UNU Update: Human rights seminar in NY

The newsletter of United Nations University and its international

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Issue30: March-April 2004FRONT PAGE
Globalization and human rights
focus of UNU discussion

Panelists at the seminar included (from left) Jean-Marc

Coicaud, Philip Alston, Michael Doyle and Simon Munzu.
Governments have failed to strike a balance between fighting terrorism and
protecting human rights, according to a leading US authority on
international law.
Many Governments had exploited the opportunity to restrict and derogate
from human rights in order to achieve objectives which had all too little
to do with rights, Philip Alston, Professor of International Law at New
York University Law School told a UN University seminar in New York.
"We seem to have forgotten the lessons of efforts in Latin America to
establish �national security states� premised on the argument that all
measures, no matter how brutal or dirty were justified in order to defeat
the enemies of the State," Alston said. "Such policies had failed
disastrously, and the risk is that we are moving down a similar path again
in some countries."
The seminar, held at UN headquarters on International Human Rights Day
(December 10), marked the New York launch of the UNU Press book The
Globalization of Human Rights, co-edited by Jean-Marc Coicaud, Michael
Doyle, and Amy Gardner and written under the auspices of the United
Nations University�s Peace and Governance Programme.
Opening the event, Mr. Coicaud said that although the projection of
Western power worldwide had left many victims throughout the world, the
West had also been instrumental in developing the modern discourse and
practice of human rights.
The international community, although it feels both the moral and legal
need to enforce human rights, has not "expressed a decisive and consistent
commitment that goes beyond lip service," he said.
Michael Doyle, who is Harold Brown Professor at Columbia University and
another co-editor of the book, told the audience that under the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, the human rights discourse has evolved in
three generations. The first focused on civil and political rights such
as free speech, the second on economic and social rights such as education
and employment and the third generation on rights of language and
representation for minority groups within a state.
He argued that the recognition that human rights are universal,
interrelated, indivisible and interdependent has been a significant
landmark of human rights education.
Mr. Munzu said that the development activities of the UN were helping to
promote economic and social rights globally but much remained to be done.
"In many failed or weak states and low-income countries the state is
unable effectively to secure the economic, social and other rights of its
citizens, raising the question of whether human rights are 'citizen'
rights to be claimed from the country of citizenship or truly 'human'
rights to be claimed from the global human community.
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