy on the borders of the European continent (Morgan & Turner 2009, pp. 91-92). The occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, which were undoubtedly escorted by the polemic of implementing human rights, were in fact carried out for the sake of national security—the violations of human rights that had without a doubt been perpetrated against the citizens of these nations were not the reason, nor the main defence for the occupations (Schaefer 2009, p. 268). It is factual that from 1990s to the 21st century the UN Security Council ever more draws upon the principle of human rights as regards the matters of conflict, war, and peace with which it has customarily been interested in, but its responses in this regard have been much more limited or restrained than the oratory would indicate. In fact, even in the European human rights agenda, widely known as the most uncompromising in the world, no outside authorities can bring down a sovereign state’s rule or meddle with its foreign policy affairs (Goodhart 2013, p. 240). Hence, the historical failure of the CHR to objectively fulfil its duty to investigate human rights performance of UN member nations pushed Kofi Annan to declare (Freedman 2013, p. 171): The Commission’s capacity to perform its tasks has been increasingly undermined by its declining credibility and professionalism. In particular, States have sought membership of the Commission not to strengthen human rights but to protect themselves against criticism or to criticise others. Even though the CHR frequently drafted country-specific legislations denouncing several nations for human rights violations, it quite seldom or not once denounced a group of nations that repeatedly abused the basic rights of their people (Freedman 2013, p. 171). It was broadly considered an incompetent advocate of human rights vulnerable to political demands from violators of human rights. The poor reputation of the CHR finally heightened, which then forced Annan to proclaim (Schaefer 2009, p. 140): The Commission’s ability to perform its tasks has been overtaken by new needs, and undermined by the politicisation of its sessions and the selectivity of its work. We have reached a point at which the Commission’s declining credibility has cast a shadow on the reputation of the United Nations system as a whole, and where piecemeal reforms will not be enough It seems that the CHR was flawed from the very beginning because of the very limited nature of the UN human rights agenda. Conclusions The UN human rights agenda is very limited, indeed. This is due to the fact that the UN has been passive with regard to state sovereignty. The CHR’s alleged inefficiency or incompetence is rooted in the inability of the UN to assert the universal principle of human rights, regardless of national sovereignty. As stated in the discussion, the UN has even promoted and protected state sovereignty. The UN human rights agenda will remain weak and limited as long as state sovereignty prevails over the international community, and as long as powerful nations, like the United States and some European countries dominate the strugglefor human rights. References Alfreosson, G & Eide, A (1999) The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: A Common Standard of Achievement. Cambridge, MA: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. Claude, R & Weston, B (2006) Human Rights in the World Community: Issues and Action. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Press: University of Pennsylvania Press. DeLaet, D (2014) The Global Struggle for Human Rights. Mason, OH: Cengage Learning. Freedman, R (2013) The United Nations Human Rights Council: A critique and early assessment. London: Routledge. Goodhart, M (2013) Human Rights: Politics and Practice. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Karns, M & Mingst, K (2010) International Organisations: The Politics and Processes of Global Governance. UK: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Morgan, R & Turner, B (2009) Interpreting Human Rights: Social Science Perspectives. London: Routledge. Schaefer, B (2009) Conundrum: The Limits of the United Nations and the Search for Alternatives. UK: Rowman & Littlefield. Read More