London 6 December 2023
We are today celebrating the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And “celebrate“ is, I would suggest, the right word to use even if the world remains full of abuses of those rights, as it most certainly does. Celebrate because the 1948 Declaration was the first occasion in world history when all the nation states of which the world was made up joined together in promulgating a clearly articulated and comprehensive set of human rights which all of them, without exception, should uphold; and that has remained the case since then as every new state joining the UN has also accepted the Universal Declaration.
The Universal Declaration thus became the global yardstick by which to assess each individual state’s observance, or failure to observe, those rights. What was lacking, of course, and is still lacking, are any effective enforcement processes to ensure observance of those rights and to sanction non-observance. But, without the Universal Declaration we would not have even started down that road nor have traced the direction in which we were headed.
During my own period of direct involvement in the UN, as Britain’s ambassador from 1990 to 1995 and as a member of Kofi Annan’s High Level Reform Panel in 2003 to 2005 – a period in which many of the taboos which had afflicted the UN during the Cold War fell away – human rights were not neglected. In September 1990, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child was signed – by Margaret Thatcher on behalf of the UK with me sitting beside her. Then later in that decade the office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights was established. Successive holders of that office have done notable work shining a spotlight on abuses of human rights in places like Sri Lanka and on the Uighur population of China. Then an International Criminal Court was set up under the Rome Statute to prosecute the most egregious abuses of human rights.
And in 2005, following a recommendation of the Reform Panel on which I served, the old discredited Human Rights Commission was swept away and replaced by a Council whose new system of Universal Periodic Reviews ensures that the human rights performance of every single member state of the UN was subjected to detailed scrutiny and criticism by its peers.
I recall this record not to blow my own or the UN’s trumpet but to demonstrate that incremental progress can be made, in this as in other fields, if sufficient will and determination is shown by the UN’s collective membership.
Does that mean that everything is fine? No, of course it does not. You only have to look around the world to see that. Does it mean that the Universal Declaration itself is flawed or in some ways represents a dated, Western view of human rights? Well, every country, Western or not, has accepted it on joining the UN so it can hardly be called exclusive in any meaningful sense. As a simple test take out the Universal Declaration and read it – and then tell me which of its provisions is not of general application worldwide. In truth, it is not the Declaration which is at fault but the states which have undertaken to observe it and do so, if at all, imperfectly. And that goes for all of us including the UK – if you do not credit that,
just read the outcome of the reasonably recent Human Rights Council Universal Periodic Review of the UK.
So, what needs to be done to improve implementation of the Universal Declaration by all its members? Well, I do not believe myself that there is any silver bullet which will achieve that in a flash. Only hard, incremental work in bringing human rights abuses and abusers into the full light of day and supporting measures to bring about effective, practical changes has any hope of doing that. That I would suggest should be the aim of every British government in office if we are to uphold and to strengthen the rules-based international order, of which the Universal Declaration is such a notable and indeed noble, part.
PERSPECTIVES 