The New York Times

Wednesday, December 8, 1999

THEN AND NOW / REFLECTIONS ON THE MILLENNIUM

The Powerful Idea of Human Rights

A great flowering of the ideal of universal human rights has taken place in the last 50 years, a blink of time in a millennium. It is among the most important political legacies of this century. Despite the persistence of state-sponsored repression and genocidal conflict, the belief that individuals have a claim to basic rights and dignities is being embraced by ordinary citizens on every continent. Freedom of speech and assembly, freedom from slavery, torture and arbitrary arrest, and the right to equality under the law as common values are still quite new in many parts of the world. But leaders who violate these principles now face international exposure, sanctions and even outside intervention, as Slobodan Milosevic discovered this year.

The past 30 years have seen the birth of hundreds of human rights organizations that give voice to aspirations of freedom and equality. These groups have worked to expose criminal regimes and help their victims. Many groups have become political forces in their own right, joining together to push for initiatives such as banning land mines.

The movement grew out of the horrors of World War II and the brutal tyrannies that darkened the rest of the 20th century. But its roots can be traced to the Greek Stoics who believed in universal natural laws, the Romans, who refined concepts on the rule of law, and the Enlightment philosophers who believed that freedom was a natural condition, and that the purpose of government was to serve and protect citizens. In this millennium, documents like Magna Carta of 1215, the English Bill of Rights of 1689, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789, and the American Constitution of 1787 and the Bill of Rights of 1791 advanced the universality of human rights.

Yet even in Western cultures where these notions of rights first developed, the progress of freedom took centuries. During the first half of the millennium, slavery was a common condition in Europe. In feudalism, only those wealthy enough to own land and arms enjoyed any semblance of freedom. In some 11th-century documents, those who were called "free" were hereditarily bound to their masters' land and transferred like livestock, with no rights to own or inherit property or even marry without a master's consent.

In 15th-century Genoa, a census counted more than 2,000 slaves in city households. In 1860, more than half the population of South Carolina was in slavery, and government-sanctioned racial dis-crimination existed in America for 100 years more. The struggle for women's suffrage across Europe and America did not end until after World War I.

Well into this century, human rights were not accepted as a matter for international discourse. The Covenant of the League of Nations of 1919, for example, did not address human rights generally. Earlier international agreements dealt with certain protections for victims of war, but not with how governments treated their own citizens.

The enormity of the Nazi atrocities forced the world to consider human rights as a concern of international law. The Nuremberg Principles established the authority of the international community to prosecute crimes committed by a state against its own people. In 1948 the United Nations approved the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a document that boldly proclaimed that recognition of "the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world." Its 30 articles catalogue civil, political, economic and social rights.

In just a few decades, the vision of that document, which is not a treaty but a "common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations," has become part of the dialogue among nations. Its principles were incorporated in the 1975 Helsinki Accords, which subjected human rights abuses in the former Soviet bloc to closer scrutiny. It remains the foundation of the global human rights movement, used by citizens from diverse cultures to express their hopes to the world.

This Friday marks the 51st anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration. The human rights movement is younger in age than the oldest baby boomers, and still embattled in many nations. In the 1990's, the world has witnessed the horror of genocide in Rwanda and the use of rape and torture as methods of war in the former Yugoslavia. The enforcement of human rights against rogue regimes, and even in nations that have adopted these principles, remains a struggle.

But the impact of the idea is undeniable. Human rights ideals have been accepted by people around the globe, whether they are students seeking democratic reform in China or women demanding equal protection under law in Pakistan. This development could not have been imagined at the start of the millennium or even this century. It offers a promise that could prove as important as the great revolutions of the preceding centuries.