The spread of human rights norms has been the biggest success of the United Nations.
Discuss.
There have been clear successes from the United Nations’ handling and treatment of Human
Rights issues since the 1948 Declaration. Although the first twenty years of its existence was
vague and unspecific and lacked focus in terms of rights, from the 1960s, ‘there was a fragile
but persistent movement toward improved supervision of states’ policies on human rights’.1
The aftermath of the Holocaust and World War Two made many countries reflect on
themselves. Harold Benjamin, among others has stated that educating people about their
rights has had a key role to play in spreading human rights norms. 2 Up to the 1990s, it
seemed as though the UN allowed countries to their own devices in seeing that rights were
adhered to. By the mid-1990s, questions were being raised as to the actual role the UN played
in national affairs. Did the UN have a role to play in taking direct action to protect people,
when it was clear that their own country did not? Indeed, it is the ordinary citizens who need
to be aware of their rights to make change happen and in cases where their rights are not
being met to hold those responsible accountable.3 Given the limits of this essay, two issues
will be looked at in particular, namely the UN’s successes in relation to the Rights of the
Child as well as that of Human Security.
Following on from the horrors of World War Two, the General Assembly set up the
International Children’s Emergency Fund, later known as the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF)
on 11th December 1946. Two years later in 1948, the 1948 ‘Universal Declaration of Human
Rights’ recognised the need to give special attention to the rights of the child. In his article on
UNICEF and their work with implementing the rights of the child, Oestreich claimed that
David P. Forsythe, ‘The United Nations and Human Rights, 1945-1985’ in Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 4,
No. 2 (Apr-June 1998), p. 252.
2 Bejamin, Harold, ‘The United Nations’ Human Rights Program’ in The Journal of Negro Education, Vol. 20,
No. 3, p. 258
3
Ibid.
1
UNICEF had gone unnoticed in their work in spreading human rights norms in implementing
the Convention on the Rights of the Child.4 The fact that they work in so many countries is
significant to their work; they are well known and have been fundamental in spreading the
concept of rights of the child. In particular, UNICEF played a key role in implementing the
rights that were set out in the 1989 Convention.5 Given the fact that what was in the
convention was so controversial, it is important to consider the role that UNICEF played.
Never before had it been thought that children should have the same rights as adults. Yes, as
it is stated on the UN website itself, it was an ‘unprecedented acceptance’ which ‘clearly
shows a wide global commitment to advancing children’s rights’.6 Even in western countries
such as the United States, the contents of the Treaty were not openly accepted.7 That said,
UNICEF has persisted in its efforts to obtain minimum rights for children and have had a lot
of success in doing so. UNICEF has been successful in their efforts to reduce the amount of
children involved in child prostitution. The very fact that they are present on the ground must
make it easier for them ‘to monitor compliance with human rights instruments’.8 UNICEF, as
an important UN body has therefore been significant in spreading human rights in particular
focusing on the rights of the child.
Yves Beigbeder, in his essay on The UN’s involvement in the rights of the child, states that
‘the United Nations has played an important role in calling the attention of world leaders and
public opinion to children through summit meetings, resolutions, declarations…’.9 The fact
that less than seventy years ago, children did not have a say or were not represented on an
Joel E. Oestreich, ‘UNICEF and the Implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child’ in Global
Governence, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Apr-June 1998), p. 184.
5
Ibid., p. 186
6
UNICEF: Convention on the Rights of the Child available at: http://www.unicef.org/crc/ [9/5/2016]
7
Joel E. Oestreich, p. 186
8
Ibid., p. 189
9
Yves Beigbeder, ‘Children’ in The Oxford Handbook on the United Nations (Oxford University Press, 2007),
p. 515
4
international platform is quite hard to believe today. This said, a vast majority of countries
[181] came on board on different treaties which discussed the rights of the child, such as the
World Declaration on the Survival, Protection and the Development of Children and the Plan
of Action for Implementing the World Declaration on the Survival, Protection and
Development of Children in the 1990s.10 In particular, the rights of the child have been
advanced through the 1989 Convention. In addition to these important documents, the more
recent Millennium Development Goals (MDG’s) and the Sustainable Development Goals
(SDG’s) have focused on improving the rights of the child. There has been a general
consensus among nations that children’s rights in particular need to continue to advance.
Charles Badenoch, Partnership Leader for Advocacy and Justice for Children with World
Vision International has been quite optimistic about the Sustainable Development Goals in
particular.11 It is interesting to get the perspective of somebody who is working on the ground
in developing countries. Badenoch has claimed that he is confident that the SDG’s will allow
for more input from children in the decision-making process ‘by promoting intergenerational
dialogue and effective channels monitoring and accountability’.12 The UN must be
commended on their ability to reflect on where the MDG’s failed children and learn from this
in adopting the SDG’s. When we consider what the message of the SDG’s are in relation to
the rights of children, there certainly seems to be a lot to be optimistic about. In developing
and reviewing the SDG’s in relation to Children’s Rights, it is clearly evident from their
report that the Open Working Group (OWG) wished to set specific targets such as reducing
the global maternal mortality ratio to less that 70 per 100,000 live births.13
10
Ibid.
Charles Badenoch, ‘SDG’s, a pathway to realise children’s rights’ available at: http://www.wvi.org/childparticipation/article/sdgs-pathway-realise-children%E2%80%99s-rights [4/5/2016]
12
Ibid.
13
UNICEF: ‘A review of the Open Working Group Report on Sustainable Development Goals from a Child
Rights
Perspective’
available
at:
http://www.unicef.org/post2015/files/Post_2015_OWG_review_CR_FINAL.pdf [2/5/2016]
11
Given the fact that many developing countries presently have figures seven or eight times this
figure, this goal seems quite ambitious.14 The very precise targets must be commended but
one may wonder whether or not such goals or targets are really achievable? It is quite
apparent that for the most part, countries are aware of their obligations to meet specific target
set down by the UN. Even when one thinks of that 70 Member States worked together in
drafting the agenda which later let to the SDGs, this is quite a significant achievement.15 Yet,
one must pose the question: who are countries who signed up to the SDG’s going to be
accountable to? Nonetheless, it is certainly a positive advancement on the MDG’s, given the
fact that where the MDG’s failed for children could be seen in violence towards children and
many children living in poverty.16 Therefore, one can see that the the UN has learned from
their errors in the past and continues to strive to achieve the rights of Children which were
laid down in the charter. The SDG’s of course take into account other rights and the work the
open group have put into developing these goals for 2030 is quite commendable.
The work of UNICEF in particular in spreading the rights of the child in the areas of
education, home life, health, security and so on is a very visible reminder of the work of the
UN in this field. Other important organisations on the ground fighting for the rights of the
Child are the World Health Organisation. The World Health Organisation plays a key role in
trying to reduce maternal and child mortality and combating diseases such as AIDS and
malaria.17 Despite the work of UNICEF and WHO and other United Nations organisations,
the success of the organisation is limited. The fact that UNICEF’s funding comes from
largely government sources, it is dependent on good relations with developed countries to
continue its work. In addition, despite targets being set through conventions and reports such
‘Maternal mortality ratio (modelled estimate, per 100,000 live births)’ in The World Bank : Working for a
World Free of Poverty available at: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.STA.MMRT [10/5/2016]
15
Ibid., p. 2
16
Ibid., p 4.
17
Yves Beigbeder, p. 517
14
as the recent MDG’s and SDG’s, the work that the UN can achieve is limited. Abhinaya
Ramesh has argued that there were inherent weaknesses in the 1989 convention.18 States who
had ratified the convention were obliged to submit reports detailing their work as to how they
implemented the rights of the child. Yet by 1998, only 113 countries had submitted their
initial reports.19 This is just one example but it demonstrates the inability of the UN to hold
all countries to account, despite them having agreed at a convention. Like its work in other
areas such as development, security and achieving gender equality, it depends on other
countries to buy in to its policies. The very fact that ‘over one billion are severely deprived of
at least one of the essential goods and services’20 that they are ‘entitled’ to, goes some way in
illustrating the shortfalls of the UN’s success in achieving what it would like to achieve in
way of the rights of the child. In fact, the number of people living in hunger increased to 852
million in 2000-2002, despite the fact that the goal was set in 1996 to reduce the world’s 800
million starving population to 400 million by 2015.21 One could argue that this is
proportional to the increases in world population but it certainly illustrates the limitations of
the UN’s success in achieving these specific human rights. One has seen therefore that there
is a general concesus that the UN has had a lot of success in spreading human rights norms in
the way of the rights of the child. The 1989 convention brought about an awareness among
countries that children, like adults, have rights. Yet, despite countries being aware of this,
there have not always been successful outcomes.
In its spreading of human rights norms, the UN has played a significant role in the area of
human security. The very concept of security should obviously encompass other human
rights such as the rights of the child, development and so on and therefore it is a fundamental
Abhinaya Ramesh, ‘UN Convention on Rights of the Child: Inherent Weaknesses’ in Economic and Political
Weekly, Vol. 36, No. 22 (Jun. 2-8, 2001).
19
Ibid., p. 1948.
20
Yves Beigbeder, p.519
21
Ibid.
18
right. The Security Council has played a key role in enforcing compliance with the right of an
individual to feel secure, not only from external forces but also from internal forces. They
have illustrated this through economic sanctions and external forces. One only has to consider
the example in spring 1991 when the Security Council stated that the Iraq’s treatment of its
people constituted a threat to international peace.22 Chitalker and Malone have claimed that
‘the resolution represented the first instance in which the Council explicitly stated that
internal repression can lead to a threat against international peace and security’. 23 Here we
see how Human Security is linked to the human rights. In recognising that thousands of
refugees had to leave Iraq was an impingement on their rights to feel safe; the Security
Council called upon countries to cease trade with Iraq. This is significant in that it illustrated,
perhaps for the first time that the UN would take threats to human security very seriously.
It is probably fair to say that it is expected, at least from well developed nations that all
members of the UN should comply with the UN in its role in seeing that those countries
inflicting suffering upon civilians either within their own borders or in other countries should
be held accountable. The second half of the twentieth century and in particular since the
ending of the Cold War, has seen the UN make great strides in leading the way in human
security. The need to instil the concept of human rights among the different nations is present
in the UN Charter. For example, the goal to encourage ‘respect for human rights and for
fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, language, or religion’ is
mentioned.24 The UN through its General Assembly has provided what Hampson and Penny
David P. Forsythe, ‘The UN and Human Rights at Fifty, an Incremental but Incomplete Revolution’ in Global
Governance, Vol. 1, No. 3 (Sept. – Dec. 1995), p. 310.
23
Poorvi Chitalker and David M. Malone, ‘The UN Security Council and Iraq’ in United Nations University
Working Paper Series, No. 1, Nov. 2003, p.3.
24
Charter of the United Nations, Chapter 1: Purposes and Principles, Article 1 available at:
http://www.un.org/en/sections/un-charter/chapter-i/ [06/05/2016]
22
refer to in their chapter on Human Security, as ‘a unique forum for interstate negotiations’. 25
Indeed the General Assembly has spent much time debating how to deal with the recent
conflict in Syria. Countries, internationally, have come to see the UN as having a function in
maintaining peace, although its role can be quite restricted. Through consecutive treaties, the
UN has shown its desire not only to spread human rights norms but to see that these are
complied with and enforced. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime
of Genocide (1948; 1951) and the Convention of the Rights of the Child (1989; 1990) for
instance were significant in the UN’s efforts in seeing that nations comply with the rights of
individuals to security.
The United Nations certainly seems to possess a keen ability to reflect on what is working
and what is not working in relation to its over sightedness in many regards in terms of how
they can see that nations comply with Human Security. The UN High Commissioner had
much success in making sure that states simply with human rights norms. For instance, the
UN has successfully implemented sanctions in Zimbabwe at a time when the white-led
government tried to declare independence from the local black community in the later 1960s
and 1970s.26 The same could be said for the work of the Security Council in 1993-1994 in
Haiti following the overthrow of President Bertrand Artistide’s democratically elected
government. That said, more could be done in this regard. The setting up of the Human
Rights Council in 2015 has been seen as a positive step in holding more countries
accountable with regards to how they deal with the security of their citizens and of course in
their relations with others. Hampson and Penny see the NGO’s role as perhaps having a
Fen O. Hampson and Christopher K Penny ‘Human Secutiry’ in The Oxford Handbook of the United
Nations, p. 543
26
Ibid., p.544
25 25
greater impact in human rights campaigns. That said, they also consider the role that the UN
would have played in laying the bed for the norms as underlying this process.27
Paul Gordon Lauren has claimed in his article that the Commission on Human Rights lost
credibility28 and indeed one cannot deny the fact that the UN certainly failed in holding some
countries to account, in particular in terms of the human security. Taylor Owen has stated that
‘human security is a precondition for human development, but not vice versa’. 29 This is an
interesting assessment in that it claims that for a country or a state to develop, the citizens
must feel safe. Although countries are aware of the concept of human rights, the UN is
limited in what it can achieve unless they take a different stance on enforcing security. The
example of Syria must be mentioned here. Given the fact that hundreds of thousands of
citizens have been displaced and their homes and the family unit have been destroyed, one
would be doing an injustice to the Syrian people to say that the UN got it right in Syria. The
rights of Syrians are not only being denied in their own country but neither within the
European Union and on global scale. The UN, in its charter states that one of its purposes is
to achieve co-operation in ‘promoting and encouraging respect for human rights’. 30 In order
to achieve these rights, people need to feel safe and clearly Syrians do not feel safe in their
own country. Although Syria is a very specific case and an extremely sensitive war torn
country, it is the response of the countries to the situation which has been quite surprising
given the fact that there have been developments in terms of what is understood by ‘human
rights’.
27
Ibid.
Paul Gordon Lauren, p. 308.
29
Taylor Owen, ‘The uncertain future of human security in the UN’ in UNESCO 2008, available at:
http://www.taylorowen.com/Articles/2008%20Owen%20-%20UN%20and%20HS%20chapter.pdf [06/05/2016]
30
Charter of the United Nations, Chapter 1: Purposes and Principles, Article 1 available at:
http://www.un.org/en/sections/un-charter/chapter-i/ [06/05/2016]
28
One has seen therefore that the United Nations has had much success in spreading the
concept of human rights. The fact that it was set up following the atrocities of World War
Two meant that it had a lot of work to do in spreading the concept of human rights and
making it accessible, even for developing countries. The concept of human rights is very
much interlinked with what the UN stands for as a whole. ‘Human Rights’ could hardly be
seen as a standalone concept, alien from other pressing issues such as security and
development. At the heart of all these issues is making progress for the quality of life for
generations to come. These issues call on the need for countries to work together and we have
seen how this can work through recent conventions such as the 1989 convention on the rights
of the child, as well as the Paris Conference on climate change in 2015. At the heart of these
issues are what will make the world a better place for this century and so on. Despite their
successes, we have also seen how the UN does depend on other countries to buy into their
policies and hope that countries will see the issues of human rights as significant for them.
Individual countries and communities within states will continue to have their own agendas
and hence it is perhaps necessary for the UN to come up with a measure of enforcement in
certain cases to see that the rights of humans (and in particular children) are met.
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