The UN and human rights

In “EU and EEA: Europe as a single market”, you saw how Europe sought peace through closer economic ties after 1945. In the same year – following the same experience of two world wars – a second project began, this time for the whole world: the UN, the United Nations organisation. Its founding idea was that there needs to be a place where all states talk to one another before they start shooting at one another.

Today, the UN has 193 member states – almost every country in the world. Liechtenstein has also been a member since 1990 and sits as an equal alongside countries with ten thousand times its population. Three main goals guide its work:

• Maintaining peace: Conflicts should be resolved at the negotiating table, not on the battlefield.
• Protecting human rights: Everyone has rights that no state may take away – more on this shortly.
• Promoting development: Fighting poverty, hunger and disease, and providing access to education.

One misunderstanding needs clearing up from the start: the UN is not a world government. It cannot simply give orders to states, and it has no large army of its own. It is a forum: a place for negotiation, mediation, voting and – sometimes – joint action. How much it achieves depends on whether its members cooperate. This is what makes it both strong and weak, as you will see when we look at the Security Council.

The UN has many bodies and subsidiary organisations – for this module, you only need the two most important ones shown in the diagram:

The General Assembly brings together all 193 member states. It follows a radically simple principle: each country has exactly one vote – Liechtenstein just as much as the most populous country on Earth. The General Assembly debates everything that matters to the world and adopts resolutions – although these are usually recommendations: they show what the international community thinks, but do not compel anyone to act. Even so, this forum is invaluable for a small state: nowhere else can it join the discussion with everyone on an equal footing.

The Security Council is the most powerful body: it is responsible for peace and security and is the only body that can make binding decisions – for example, sending peace missions or imposing sanctions. It has 15 members: 10 are elected by the General Assembly for two years each – and 5 are permanent members: the USA, Russia, China, France and Great Britain, the victorious powers of the Second World War.

These five have veto power: if even one veto power votes ‘No’, a resolution fails – regardless of how everyone else votes. Why was it set up this way? This was the founding compromise of 1945: without this guarantee, the major powers would never have joined – and a UN without the most powerful states would have been ineffective.

The price of this is the UN's inherent weakness: if a veto power is itself involved in a conflict or is protecting an ally, it can block any resolution on the matter. The Security Council is then unable to act – not because the rules are being broken, but because this is exactly how they work. Remember this mechanism: in “Konflikte verstehen: Ursachen, Eskalation, Akteure”, you will apply it to a real conflict.

After the crimes of the Second World War, the newly founded UN drew a second lesson: protecting states from one another is not enough – people also need protection from states. On 10 December 1948, the General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: 30 articles setting out, for the first time for the whole world, the rights that every human being is entitled to.

The key word here is universal: human rights apply to all people – regardless of their background, skin colour, religion, gender, language or wealth. They are not ‘granted’ by the state and cannot be taken away: you have them because you are human. Here are five key rights, explained through everyday examples:

• The right to life: The state must not kill anyone arbitrarily and must protect life – emergency services and the police must be there for everyone, not just certain groups.
• Freedom of expression: You can express your views and criticise those in power – for example, in a post opposing a building project in your municipality – without fearing arrest (you know its value from “Democracy as a principle”).
• The right to education: Every child should be able to go to school – primary education should be free and must not depend on wealth or gender.
• Protection from torture: No one may be tortured or subjected to degrading treatment – not during questioning, not in prison, and not ‘to get a confession’.
• Equality before the law: The same rules apply to everyone – in court, what matters is what happened, not who your parents are or where you come from.

These statements may seem obvious to you. That is exactly the point: for billions of people, they are not. This brings us to the hardest question in this module.

The Universal Declaration is a declaration – not a world law backed by a world police force. It became the standard against which states must be judged, and its rights were later incorporated into many constitutions and binding treaties. But declaring rights does not mean enforcing them.

You learnt about authoritarian systems in “Authoritarian systems today” – there, human rights violations are part of everyday life: critics are arrested (freedom of expression), trials are controlled (equality before the law), and confessions are forced (protection from torture). The key point is this: a state's violation of human rights does not mean that those rights do not apply there. They apply universally – yet they are still violated. This gap between aspiration and reality is the tension that international politics has had to deal with since 1948.

What can the international community do when rights are violated? It can identify and document violations – every state has to face questions about its human rights record at the UN, and no one likes to be seen as a violator. It can put pressure on states, from diplomatic protests to sanctions. And in serious cases, the Security Council can take binding action. But that is where the problem of the veto comes in – if a veto power is involved or protects the state concerned, this route is blocked.

The sober conclusion is: human rights are the globally recognised standard – their enforcement remains patchy. That is no reason to shrug your shoulders: the very existence of this standard has been changing the world since 1948 – slowly, with setbacks, but measurably. Every government that has to justify its actions today does so because, in 1948, the rights of every human being were put into writing.