The UN and Human Rights at Fifty: An Incremental but Incomplete Revolution

The first fifty years of the UN have manifested a revolutionary change concerning the place of human rights in world affairs. In an incremental rather than sudden way, there has been major change in the relationship between people and their governments. Clearly, in both legal theory and diplomatic practice, personal rights are no longer within the exclusive or even essential domestic jurisdiction of states. Fundamen tal personal rights?viz., human rights?have been internationally recog nized and made the object of varied international action. The UN now has concurrent jurisdiction over a broad range of human rights issues, sharing the promotion and protection of human rights with states and other inter governmental organizations. Further, international nongovernmental orga nizations have been highly active in this process of international gover nance. Particularly since 1991, if states do not protect human rights, the UN itself may try to protect them. Has the notion of international human rights, however, really taken hold in world affairs? Is this principled idea really deeply rooted in global society? Many states, insofar as they have a long history at all, do not have a long history of serious attention to human rights. Indeed, the existence of "mini-holocausts"2 since 1991 reminds us of the gap between legal theory and much human behavior. Might not old traditions of animosity and power, even savagery, actually overwhelm the relatively new notion of in ternational human rights? How can we say that there has been a revolu tion in human rights at the UN at the very time that certain writers project a deteriorating human condition?3 Taking stock of the status of human rights in the UN at fifty allows us to begin to answer an important question: Has international attention to human rights becon\e institutionalized, as a reflection of that notion's