Universalizing Human Rights: The Role of Small States in the Construction of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Abstract

In the fifty years that have passed since the United Nations General Assembly approved the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), 1 literally hundreds of books on the subject of human rights have come to fill the shelves of major university libraries in the United States and around the world. Human rights has claimed the attention of scholars in several disciplines, and the notion is alternatively approached as a philosophical idea, a legal concept, or a political project. Human rights readily finds a home in Western political philosophy, where theories of natural rights and social contract are well-anchored and help elaborate the modern concept of human rights. This concept has also been discussed in comparative philosophical frameworks. 2 Human rights as a legal concept is part of the bedrock of contemporary international law, and neither legal scholarship [End Page 44] nor discussion of the international implementation mechanisms (and their flaws) is wanting. The study of international human rights as a political project, however, has been relatively neglected. A political project refers to concerted efforts to build a public and worldwide consensus around the idea of human rights, including political strategies, diplomatic initiatives, agreement of explicit principles, and conclusion of an international accord. 3 The field of international relations is the most natural disciplinary home for such inquiry, but until the 1970s, the paradigmatic attachment to the notion of sovereignty excluded virtually all treatment of human rights. Scholars in international relations tended to view concern with human rights as a matter of domestic governance, and thus out of their domain. It was only with discussions of transnationalism, international regimes, and the limits to political realism that human rights began its slow creep into that literature. 4 Political analyses of international human rights began to appear in the late 1980s, and today they are complemented by a growing body of writings about the construction of international human rights as a political project. 5