The UN at 75: Human rights and global pandemic

Abstract

This column reflects on the continuing relevance of human rights in the 75th anniversary year of the founding of the United Nations. Despite the background circumstances, which included the catastrophe of a recent world war, ongoing colonial violence, and the dawn of the nuclear age, the new international body adopted the language and ideology of human rights as the moral foundation for the new world order. 75 years later, amidst a global pandemic, and in light of other pressing problems that include economic inequality, the return of pervasive ethno-nationalism, and the inevitable consequences of human-induced climate change, how well has this moral foundation stood the test of time?

During the 75th anniversary year of the founding of the United Nations (UN), amidst a global pandemic that is laying bare the frailties of internationalism as a political ideology, it is worth taking the measure of the moral underpinnings of this political ideology, human rights. In thinking of human rights as the most important moral project behind the creation of the UN in 1945, it is useful to consider both the immediate precursor to its establishment and the language through which this moral project was expressed.

Like the League of Nations before it, the UN was born of war, and not just any war or conflict, but the cataclysm of ‘world’ war, in which approximately 80 million people died; nuclear weapons were used intentionally to kill hundreds of thousands of civilians; and centuries of European anti-Semitism that culminated in the ‘Final Solution’, in which German technological capacity was combined with a doctrine of racial extermination in the most devastating genocide in human history. As the Preamble to the UN Charter makes clear, the creation of the UN was not just a response to the horrors of the Second World War; the ‘scourge of [world] war’ had brought ‘untold sorrow to [humankind]’ twice in the twentieth century. Between the First and Second World Wars, approximately 100 million people died as a result of military violence, genocide, starvation, disease, and injury, an unprecedented record of suffering and dehumanization for which humans themselves were directly responsible.

What was the moral foundation of the ‘international organization to be known as the United Nations’, which was established in order to prevent such scourges from ever returning? It was the condition of immanent ‘dignity and worth of the human person’, without regard to nationality, ethnic or racial identity, or gender, a moral status that gave rise to equally immanent and universal entitlements: ‘fundamental human rights’. So, with many parts of the world still in ashes, with the charnel house of war and genocide still smoldering, and with the Nuremberg trials still on the horizon, the 50 countries that signed the UN Charter in June 1945 did so as a leap of faith in the moral truth of universal human dignity and the entitlements this entailed.

These preceding circumstances are the reason I describe the legacy of human rights as a moral project, one that involved the projection of moral aspirations into an uncertain, even unlikely, future. With all evidence tragically to the contrary in 1945, how else could ‘fundamental human rights’ be expressed? In a largely colonial world, within a new organisation committed to nation-State sovereignty and anchored around a permanent Security Council that demonstrated from the beginning how some members of the international ‘community’ were more equal than others, the importance of human rights in practice could only be prospective, an aspiration, something to work toward in the distant future.

Three years later, when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) gave more elaborate form to this moral project, Eleanor Roosevelt, the Chair of the UN Commission on Human Rights, reaffirmed its prospective nature, despite the Declaration’s juridical trappings. In a Foreign Affairs article that was published in the months before the adoption of the UDHR in December 1948, Roosevelt reflected on what she described as the ‘promise’ of human rights: the fact that such a contrarian, even utopian, moral vision, announced at such a time (three years after the end of the Second World War, but with its consequences still omnipresent), would only – if ever – be realised many decades hence. As she explained, the immediate impact of the UN’s adoption of the UDHR would be minimal. Instead, its moral-didactic essence would only be revealed with time, perhaps a long time, a historical longue durée in which the moral project of human rights might ‘help forward very largely the education of the peoples of the world’. ¹

As we know in retrospect, Roosevelt’s predictions turned out to be accurate in both senses. The political and legal impacts of human rights did, indeed, remain largely symbolic, and not only because the radically opposing logics of the Cold War emerged as the dominant drivers of international relations. Except for a relatively small number of diplomats and activists, the entering into force in 1976 of both the ICCPR and the ICESCR, over thirty years after the UN Charter solemnly proclaimed its ‘faith in fundamental human rights’, was a moment in history that caused hardly a ripple. Indeed, in March 1976, when the covenant guaranteeing ‘civil and political’ human rights became legally binding, a covenant that recognised the primordial ‘inherent right to life’, crimes against humanity were being committed yet again, this time in ‘Democratic Kampuchea’, where the Khmer Rouge were in the process of ‘smashing’ 2 million fellow Cambodians as the cost of socialist-agrarian revolution. ²

Yet during these same decades and later, the promise of human rights as a moral project was beginning to bear fruit, albeit in subtle ways that could only be seen through tantalizing traces of influence: Nelson Mandela invoking the UDHR during his famous ‘I Am Prepared to Die’ speech before being sentenced to life in prison in 1964; Václav Havel and other members of the outlawed Charter 77 movement using human rights to criticise State repression in Czechoslovakia and other Soviet bloc countries; the use of human rights in an effort to ‘reconstruct’ ³ global values by different Caribbean and African countries during the process of decolonization; and the increasing mobilisation of human rights in the fight for the ‘cultural survival’ of the world’s indigenous peoples.

But it was not until after the end of the Cold War that the moral project of human rights could be said to have truly shaped, on a large scale, the ‘education of the peoples of the world’, as Eleanor Roosevelt imagined. The 1990s was without question the Hesiodic Golden Age for human rights, the golden decade that, like the Ages of Man, would eventually give way to decline, backlash, and ‘endtimes’. ⁴ Yet before this could happen, these roughly ten years of halcyon florescence formed a period in which a ‘culture of human rights’ took root in many parts of the world, often at the grassroots level where human rights were vernacularised as a moral language, as an emancipatory narrative, and as a ‘way of life’. ⁵

At the same time, the dissolution of the bipolar Cold War system opened up new possibilities for international mobilisation through historic world conferences, during which the terms of human rights as a moral project could be negotiated and renegotiated in ways not possible during the preceding decades. In 1993, the World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna reaffirmed the universality of human rights and launched the post-Cold War era with a burst of internationalist enthusiasm. Two years later, during the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, First Lady of the United States Hillary Rodham Clinton gave a provocative speech about ten kilometres away from where hundreds of young democracy and human rights activists had been massacred by the Chinese government six years before. In her speech, Clinton made the argument to the 20,000 gathered participants from over 189 countries that ‘human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights’, thereby ensuring that women’s rights would become an essential part of the human rights bedrock during this decennium mirabilis. (Yet even the golden age of human rights was marred by ‘untold sorrow’, including in the years during and between the Vienna and Beijing Conferences when the scourge of genocide reared its ugly head in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda).

Although the UN Secretary-General could confidently declare in 2000 that that world was living through the ‘Age of Human Rights’, ⁶ this age was, in fact, drawing to a close. Whether it was the attacks of September 11, 2001, or the images of American soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners at Abu-Ghraib, or, somewhat later, the coalescence of organizations like the G-20, which expanded its influence dramatically after 2008 in order to safeguard global capitalism, the signs were unmistakable: the epoch in which human rights became ‘one of the key ideas of contemporary world-making’ ⁷ had yielded to a different world, one shaped by global electronic surveillance, the bodies of immigrants washing up on the shores of Europe’s beaches, and the innumerable ramifications of ‘galloping material inequality’, for which human rights apparently had no answer. ⁸

Nevertheless, despite these shifts in the status of human rights as a moral project at what might be thought of as geopolitical levels, the ‘education of the peoples of the world’ continued in much more fractured, unremarked, even invisible ways. These were the spaces in which cultures of human rights—diverse, innovative, unpredictable—remained vital in the ‘small places’ of everyday life well beyond the walls of courtrooms and political campaigns. ⁹ But was the continuation of human rights as a moral project in all of its pluralist richness one in which the ‘dignity and worth of the human person’ remained at the core of diverse local practices, despite what appear to be failures at the much more visible international level?

To answer this question, I return to the current moment, the global Covid-19 pandemic of 2020 (-?). In relation to the international level, we can reasonably quickly evaluate whether or not the UN has fulfilled its Article 1 purposes in the face of one of the gravest and most sudden global crises of the last hundred years. If the UN was created in 1945 to ‘take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats’, to ‘achieve international co-operation in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian character’, and function as a ‘centre for harmonizing the actions of nations in the attainment of […] common ends’, ¹⁰ then we must acknowledge that the UN has manifestly and tragically failed to achieve these purposes. Even the World Health Organization (a specialised agency of the UN, founded in 1948) has had to confront the same formidable forces that have completely marginalised the wider UN as the only supranational institution whose mandate is to respond globally to global threats.

These countervailing forces have different origins, but the most important is the enduring and not-so-hidden hand of Westphalian sovereignty, which establishes a powerful contradictory logic at the heart of the UN project. Without having to rehearse all the many ways in which ‘the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members’ (Art. 2.1) — with some members much more equal than others, as we have seen above — has rendered the UN largely impotent during many of the most consequential global crises since 1945, it is enough to simply say that this legacy has only been magnified during the course of the global Covid-19 pandemic.

But leaving the failure of the UN to realise its grand cosmopolitan visions aside, what about its moral underpinnings? Have our responses to the pandemic — in all their multiplicity — shown signs of the ‘education of the peoples of the world’ through human rights? I think, in fact, this is actually the much more important question. As we have seen, within an international system marked by increasing levels of nationalist closure and tension between nation-States even within relatively successful regional bodies such as the European Union, the responses by individual States have varied widely. Although some States have followed international guidelines to greater or lesser degrees, the approaches of others have been puzzling, inexplicable, even bizarre. It is only a matter of luck that a person lives in a country like Germany or New Zealand, which has imposed rational public health restrictions based on scientific advice, or in a country like the United States, where gun-toting activists protest for the ‘right’ to become infected and whose president speculated in front of a national audience that people might experiment by injecting themselves with household disinfectant as a cure for the virus.

Beyond the capriciousness in State responses to the global Covid-19 pandemic, however, something very different and much more hopeful has been seen: people coming together on small scales in ways that reflect genuine moral concern, empathy, and what in French would be described as interreconnaissance. Here, I am referring to the instances — from Mumbai to New York City — in which people emerge onto balconies once a day to cheer medical workers; the fact that hundreds of thousands of people around the world have volunteered to make deliveries of food to elderly neighbours; and the ways in which educators have responded with tremendous creativity in the face of personal and professional challenges, thereby playing a key role in ensuring the human right to education.

Yet when people in Dhaka play music from their balcony to boost morale in their immediate neighbourhood, they know that people living under lockdown in Italy cannot hear them, and vice versa. It would be a stretch to make the moral argument that in playing music to lift the hearts of their neighbours, people in these instances are acting ‘towards one another in a spirit of [personhood]’, as Article 1 of the UDHR imagines. But perhaps this is assuming too much, or, rather, too little? In singing opera from his balcony, knowing that this gesture will eventually reach the attention of national and then international media, is the man in Venice also projecting moral concern — even implicitly — to everyone around the world who will learn of this gesture? And if so, is this evidence, in fact, that the education of the peoples of the world to see themselves as ‘members of the human family’ has been much more pervasive than supposed?

The way in which we interpret these gestures, these signs, during these months and possibly years of global crisis will tell us much about what the course of the future will likely hold. Does our ‘performance’ as moral actors provide ‘evidence for hope’ that we will (re-)act in a spirit of interreconnaissance, despite the everyday categories that divide us, to confront the crises that are surely coming for us at even bigger scales: those caused by human-induced climate change; nuclear war; and yes, other pandemics, except those that are exponentially worse than the global Covid-19 pandemic? ¹¹

What happens when one of the dreaded filoviruses like Ebola mutates and becomes transmittable through the air, like Covid-19, and not only through blood and other bodily fluids, which has made the terrible viral haemorrhagic fevers like Ebola and Marburg much easier to contain? Ebola, which has a mortality rate of between 60% and 90% (compared to roughly 1% for Covid-19), has been called a ‘slate clearer’, a ‘hot’ virus whose effects on the human — and not just the human — body has been described as an internal bomb going off. ¹² It’s almost impossible to imagine what it would be like to confront a global Ebola pandemic; in any event, it would bring a level of ‘untold sorrow’ that would make the scourge of war pale by comparison.

In the face of this and other possible dystopian futures, I do not think we have a choice. The language, history, and emancipatory potential of human rights as a moral project will remain as good as any other in establishing a framework that—under the right conditions—can be used to nurture a spirit of personhood, interreconnaissance, solidarity beyond boundaries. Global crises like the current Covid-19 pandemic might, or might not, be considered the right conditions in which ‘faith in fundamental human rights’ might flourish.

It depends not on how States or the UN responds, but rather on how one reads the incalculable gestures that are made in the equally incalculable ‘small places’ that constitute the spaces of everyday life. Amidst so much moral uncertainty, so many questions about whether or not our faith in human rights should provide a sense of comfort as we collectively look to the horizon, I think the best we can do, in the end, is to continue singing from our balconies.