WHAT ARE HUMAN RIGHTS?

By Jack Donnelly

Human rights are, literally, the rights that one has simply because one is human. This deceptively simple idea has profound social and political consequences.

Human rights, because they rest on nothing more than being human, are universal, equal, and inalienable. They are held by all human beings, universally. One either is or is not human and thus has or does not have human rights, equally. And one can no more lose these rights than one can stop being a human being -- no matter how inhuman the treatment one may suffer. One is entitled to human rights and is empowered by them.

Human rights, being held by every person against the state and society, provide a framework for political organization and a standard of political legitimacy. Where they are systematically denied, claims of human rights may be positively revolutionary. Even in societies where human rights are generally well respected, they provide constant pressure on governments to meet their standards.

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The natural liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on earth, and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man, but to have only the law of nature for his rule. The liberty of man in society is to be under no other legislative power but that established by consent in the commonwealth....

John Locke, British philosopher (1632-1704), from Concerning Civil Government, 1690

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Nearly all pre-modern societies saw rulers as obliged to govern wisely and for the common good. This mandate, however, arose from divine commandment, natural law, tradition, or contingent political arrangements. It did not rest on the rights (entitlement) of all human beings to be ruled justly. In a well-ordered society, the people were to benefit from the political obligations of rulers. But the people had no natural or human rights that could be exercised against unjust rulers.

Human rights entered the mainstream of political theory and practice in 17th-century Europe. John Locke's Second Treatise of Government (published in the wake of Britain's Glorious Revolution of 1688, which overthrew King James II) presented the first fully developed theory of natural rights.

Locke's theory begins with a pre-social state of nature in which equal individuals have natural rights to their lives, liberties, and estates. In the absence of government, however, these rights are of little value. They are almost impossible to protect by individual action, and disputes over rights are themselves a powerful cause of conflict. Therefore, people form societies, and societies establish governments, to enable themselves to enjoy their natural rights.

Government, according to Locke, is based on a social contract between rulers and ruled. Citizens are obliged to obey only if the government protects their human rights, which are morally prior to and above the claims and interests of the government. Government is legitimate to the extent that it systematically protects and furthers the enjoyment of the human rights of its citizens.

The idea of human rights initially was associated with the middle classes. Against the claims of high birth and traditional privilege, the rising bourgeoisie of early modern Europe advanced political claims based on natural human equality and inalienable natural rights. This bourgeois political revolution, however, had severe limits. For example, Locke, despite the apparent universalism of the language of natural rights, actually developed a theory for the protection of the rights of propertied European males. Women, along with "savages," servants, and wage laborers of either sex, were not recognized as rights-holders.

But once the notion of equal and inalienable rights held by all was advanced, the burden of proof shifted to those who would deny such rights to others. Claims of privilege could be rationalized by, for example, arguments of racial superiority or assertions of superior acquired virtue. Privilege could be, and regularly was, protected through force. But having accepted the idea of human rights, dominant elites found it increasingly difficult to escape the logic of human rights.

Many of the great political struggles of the past two centuries have revolved around expanding the recognized subjects of human rights. Efforts to extend the right to vote beyond a small, propertied elite provoked intense controversy in most European countries in the 19th century. The claims of working men for fair wages, for the right to organize themselves, and for safe and humane working conditions led to often violent political conflict until World War I in most of Europe, and much longer than that in the United States. Ending the systematic denial of human rights inherent in colonialism was a major global political issue during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. And struggles to eliminate discrimination based on race and gender have been prominent in many countries over the past 30 years.

In all of these situations, dispossessed groups used the rights they did enjoy to press for legal recognition of rights being denied them. For example, workers used their votes, along with what freedom of the press and freedom of association were allowed them, to press for eliminating legal discrimination based on wealth or property. They also demanded new rights that would bring true liberty, equality, and security to working men (and later women). Racial, ethnic, and religious minorities, women, and peoples suffering under colonial rule have likewise used what rights were allowed them to press for full recognition and participation as equal members of society.

In each case, the essence of their argument was that we, no less than you, are human beings. As such, we are entitled to the same basic rights as you and to equal concern and respect from the state. And in each case, acceptance of such arguments has led to radical social and political changes.

In the past two decades, the revolutionary force of the demand for human rights has become unusually clear. Across the globe, regimes that had cynically manipulated the language of human rights have been sent packing by a citizenry that insisted on taking human rights seriously. A significant cause of the collapse of the Soviet empire was the growing unwillingness of Communist-bloc citizens to accept the systematic denial of internationally recognized human rights. In South and Central America, repressive military governments fell throughout the 1980s. In Asia and Africa, liberalization and democratization have been more irregular but nevertheless real, and in some countries (South Korea and South Africa, for example) quite striking.

The spread of human rights is neither natural nor inevitable. Regression is possible, even likely in some cases. The world's remaining repressive dictatorships may prove quite long-lived. But the lesson of the recent past would seem to be that wherever people are given the chance to choose, they choose internationally recognized human rights. And whatever the shortcomings of current practice, we live in a world in which fewer governments than ever before seem able to deny their people that choice.

Human Rights as an International Issue
In the post-Cold War world, nearly all states, in all regions of the world, at all levels of development, proclaim their commitment to human rights. One of the most dramatic expressions of this was the 1993 World Human Rights Conference in Vienna, which produced a wide-ranging Declaration and Program of Action endorsed by 171 states. With the continuing spread of political liberalization and democratization, an ever-growing number of governments are being pressured at home and from abroad to live up to these commitments. In today's world, a consistent pattern of gross human rights violations is widely perceived to undermine a regime's national and international legitimacy.

This situation, however, is historically unprecedented. Human rights has been an established subject of international relations for only about half a century. Prior to World War II, even genocidal massacres such as Russian pogroms against the Jews and the Turkish slaughter of Armenians were met with little more than polite statements of disapproval. Less egregious violations typically were not even considered a fit subject for diplomatic conversation.

How a government treated its own citizens in its own territory was considered a matter of sovereign domestic jurisdiction. In fact, individual states and the international community were considered to be under an international legal obligation not to intervene in such matters. Even the notoriously "idealist" Covenant of the League of Nations fails to mention human rights as a subject of legitimate international concern.

From the Holocaust to the Cold War: The Holocaust, in which German Nazis systematically attempted to eliminate European Jewry, brought human rights into the mainstream of international relations. Shocking as Nazi atrocities were, the international community lacked the legal and political language to condemn them. Massacring one's own citizens simply was not an established international legal offense. The German government may have been liable under the laws of war for its treatment of citizens in occupied territories, but in killing German nationals it was merely exercising its sovereign rights. And traditional "realist" diplomacy, which defined the national interest in terms of state power, could find no material interest that was threatened by the barbarous treatment of foreign civilians.

The Nuremberg War Crimes Trials (1945-1946) introduced the novel charge of crimes against humanity. For the first time, officials were held legally accountable to the international community for offenses against individual citizens, not states, and individuals who in many cases were nationals, not foreigners. It was in the United Nations, however, that human rights really emerged as a subject of international relations.

Human rights have a prominent place in the UN Charter adopted in 1945. And the new organization moved rapidly to elaborate authoritative international human rights norms. On December 10, 1948, the UN General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This comprehensive list of rights codified the emerging view that the way in which states treat their own citizens is not only a legitimate international concern but subject to international standards.

With the rise of the Cold War, however, human rights increasingly became just another weapon of ideological struggle. Just as the United States was willing to accept the most vicious human rights practices in "friendly" anti-Communist regimes, the Soviet Union was ready to use force when necessary to assure "friendly" totalitarian regimes in its sphere of influence.

Furthermore, few states desired more than the strong statement of norms provided by the Universal Declaration. Although no longer willing to leave human rights entirely beyond international purview, they refused to allow even multilateral monitoring of national human rights practices, let alone international implementation or enforcement. The UN Commission on Human Rights, for example, was not even permitted to read the thousands of complaints received by the United Nations alleging human rights violations.

The United Nations is not a world government standing above states, but an intergovernmental organization. It can do nothing that its members -- sovereign states -- do not authorize. During the first two decades of the Cold War, neither bloc was willing to allow the UN to do much at all in the field of human rights.

By the mid-1960s, though, the Afro-Asian bloc had become the largest group in the United Nations. These countries, which had suffered under colonial rule, had a special interest in human rights. They found a sympathetic hearing from the Soviet bloc and some countries in Europe and the Americas. The United Nations thus once again began to attend to human rights.

Most significantly, the International Human Rights Covenants were completed in December 1966. Along with the Universal Declaration they provide an authoritative statement of internationally recognized human rights.

The very comprehensiveness of the Covenants, however, demanded that the United Nations shift its human rights work from standard-setting to implementing these standards. This was an area where the organization had made virtually no headway in its first two decades.

In the absence of an international legislative body, international law is in large measure contractual. Most international legal obligations today arise from treaties, which are, in effect, solemn contracts between states. Because states are free to enter into treaties or not, as they see fit, the obligations of international law are for the most part voluntarily incurred. States are thus free to, among other things, establish international obligations that cannot be internationally enforced -- which is precisely what they did in the case of human rights.

Consider the "implementation" machinery of the Covenants. Parties must submit periodic reports on compliance. The supervisory committees may question state representatives about the reports and draw attention to apparent shortcomings. But they are not authorized to find violations of the treaty, demand changes in state practice, or seek remedy for victims.

Although human rights norms were fully internationalized by the mid-1960s, implementation of those norms remained almost entirely national. The emerging global human rights regime thus reflected, and even today continues to reflect, the strong persistence of a sovereignty-respecting logic.

The Carter Revival: Small inroads began to be made in the late 1960s and 1970s. The UN Commission on Human Rights received authority to discuss human rights violations in particular countries. Special procedures addressed human rights violations in Israeli-occupied territories, South Africa, and Chile. But the point of takeoff for human rights as an international issue came in 1977, when Jimmy Carter took the office of president of the United States.

In embracing human rights as a priority for American foreign policy, Carter at least partly disentangled international human rights from the East-West politics of the Cold War and the North-South struggles over a new international economic order. This gave new momentum and increased legitimacy to human rights advocates throughout the world.

Within the United Nations, a revitalized Commission on Human Rights, led by Canada, the Netherlands, and others, formulated major treaties on women's rights (1979), on torture (1984), and on the rights of the child (1989). Rapporteurs were appointed to study human rights violations in a growing number of increasingly diverse countries. The commission also developed innovative new mechanisms to deal with particular kinds of violations, most notably disappearances.

The mid-1970s also saw the introduction of human rights into the mainstream of bilateral foreign policy. For example, the United States and the Nordic countries began to consider the human rights practices of recipient countries in their aid policies. And the Helsinki Final Act of 1975 explicitly introduced human rights into the mainstream of U.S.-Soviet relations.

By the mid-1980s, debate in most Western countries focused less on whether human rights should be an active concern of foreign policy -- still a matter of considerable controversy in the late 1970s and early 1980s -- than on which rights should be pursued and where.

The 1970s was also the decade in which nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) concerned with human rights emerged as a notable international political force, as symbolized by the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Amnesty International in 1977 for its assistance to political prisoners. By 1980, there were some 200 NGOs in the United States that dealt with human rights in some way, and about the same number in Britain.

These groups, in addition to their advocacy for victims of human rights abuses, have been important actors in changing bilateral and multilateral international human rights policies. International campaigns against torture by Amnesty International in the 1970s and 1980s played an important role in the drafting of the UN's 1984 Convention Against Torture.

At the national level, the Dutch section of Amnesty was involved in drafting its government's 1979 White Paper on human rights and development. And anti-apartheid activists in the United States and several European countries had a major impact on foreign policy toward South Africa in the 1980s.

The Post-Cold War Environment: Post-Cold War developments have further strengthened multilateral, bilateral, and transnational human rights actors and procedures. Existing multilateral mechanisms are being used more vigorously and with greater impartiality, and new initiatives, such as the creation of a UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, promise intensified international monitoring. In most countries, human rights have become a more deeply entrenched and less controversial issue on foreign policy agendas, and nongovernmental human rights organizations and advocates have become an increasingly significant part of the political landscape.

International human rights issues still provoke political controversy. At the Vienna World Conference, for example, a small group of countries argued, ultimately unsuccessfully, against efforts of the international community to press states to comply with the standards laid out in the Universal Declaration and the Covenants. In bilateral relations, raising human rights issues still is resented by many states, as the strained relations between China and its major trading partners in the years following the 1989 Tiananmen massacre of Chinese citizens clearly illustrate. And most states still refuse to press international human rights concerns strongly enough to satisfy many human rights NGOs.

The record of national practice, although greatly improved in many countries over the past decade, also leaves much to be desired. There are still regimes in power -- in Cuba, Iraq, Burma, North Korea, and other countries -- that rest on systematic violations of internationally recognized human rights. And as is documented in the reports of groups as diverse as the NGO Human Rights Watch and the U.S. Department of State, most countries of the world still have significant human rights problems.

Nonetheless, there is a new willingness within the international community to act forcefully in at least some cases of systematic human rights violations. During the Cold War, genocide in Cambodia was met with pained expressions of regret, but little more. In Rwanda in 1994, by contrast, the international community responded to genocide with military intervention. In El Salvador, UN human rights monitors played an important role in reaching a political settlement and demilitarizing the country after a decade-long civil war. In Somalia, when the country descended into warlord politics, multilateral military forces intervened to save literally hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians from starvation. And in Cambodia, a massive United Nations operation helped to remove occupying Vietnamese forces and install a freely elected government.

To take just one more example, consider Bosnia. After three and a half years of refusing to bow to force and the politics of ethnic cleansing, the international community, led by the United States, was able to broker a settlement of a bloody civil war that killed close to a quarter million people and made refugees of some two million others. Whether the peace will hold is unclear. But the willingness of the countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and several non-NATO countries in Central and Eastern Europe to provide 50,000 troops to implement the Dayton Peace Accords dramatically reflects the rise in importance of human rights and humanitarian politics on national and international agendas in the 1990s and beyond.

The United States and Human Rights
The United States has played a special role in the political development and spread of human rights ideas and practices. The Declaration of Independence, by which the American colonies severed their allegiance to the British Crown in 1776, proclaims the self-evident truth that all men are created equal and endowed with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. No less important, it asserts the right of a people to dissolve political bonds that have come to be oppressive. And in the political system established under the U.S. Constitution and its Bill of Rights, the world witnessed the first practical experiment in a government committed to being judged by the extent to which it respected and protected the rights of its citizens. Rights, thus, are often seen by Americans as a defining feature of their national heritage.

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Natural rights are those which appertain to man in right of his existence. Of this kind are all the intellectual rights, or rights of the mind, and also all those rights of acting as an individual for his own comfort and happiness, which are not injurious to the natural rights of others....

Thomas Paine, American political theorist and writer (1737-1809), from Rights of Man, 1792

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American international human rights policies and practices reveal a similar ambivalence. For example, Central America and the Caribbean were viewed as "our backyard," in which American troops were sent to overthrow governments the United States judged unacceptable. And during the Cold War, brutal military dictatorships were called free and democratic, and were given American financial and military support, so long as they supported U.S. economic and geopolitical interests.

But the United States also has a long record of positive international action on behalf of human rights, as, for example, during the French Revolution and when the countries of Central and South America threw off Spanish colonial rule in the 19th century. Furthermore, throughout the 20th century, the United States has acted internationally to strengthen this reputation.

After World War I, American President Woodrow Wilson championed national self-determination and protection of minorities by the international community. After World War II, the United States devoted considerable effort and money to sustaining and rebuilding democracy in Europe and to establishing it in Japan. The United States was a leader in decolonization, granting independence to the Philippines in 1946.

Even during the Cold War, when the United States supported repressive dictatorships in the name of anti-communism, there was a core of truth to the American claim to be the one superpower committed to the realization of human rights. And with the end of the Cold War, the United States has emerged as a leader in multilateral human rights and humanitarian initiatives in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and other countries.

This leadership role has its problematic elements. Traditionally, the United States has been reticent to open itself to the sort of human rights scrutiny it applies to others. It was only in 1992 that the United States ratified the United Nations' International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, more than 25 years after the measure received General Assembly approval. In addition, across the mainstream of the American political spectrum, there has been an unusual reluctance to accept the equal status of civil and political and economic, social, and cultural rights, a central normative principle of the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Covenants. The United States is not a party to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and most Americans do not regard social problems involving education, health care, and employment as human rights issues.

American leadership has also been challenged. At home, the isolationist tradition is deeply rooted. Today, many Americans are reluctant to spend money or risk American lives to support human rights abroad. Abroad, American self-righteousness and a preference for unilateral action have often provoked resentment even among those who have shared the values underlying American policies.

Nonetheless, the United States today, as two centuries ago, is a world leader in the ongoing struggle for human rights. And the struggle continues, globally, to realize the revolutionary idea that all people, simply because they are human, are entitled to the basic protections, goods, services, and opportunities of internationally recognized human rights.

International Monitoring and Implementation Mechanisms
The transformation of the international relations of human rights has been particularly striking at the normative level. For example, by mid-1998 the International Human Rights Covenants have been ratified by 137 and 140 states, more than three-fourths of the countries of the world. Although international bodies still play a secondary role in implementing these norms, states are increasingly accountable to the international community for their human rights practices.

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...there are occasional crimes committed on so vast a scale and of such peculiar horror as to make us doubt whether it is not our manifest duty to endeavor at least to show our disapproval of the deed and our sympathy with those who have suffered by it. The cases must be extreme in which such a course is justifiable.

Theodore Roosevelt, 26th president of the United States (1858-1919), from On Human Rights in Foreign Policy, 1904

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Although questions from the committee during review of the reports are often well informed and probing, the representative of the reporting state need not answer any question, let alone provide a satisfactory answer. Many reports contain little more than extracts from laws and the constitution, or obviously evasive claims of compliance. And whatever the quality of the report, once it has been reviewed, the monitoring process typically ends until the next report is due.

Reporting schemes obviously cannot force recalcitrant states to alter their practices. They can, however, provide additional incentives for states seeking to improve or safeguard their human rights record. Preparing a report requires a national review of law and practice, which may uncover areas where improvement may be needed or possible. It also provides a concrete periodic reminder to officials of their international legal obligations.

Human rights reports, because they originate from the reporting government, may provide the least adversarial of all international monitoring mechanisms. Reporting systems also have the virtue of allowing human rights issues to be addressed before problems become severe. But government control of the mechanism makes this type of monitoring most subject to evasion and abuse.

The Human Rights Committee may also consider "communications" (complaints) from individuals in the states party to the (First) Optional Protocol to the Covenant. Although the findings of the Human Rights Committee are not enforceable, several states have acted on them. For example, Canada revised legislation concerning the rights of Indians living off their tribal lands, Mauritius altered legislation concerning women's rights, and the Netherlands changed discriminatory social security legislation. The expert committees on racial discrimination and torture have similar powers.

An even stronger individual complaint mechanism exists within the Council of Europe. The decisions of the European Commission on Human Rights, although not technically binding, are usually accepted by states. And the European Court of Human Rights has made legally binding decisions in almost 200 cases dealing with a variety of issues, including such sensitive questions as public emergencies. This is the one instance, globally, where there has been a significant transfer of authority for implementing human rights from states to a supranational political community. Unfortunately, regional schemes in the Americas and Africa have had less success working with individual communications, and Asia and the Arab world do not have regional human rights commissions.

The attraction of individual cases is that their concreteness and specificity make it hard for states to evade responsibility. In order to avoid embarrassing publicity, a state may release political prisoners or may compensate individual victims -- although the three global treaty-based petition systems have handled well under 1,000 cases combined. Procedures focused on individual victims, however, fail to address broader patterns and deeper structural forces.

Therefore, it is of special interest that the Committee Against Torture is also authorized to investigate communications concerning situations where torture is systematically practiced. But precisely because such procedures allow more systematic challenges to governments, they are not widely implemented. No other independent committee of experts has this authority, and the comparable "1503 procedure" in the UN Commission on Human Rights dealt with less than half a dozen cases during its first two decades of operation.

Here as elsewhere, one can see an inverse relationship between the strength and scope of international monitoring procedures and the willingness of states to use and participate in them. And because sovereign states have the right to choose not to participate in most international human rights implementation systems, the tradeoff between strength and coverage is a serious and persistent problem.

Another set of multilateral human rights monitoring mechanisms focuses on investigative reporting and advocacy. The pioneer in this area was the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Its reports on Chile in the 1970s and 1980s were an important element in the international campaign against the Pinochet government, and its 1978 report on Nicaragua appears to have contributed significantly to the demise of the Somoza government.

Over the past two decades, the UN Commission on Human Rights has devoted considerable and growing effort to country studies, including such politically prominent countries as Guatemala, Iran, and Burma. Typically, the commission works through a special rapporteur -- a semi-independent expert and investigator. The special rapporteur, in addition to reporting formally to the commission, typically attempts to maintain a continuing dialogue with the government in question in order to establish a sustained presence and channel for influence.

The UN Commission on Human Rights has also developed an innovative series of "thematic" efforts to consider particular types of human rights violations, beginning with the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances established in 1980. In its first decade, this working group handled over 19,000 cases. In 1985, Peter Kooijmans, the outgoing chair of the commission, was appointed special rapporteur on torture. Kooijmans held this position until 1993, when he became Foreign Minister of the Netherlands -- a sign of the dramatic rise in the priority of human rights in the foreign policy of at least some states. Additional rapporteurs or working groups have been created to deal with summary or arbitrary executions, arbitrary detentions, religious intolerance, human rights violations by mercenaries, and racism.

The newest international human rights monitor is the semi-independent UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, established in 1994 on the recommendation of the Vienna World Conference. Although it is still too early to assess the impact of this initiative, the appointment in 1997 of Mary Robinson, the former President of Ireland, has brought a substantial increase in the profile and vigor of the office.

Nongovernmental Organizations and States: Their Contrasting Roles
As noted earlier, the transnational activities of human rights nongovernmental organizations outside their own countries and the bilateral policies of states are often at least as important to the international politics of human rights as the activities of formal multilateral institutions discussed above. In addition to the international campaigns waged by Amnesty International, such U.S. NGOs as Americas Watch, the American Civil Liberties Union, and several other organizations were important players in the struggles over Central American policy in the 1980s. And in both North America and Europe, NGOs played a major role in national debates over sanctions against South Africa during the 1980s.

Because of their private status, NGOs can operate free of the political control of states. And because they do not have broader foreign policy concerns that may conflict with their human rights objectives, they often are better able to press human rights concerns.

Human rights NGOs may also have a special advantage as national advocates of improved human rights practices. Because they are narrowly focused and generally nonpartisan, they sometimes can raise human rights issues within a country that no other actor can. Particularly where independent political activity is repressed and civil society is weak, as in the Soviet bloc or the Southern Cone of South America during the late 1970s and early 1980s, human rights NGOs may be the only national voice not completely silenced. Likewise today, in countries where democratization and political liberalization remain incomplete, partisan political activity often is far more dangerous than less directly partisan human rights activity. And both national and international human rights NGOs have a special role when political space begins to open, or threatens to close back down, because they act with a single-minded focus on human rights.

However, NGOs must rely on the power of publicity and persuasion. They lack the resources of even weak states. States remain free to be unpersuaded. And many states have used their powers of coercion against the members of human rights NGOs, turning them into new victims.

Sovereign states have almost the opposite strengths and weaknesses of NGOs. States in their foreign policies must accommodate a wide range of interests. Foreign policy can never be reduced to or identical to human rights policy. Furthermore, foreign policy is by its nature directed toward the realization of the national interest, which rarely places human rights above material and political interests. But when states do choose to pursue human rights objectives, they typically possess resources, channels of influence, and even publicity capabilities that are unavailable to NGOs.

The national role of states also needs to be emphasized. States, in addition to being the principal violators of human rights, are the principal mechanism for their protection and implementation in the contemporary world. The ultimate goal of human rights advocacy is to alter national law and practice. The contribution of international actors is therefore almost always secondary to the national political struggles by which citizens force their own government to respect their rights. International action can help to quicken the pace, provide support for national human rights advocates, and add further incentives for regimes to respect the rights of their citizens. It is at the level of the nation-state, however, that human rights must ultimately be vindicated.

Finally, in thinking about international human rights pressures on states, the role of actors who are only episodically involved, or may not even have an explicit human rights mandate, should not be overlooked. For example, the 1993 Vienna World Conference on Human Rights, a one-time, ad hoc gathering, helped refocus international attention on human rights in the post-Cold War world. The war crimes tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda are ad hoc bodies that may help to shape the direction of international human rights activities. The 1995 United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing attempted to introduce women's issues more explicitly into the mainstream of international human rights discussions. The World Bank, in its recent emphasis on "good governance," has begun to touch on important human rights issues. And both the Council of Europe and the European Union have stressed the importance of rights-protective policies to inclusion in "Europe."

A System of International Accountability
Although sovereign states retain a primary responsibility for implementing internationally recognized human rights in their territories, they no longer enjoy the protections of discrete diplomatic silence. Quite the contrary, persistent human rights violators increasingly must act in the light of embarrassing international publicity mobilized by public and private groups. Global, regional, national, and transnational actors have created a web of pressures that make it almost impossible today for states to avoid a public accounting of their human rights practices.

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The authority of government...is still an impure one: to be strictly just, it must have the sanction and consent of the governed. It can have no pure right over my person and property but what I concede to it. The progress from an absolute to a limited monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a democracy, is progress toward a true respect for the individual.

Henry David Thoreau, American essayist (1817-1862), from Civil Disobedience, 1846

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The most important impact of all this -- largely verbal -- international human rights activity, however, probably lies less in its immediate achievements on behalf of victims than in the fact that national and international norms and expectations are being altered. The idea of human rights has a moral force and mobilizing power in the contemporary world that seems hard to resist. And as more and more citizens throughout the world come to think of themselves as endowed with inalienable rights against their government, the demand for human rights continues to cause dictators to flee and their governments to crumble.

The sword often proves mightier than the word, at least in the short run. But the task of human rights advocates, wherever they may be, is the ancient and noble one of speaking the truth of justice to power. And one of the most heartening lessons of recent international history is that, far more often than so-called realists would ever allow, that truth can triumph.

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Jack Donnelly is the Andrew W. Mellon professor at the Graduate School of International Studies, University of Denver. Dr. Donnelly is the author of Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice, International Human Rights, and numerous articles on a variety of human rights issues.