The Rise and Rise of Human Rights [Hardcover]

The Rise and Rise of Human Rights is a very different and quite original contribution to the subject. Kirsten Sellars simply takes a very clear-eyed and astute look at what has actually happened. She takes nothing at face value, but probes behind the scenes, exploring the discussions and the conflicts that have shaped specific developments.

The result is an often breathtaking exposure of hypocrisy and humbug. For example, take the legendary status in human rights lore of the contribution of 42 non-governmental organisations to the drafting of the United Nations Charter. They have long been given credit for ensuring that the Charter attended properly to human rights. Drawing on official papers and the writings of politicians and diplomats involved, Sellars shows that these 42 groups, invited by the US government to the founding conference in San Francisco in 1945, were in fact manipulated to push hard in public for what had already been decided in the State Department. As an official commented in London afterwards 'We had quite underestimated the apparent power of the American administration to delude these simple folk and to make them think that their objectives had been achieved in the present Charter.' He added, 'nearly all of these 'consultants' talked the most fearful nonsense'.

Sellars takes us from the UN Charter through Nuremburg, Tokyo, the colonial and post-colonial world, the crusades of Jimmy Carter and later the religious right, the International Criminal Tribunals at the Hague and Arusha and the International Criminal Court. At every step of the way she shows how it has been the political imperatives of the major powers, in particular the United States, that have driven the agenda. The need to alleviate human suffering and provide increased protection for individuals anywhere has always taken second place to promoting the global image of the powerful and securing greater legitimacy at home. She provides, for example, hair-raising details of the cyncial use to which governments have put groups such as Amnesty and Human Rights Watch.

Sellars is sensitive to the idealism of many of those who have devoted their lives to this cause; she just hasn't found much of it among the people who really count.

This outstanding book, full of excellent research, is also very funny. Take the British colonial official Henry Steel, struggling with the problem of what do about the colonies after Britain had signed the European Convention on Human Rights. He went through the options in a memo - withdrawal of the Convention from the colonies, flouting the Convention, relying on a 'public danger' loophole. Then he had an afterthought.
'There is also, I suppose, the course of adhering strictly to the Convention and refraining from doing what we want to do.'