The Universal Declaration of Human Rights at 70: protection of human rights in Australia*

This commentary reflects on the legacy of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on its 70th anniversary, in terms of the protection of human rights within Australia. I reflect on Australia’s failure to implement domestically the terms of the two founding Covenants, and the resulting piecemeal protections that exist for human rights. I finish by considering the growing complexities in understanding human rights, responsibilities, and limits.     

Bodil Begtrup and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: individual agency,transnationalism and intergovernmentalism in early UN human rights

The article investigates the individual agency of the little studied transnational, Bodil Begtrup, in the subfields of women's and minority rights, and refugee and asylum policy. Begtrup fulfilled many roles – as state representative, expert advisor, member of the United Nations' Commission on the Status of Women, and president of a national NGO. This article shows how Begtrup enjoyed wide room for manoeuvre in the subfield of women's rights, and acted in this as a transnational norm entrepreneur and process entrepreneur advocating women's rights as an integral part of human rights and forging the change of the institutional design of the UN human rights institutions. In the subfield of minority rights, refugee and asylum policy, Begtrup acted under tight governmental control because the issue at hand was subject to national interest and domestic party politics. Her agency in the two subfields shows how internationalism was a predominant feature in the early shaping of UN human rights. Transnationalism occurred when the subfield in question was not affected by national interest.     

Insights from Cameroon: Five years after the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

In September 2007, after 23 years of negotiation between nation states and indigenous peoples' organizations, the United Nations (UN) General Assembly finally adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Among its most significant assertions were indigenous peoples' rights to self‐determination; to lands, territories, and natural resources; and to free, prior, and informed consent. Activists and organizations concerned with human and minority rights saw the adoption of the declaration as an important step toward the improvement of the precarious situation of many minority groups. Today, five years have passed since the declaration's adoption. What difference has it made? Have the activists' expectations materialized? How has the declaration been implemented? Which are the responses of governmental and civil society actors? Drawing on institutional developments at the United Nations as well as the case of Cameroon and the Mbororo as a national minority group, I aim to provide some answers to these questions.     

Indigenous peoples' rights and the politics of the term 'indigenous'

This article forms part of an ongoing debate on rights and the use of the term 'indigenous', which has so far included exchanges in Current Anthropology , the New Humanist , and ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY , as indicated in the bibliography. The authors here respond specifically to an article by Adam Kuper, published in Current Anthropology and the New Humanist . Professor Kuper has been invited to respond and has indicated his intention to do so in the forthcoming issue of ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY . Readers are invited to contribute their own views to the debate. [Ed.]     

Indigenous biocultural rights and the Blue Mountains: Local and international policy challenges

Indigenous knowledges play a critical role in addressing the environmental crisis, and the United Nations system has adopted a suite of international treaties to protect and strengthen Indigenous peoples’ rights, which are often described as biocultural rights. Because World Heritage Areas are nominated and monitored by UNESCO, an initial hypothesis in this study was that such areas would be subject to higher than normal standards in regard to Indigenous people’s biocultural rights. By reference to the Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area, Australia, this research examined how the international legislative framework influences conservation practices. We held semi-structured interviews with conservation and Indigenous local experts and compared park management practices in the Area against those used in an Indigenous Protected Area. Findings align with the literature and suggest that Indigenous and scientific knowledge systems can generate new insights for the Area and other sites. Yet, Indigenous knowledges are only marginally applied in practice. Some barriers to full participation of Indigenous people are specific to the colonial history of the area. Yet, findings point to a lack of action by Australian governments and UNESCO, and that needs to be redressed. The study calls attention to the need to support and resource Indigenous people to enable collaborative partnerships to yield significant benefits for biodiversity and protection of Country.     

Translation on Trial: The Virginia Declaration of Rights (1776) in Sweden

Tracing the international career of the 1776 Virginia Declaration of Rights to Sweden via France, this article is a study in the translation of politics and the politics of translation. Specifically, it shows how the Swedish translator, physician and publisher Lorents Münter Philipson (1765–1851) reached for it in 1792 to add to domestic arguments against hereditary office, the purpose of which, the article argues, was to revive and legitimise a more indigenous but by now slumbering rights revolution. The article first outlines the reception of America in Sweden and the ways in which Sweden figured in American debates. It then provides a detailed analysis of the trial that ensued as a response to the Swedish translation of the Virginia Declaration. Having reconstructed the process of transmission and the trial, during which the translator was charged with attacking Sweden's monarchical constitution by means of ‘wrongly’ translating the term ‘magistrate’, the article places the translation of the declaration in political context. The contextual analysis shows that translating the declaration at this particular point in time makes most sense against the background of the events unfolding in revolutionary France, which the translator hoped would influence political developments in Sweden and which the authorities sought to suppress.     

The Ebb and Flow of Indigenous Rights Recognitions in Conservation Policy

At the 2003 World Parks Congress, diverse conservation actors called for the end of exclusionary approaches to conservation; recognition of customary forms of environmental protection; and restoration of losses to indigenous peoples whose lands were incorporated into protected areas without meaningful consent. A primary means to achieving such reforms has been the development of rights‐based approaches to conservation, expressed at the time as the better integration of human rights into the planning and management of protected areas. This article reviews the suite of publications that followed the 2003 Congress, each identifying the need for rights‐based approaches in conservation. All reviewed materials seek to operationalize human rights into conservation planning, but the review indicates a pattern of support for, then retreat from, and even a possible ‘backlash’ against, indigenous rights. The review also finds important differences in organizations’ ideas about who is responsible for protecting the environment versus who is responsible for protecting human rights. The authors draw from these findings a caution against the subversion of the original intention of rights‐based conservation to definitions that more fully serve conservation organizations’ own ends, based on the presumption that benefits (including rights) from environmental protection will eventually trickle down to people.     

The Applicability of Human Rights: A Voegelinian Interpretation

ABSTRACT

The human rights discourse is prevalent in our contemporary social and political setting. In large part it determines the way we understand justice and therefore plays a crucial role in shaping the way we think and act. But despite its prevalence and widespread acceptance, this discourse is not without its difficulties. One of the more persistent, significant, and well-documented problems associated with human rights is whether they are universal or relative in their application. The following essay attempts to confront this question from a novel and more informative perspective than the ones offered thus far. Analyzing the debate concerning the universality or relativity of human rights from within the intellectual framework of Eric Voegelin's philosophy of history, this essay endeavors to uncover the essence of human rights and thus bring to light their true function lest we burden them with tasks that are beyond their scope.     

Dog Wars and Human Rights: Perceptions of Political Despotism at the End of the Ancien Regime

During the political crisis in the Salzburg archiepiscopacyat the end of the eighteenth century there was an increase inthe number of violent clashes between huntsmen and poachersin the forest areas. The huntsmen exacerbated the anger of therural communities by shooting dead any farm dogs they foundrunning free. The farmers, for their part, ignored the decreewhich had been in force since the sixteenth century that theyshould either chain their dogs up or restrict their freedomwith a Knüppel, a large piece of wood attached to the neckto hinder their chasing after game. These attacks by the huntsmenwere felt by the peasants to be an arbitrary abuse of politicalpower, and a threat to their farms. They were angered both thatthis limited the ability of the dogs to do their duty in guardingthe farms, and also by the way the dogs' natural guarding instinctswere being undermined. They thought of men and their animalsas different creatures, but they were forced to acknowledgethat the restriction of the dogs' freedom was also an attempton their own liberty. The Dog Wars crystallized a conflict aroundtraditional feudal symbols of subjugation. They show how theimages that the ruling and the ruled had of each other beganto crumble and give way to mutual mistrust. The Salzburg farmershad no need of revolutionary agitators to see that the archiepiscopalstate was moribund. They had their own yardsticks, first andforemost poaching, with which to measure the effective limitsset to their freedom by the state. They were not party to thecontemporary intellectual debates on human rights, but the violenceto their dogs was a clear sign to them of the revolutionaryspirit of the times. The notion of human rights did not enjoylinear growth, but itself progressed by way of conflict. Andthis notion should not be limited to the human condition only—itmust be extrapolated beyond the ideological fixations of thenineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the context of the historyof dogs—man's longest-standing companion, after all—‘human’rights take on a different hue, relativized and yet somehowmore clearly defined.     

Human Rights and International Security: The International Community and the Greek Dictators

The Greek junta was notorious for its use of state torture as a means of control. Yet, for most Western governments and organisations such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the United Nations (UN), Greece's geostrategic location was considered to be a higher priority than the undemocratic behaviour of the ‘Colonels’. This article seeks to synthesise existing historiography with new research in order to examine the complex and interconnected processes that led Western states and key international institutions to tolerate human-rights abuses in Greece in the face of huge protest from international public opinion. It will look at why Western states failed to explain away the ‘Greek case’, as they had done with Portugal and Spain, as an anomaly on the road to defeating a mortal enemy, the USSR, which was committing far more numerous violations. It will also consider why international opinion focused on Greece so intently. It will show how many in the West were lulled by the regime into believing that human-rights abusers can act as agents of stability and security. The article's footnotes aim to draw attention to the many primary and secondary sources that provide additional information on the issue of human-rights abuses by the Greek junta.     

Jimmy Carter and the Foreign Policy of Human Rights:

I would hope that the nations of the world might say that we had built a lasting peace, based not on weapons of war but on international policies which reflect our own most precious values. These are not just my goals, and they will not be my accomplishments, but the affirmation of our nation's continuing moral strength and our belief in an undiminished, ever-expanding American dream. ¹
President Jimmy Carter, Inaugural Address, 20 January 20, 1977     

Women's Rights as Human Rights after the End of History

This article is based on the 2022 Gender & History annual lecture. It reconsiders the recent history of women's rights as human rights. The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union brought to an end a twentieth-century discourse of women's rights, understood not only as legal norms, but as a political language harnessed to a narrative of women as a collective subject progressing towards emancipation and equality. This was enabled by an international order in which human rights were tied to visions of self-determination, social rights and strong states, creating spaces for new subjects to make their voices heard in international law, albeit in particular and circumscribed ways. After 1989, women were again written into international law primarily as victims of violence, while the emergence of gender as a category of analysis challenged the notion of ‘women’ as a collective subject of rights. The story of women's rights, the article concludes, suggests that recent revisionist histories of human rights as a neoliberal utopia are only one part of a more complex human rights history.