75th anniversary of the Declaration of Human Rights: problem areas wars and China
Published: Thursday, Dec 7th 2023, 11:00
Back to Live Feed
Bombs in Ukraine, a terrorist attack on Israel, rocket attacks in the Gaza Strip and many more brutal battles in Sudan, Myanmar and other countries: What's wrong with the world?
75 years ago, on December 10, 1948, the then members of the newly founded United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The 30 articles are intended to protect every person in the world from arbitrary state violence. As the global situation shows, this has hardly been achieved so far. "It is not human rights that are failing," said the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, recently in Geneva. "It is the cynical disregard for human rights and the failure to heed warnings about human rights that have brought us here."
"Legal norms do not translate themselves into reality," explains Wolfgang Kaleck, Secretary General of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) in Berlin. And the reality of the last 75 years has been wars and massacres, as the human rights lawyer tells dpa. "After all, we have the Declaration of Human Rights." It is indispensable. The Director of the German Institute for Human Rights, Beate Rudolf, says: "The idea of human rights is as powerful today as it was 75 years ago. The idea that everyone has rights simply by virtue of being human, everywhere and at all times, inspires people and limits states."
Nine international treaties have been drawn up on the basis of the Declaration of Human Rights, which set out rights in concrete terms, including the Convention on the Rights of the Child. "Of course, paper alone is not enough, they have to be implemented, and that requires pressure from civil society," says Kenneth Roth, who headed the human rights organization Human Rights Watch for around 20 years until 2022 and is now a lecturer at Princeton. Challenges remain. Three highlights:
Wars, conflicts, human rights
"Since the so-called 'war on terror' from 2001 onwards, there has been a dramatic erosion of international law and human rights," says Kaleck. He is referring to the US response to the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington with the collapse of the World Trade Center towers. The USA had terror suspects taken to a prison camp in Guantanamo, where they were held for years without trial. US soldiers tortured people in Iraq. None of this was punished internationally, says Kaleck.
"Gaza is becoming a test of whether the West is serious about international law and human rights," he says. Even before the most recent Israeli attacks in the Gaza Strip in response to the terrorist attack on October 7, Western countries had remained inactive. "If, like the German government, you advocate that Israel should not have to answer to the International Criminal Court for illegal settlement construction, but only point the finger at those who are far away, in Africa - that no longer works." Such double standards would be rightly denounced in the rest of the world. "In the West, we are digging our own grave by allowing legal principles to erode. If the trust that the law is applied equally to everyone breaks down, it will only be about who is the strongest - militarily. This is very bad for Europe because, among other things, it is economically dependent on reliable trade relations.
China's approach to human rights
For human rights activists, the biggest threat to human rights comes from China. "They want to undermine the whole concept," says Roth. "That's attractive to dictators." In the UN Human Rights Council, for example, China insists that each country should be allowed to choose its "own path of human rights development", taking into account its cultural heritage and national conditions. "China only wants the gross domestic product to count, the growth of the economy," says Roth. It calls this collective rights, for example to a life without poverty. It has never ratified the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which enshrines freedom of expression and assembly.
China is trying to use financial pressure to get countries on its side in votes at the United Nations, says Roth. In 2022, Beijing managed to prevent a debate on a report by the UN Human Rights Office describing the oppression of the Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang in the Human Rights Council with the votes of others, such as Cuba, Venezuela and Sudan. However, Roth does not believe that the strategy will be successful in the long term. Many countries that benefited from China's money in the Silk Road project and agreed with Beijing in the United Nations are now in a debt trap and are disillusioned.
Human rights and migration
"The role of human rights in contemporary societies has changed," says conflict researcher Susanne Buckley-Zistel from Philipp University Marburg to dpa. "In the past, in the 70s and 80s, the focus was on authoritarian regimes, torture, totalitarianism, political prisoners in other countries. Now they are used more to address the situation in their own country."
Buckley-Zistel is investigating the role of human rights in the context of migration in a project with other institutes. "In the migration debate, we are talking about a humanization of human rights," she says. Migrants and the organizations that support them make greater reference to human rights in order to articulate their interests. "This also includes raising awareness among refugees that they can defend themselves in Germany, for example, against human rights violations that have happened to them elsewhere," says Buckley-Zistel. "For example, the world's first trial for state torture in Syria took place in Koblenz in 2020."
©Keystone/SDA
English 
German 
French 
Spanish 
Arabic