Exactly seventy years ago, on December 10, 1948, the United Nations accepted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Since then, human rights have improved significantly worldwide.
A record number of journalists were murdered in 2017. There are millions of refugees because of the war in Syria, where human rights violations are still the order of the day. 168 million children are still forced to work, often in dangerous conditions. This is evident from data from the UN.
At first glance, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights does not seem to have been a success at all. According to the American lawyer Eric Posner, we have even entered an era where human rights hardly matter. Former UN Secretary Ban Ki-Moon also implicitly stated that the protection of human rights has failed miserably. “The human suffering we see now is as great as the suffering that plagued the world when the United Nations was established,” he told the World Humanitarian Summit two years ago.
But is that actually the case? Has the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which a brand new United Nations adopted in 1948, indeed achieved nothing or hardly anything?
That question is not so easy to answer. Definitions of human rights sometimes vary and violations often happen on the cover. Nor has there been much empirical scientific research into the global state of human rights at all. But if we look at the research that has been done, there seems to be every reason for optimism. Compared to 1948, a lot has improved.
Rising line
Take the research of Harvard University political scientist Kathryn Sikkink. She not only investigated the origins of the Declaration of Human Rights, but also studied for decades how the protection of those rights developed after 1948.
“Change takes time, but there is a clear upward trend,” she wrote in her 2017 book Evidence for Hope. Violence against civilians has decreased significantly. Which is partly because there are fewer genocides and wars.
Much has also improved when it comes to socio-economic rights. The number of people living in extreme poverty is historically low, according to UN figures. The chance of suffering from malnutrition was still 50 percent in 1948, now it is 13 percent. In addition, access to education and health care has improved enormously worldwide.
American psychologist Steven Pinker, who has studied human well-being through the ages, is also positive. “Never before have we had so much freedom and material wealth as we do now,” he writes in his book Enlightenment Now, which was published this year. . The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was an important step forward in this regard.
Many Dutch scientists share this opinion. “Look at what the world was like when I was born just after the war, and you see the progress that has been made,” said sociologist Abram De Swaan last month during a public lecture in the Amsterdam Flexbieb. “Take women's rights. In the 1950s, it was still relatively common for girls to receive less education. Continuing education is now the norm, even in many non-Western countries. Which gives women more power, because it makes it easier for them to participate in society."
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Mental change
It is not surprising that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights shook the world, says Cees Flinterman, honorary professor of Human Rights at Maastricht University and member of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women. “It meant a huge change in mentality. Previously, the sovereignty of the state was sacred, think of how Nazi Germany treated the Jews in the 1930s, without other states getting involved. Now all of a sudden the right of the citizen came first and other states could hold a country that violated human rights to account. In addition, it was established that everyone had inalienable rights, regardless of origin. That was really revolutionary.”
In addition, the declaration quickly led to the necessary UN resolutions, which often resulted in international treaties. Such legislation became an important lead for activists. For example, the civil rights movement in the United States in the 1960s referred to the 1960 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. And Argentina's "Foolish Mothers" who demanded clarification from the dictatorial regime over their missing children in the late 1970s "referred on banners to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights that Argentina signed in 1968," says Flinterman.
Opposition
Yet something strange is going on. Many people feel that life in their country has deteriorated, according to a large-scale worldwide study by the American research center Pew. And the academically-developed CIRI Human Rights Dataset, which charts governments' respect for Human Rights between 1981 and 2011, shows that many human rights are less. be protected.
However, according to political scientist Anne Marie Clark of the American Purdue University, this is an artificial increase; human rights are simply being portrayed in more and more detail. Take the US State Department, whose Country Reports on Human Rights Practices serves as important input for figures on human rights violations. While this US Department of State only had one human rights expert in the early 1970s, there are now more than a hundred.
In addition, many definitions of human rights violations have been 'stretched' over the past 35 years. In the 1980s, for example, 'political murders' were mainly understood to mean the murder of political opponents by a government. Today, for many activists, this includes excessive police brutality against non-political detainees or murdered citizens from a minority group that the government does not adequately protect. The concept of torture has also been formulated more broadly in international law. This can easily make it seem as if there are more and more human rights violations. However, political scientist Christopher Farris shows that this is a fable. Farris built into a computer-driven model the probability that the standards on which certain violations were based would expand over time and then had the model recalculate human rights violations in the time period 1980-2011.
The resulting figures show that human rights have indeed improved on the basis of these more extensive definitions. The chance of being tortured or becoming a victim of political assassination, for example, has steadily decreased. Other human rights violations remained the same (but did not increase), such as the chance of becoming a political prisoner.
He also shows how broadened definitions give a distorted picture. For example, based on new definitions, CIRI assessed that Sweden used as much torture in 2011 as Guatemala did in 1983. Sweden was criticized by the UN Committee against Torture because government cuts to prison staff meant that Swedish prisoners did not have as much contact with other detainees as they did. would like and received less personal attention. There was no physical violence. Guatemala, on the other hand, had a military junta in 1983 that systematically tortured the indigenous Maya population and made them disappear, as did many political opponents.
Viper
But even if we assume that human rights are increasingly observed, it is not always clear to what extent this is due to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – and the international human rights treaties and actions that have been influenced by it. Such an interpretation can be difficult, especially with regard to socio-economic rights. For example, Posner points out that the enormous decline in poverty and hunger that we have seen in recent decades was in large part the result of the successful transition to a capitalist economy by populous China and India. And therefore not of a particular human rights policy.
The economic boom of these “Asian tigers” has allowed more people to say goodbye to extreme poverty. But that also does not mean that aid in the spirit of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by definition played no role. In Africa, for example, the death rate has fallen sharply, at least partly due to development aid offered or promoted by the UN, such as vaccination programmes.
Moreover, in order to lift many people out of poverty, economic growth must benefit poorer population groups. In China, this was partly due to the introduction of pensions. When introducing such measures, the Chinese government likes to guard against the importance of socio-economic human rights. But also Chinese social scientists who find this pension system not yet inclusive enough, like to frame this criticism with reference to, yes, human rights.
All in all, thanks to the Declaration of Universal Human Rights – and all the actions it inspired – the world has come a long way. Let's hope that upward trend continues. According to Flinterman, that is really in the interest of all of us. “We have become increasingly interconnected economically and technologically. Being only interested in your own country or group is no longer of this time. Not only do you hit others with it, but you also easily cut yourself in the fingers with it.”