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Thank you very much for inviting me to join such a distinguished group of speakers here today. I’m not sure, however, that I can directly speak to the topic of this conference. How you young people understand and practice human rights is really something that you should tell me. But I can offer a few personal thoughts of my own on this important topic, in the hopes that these thoughts might aid your later discussions.
Let me begin, if you don’t mind, with a statement that may be a cliché, but that has the virtue of being true nonetheless. It is this: Human rights are universal. If anyone here doubts that, he or she need only look at your program to be convinced otherwise. Human rights now seem to encompass ever aspect of society. You will even have a session devoted to the “ecological aspect of human rights.” I’m sorry I can’t attend that one myself. It’s a new part of human rights to me.
But many parts of human rights are new to me, because human rights theology has been evolving over the years and continues to do so today. In fact, the pace of its evolution seems to me to have picked up recently. I can offer my own mission as an example. Annex Six of the Dayton Agreement, which ended the war here twelve-and-a-half years ago, is entitled “Agreement on Human Rights.” It begins with this statement: “The Parties shall secure to all persons within their jurisdiction the highest level of internationally recognized human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the rights and freedoms provided in the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms and its Protocols and the other international agreements listed in the Appendix to this Annex.” It then goes on to ask the OSCE, along with a host of other international organizations, “to monitor closely the human rights situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina.”
Now I naively used to think that the term “monitoring” meant keeping an eye on various parts of and governments in Bosnia and Herzegovina – and this country has a lot of both – to see if they were upholding the highest level of human rights and fundamental freedoms and, if not, to call their failures to do so their attention. So you can imagine my surprise, when I took up my position here, to find that we and other human rights organizations had now gone beyond that and were now actively engaging in what we call “advocacy,” particularly for what are known for short as economic and social rights, which I think you will be discussing on “Day III” of this conference. We do this, it seems, because that is what human rights officers now do. They all seem to believe deeply in a “UN rights-based approach.” This approach starts from the presumption that the various United Nations conventions on human rights, which some people have even decided to group together and call an “International Bill of Human Rights,” now direct and determine human rights’ officers work. This in turn requires that such officers now “advocate,” rather than simply monitor and report, in order to ensure that human rights enjoy the respect to which they are legally entitled in countries that have ratified all of these conventions – and even in some, like the United States, that have not.
The basis for this approach, I think, is the idea that flagrant or gross violations of human rights are an affront to the inherent dignity of everyone. Such violations therefore affect us all, wherever we live and whoever we are. This premise or precept is now becoming entrenched in international law. It has already become the basis of international and regional mechanisms for the protection of human rights.
This is not entirely new. I won’t bore you with the entire history of human rights, if only because most of you would know more about it than I, but I will point out that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was “adopted and proclaimed” in a resolution of the United Nations General Assembly on December 10, 1948, a date we now celebrate each year as International Human Rights Day. Then, in 1975, at the height or depths of the Cold War, in a document called the Helsinki Final Act, thirty-some European States, a category that somehow included both the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, reaffirmed “… the universal significance of human rights and fundamental freedoms, respect for which is an essential factor for the peace, justice and wellbeing necessary to ensure the development of friendly relations and co-operation among themselves as among all States.”
The Helsinki Final Act later generated a humble organization called the OSCE. More important, it also prompted many of the states that gained independence after the break-up of the Soviet Union to introduce measures for human rights protection into their new constitutions. Most of them ratified the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, to which the Dayton Agreement awards such prominence, as well. This means, I think, that they subjected themselves to the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights, too.
The end of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall, which must seem like ancient history to many of you, had consequences that were not always peaceful. Conflicts broke out in parts of Europe ranging from the Caucasus to the Balkans Peninsula. The genocidal power-struggles in Rwanda and other parts of the Great Lakes Region in Africa reminded us that such conflicts were neither new nor unique to the European continent either. They also signalled the emergence of new threats to international security, threats that caused states and some international organizations to examine whether their commitments to a universal respect for human rights were more than just verbal. Such an examination led the leaders of some of those states and organizations, not to mention thinkers in academic institutions and activists in non-governmental organizations, to craft new concepts like “humanitarian intervention” and the “Responsibility to Protect”—or “R2P.” These concepts, while widely accepted by human rights theoreticians and activists, are not, I should perhaps point out, universally popular. They have prompted leaders of other states to charge that such ideas and such interventions constitute meddling in the internal affairs and violations of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of member States of the United Nations – and thus constitute violations of the United Nations Charter as well. This debate continues to rage today.
At the same time, especially in this decade, the attention of human rights theoreticians and activists began to turn more and more to the human dimensions of poverty, along with global warming and migration, and to their linkages to security and cooperation. Strong movements in support of these new dimensions, often headed by young men and women like you, have prompted the United Nations and other international organisations to draft new conventions for the protection of the environment, of individuals at risk of trafficking, and of migrant workers and indigenous peoples. The United Nations’ list of human rights, in other words, continues to grow.
International justice has evolved accordingly. In 1993 the United Nations established a tribunal in Hague, in the Netherlands, to prosecute crimes against international law committed in this part of Europe. (The full and proper title of this court is “the International Tribunal for the Prosecution of Persons Responsible for Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law Committed in the Territory of the Former Yugoslavia since 1991.”) In Bosnia and Herzegovina, domestic courts – in particular the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which did not exist when the Dayton Agreement was signed and which only began work a few years ago – supplemented these efforts. The Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina has international judges and prosecutors working along side their domestic counterparts. Its creation coincided with the adoption of a new Bosnian-Herzegovinian criminal procedure code, which among other things incorporated “crimes against humanity,” a new concept in local jurisprudence and one not found in previous criminal codes and or even in the codes some still in use in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s lower courts today.
But just as not everyone in Bosnia and Herzegovina agrees on who committed what crimes or even on what kinds of crimes they may have committed, so do the after-effects of war still linger in other ways as well. A debate over the extent of the genocide in Srebrenica in 1995 and over whether similar crimes were perpetrated against other nationalities in this country has, for instance, grown quite heated in the last few weeks. Today, too, 130,000 people are still displaced from their original homes in this country, while perhaps half of the two million people who fled those homes during the war remain abroad.
War destroys not just lives and people but whole communities and economies too. A fifth of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s population, roughly 800,000 people, now live below the poverty line. They need assistance if they are to enjoy something approaching the same standard of living – or what my human rights colleagues call the same economic and social rights – as their more fortunate fellow countrymen. If governments and officials do not become more willing to give priority in fact, and not only on paper, to contemporary norms and standards of human rights, which include “rights” to housing, social assistance, health care, and the like, then this will not happen. Peace will seem to many people here to have come to Bosnia and Herzegovina at the price of continued discrimination and exclusion.
As this example suggests, human rights do not just happen. They do not flow automatically from words set down on paper. Like delicate plants placed into thin soil or rocky ground, they sometimes requires years of effort before they take root and blossom and grow. Their protection requires much more than just a legal framework too. International cooperation and the intergovernmental organisations such as the OSCE can help. But the main responsibility lies with governments, who have to promote, preserve, and protect human rights actively. Without civil society, and particularly young people like you, to hold governments accountable, these delicate plantings can all too easily wither and die.
The very fact of this conference, then, is promising for the future. I’m glad you’re all here. I wish you an interesting time here over the next few days and every success in your future work. I hope it will always incorporate a commitment to human rights.
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