How to uphold the Universal Declaration on Human Rights

Another mammoth session of the UN human rights council kicks off here in Geneva next week. The Palais des Nations will be full of scurrying diplomats and eager human rights activists. To journalists it probably feels like only yesterday that the last council session ended (in fact it was April 4, but we had a special session on Sudan in May as well) and now here we are again, with another packed agenda ahead of us.

It’s easy to weary of the human rights council. At times, if I’m honest, it feels at the same time both overwhelming and pointless. So many human rights violations to be tackled, so many ways our treatment of one another needs improvement, and yet year after year things don’t get better, in fact it often feels like they’re getting worse.

But 2023 is not the year for doubt, pessimism, and cynicism. We are marking the 75^th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a ground-breaking set of principles and also – fun fact – the most translated document in the world.

Over the course of this year, Inside Geneva will be devoting several episodes to the declaration, and to the UN and its human rights work – both successful and unsuccessful. The current UN human rights commissioner, Volker Türk, describes the declaration as “a transformative document…in response to cataclysmic events during the second world war.”

Small beginnings

Nowadays the UN’s human rights office is one of the bigger, more prominent, of the UN agencies. There are multiple committees (on racial discrimination, on the rights of the child, on the prevention of torture etc), and dozens of special rapporteurs, whose job it is to examine every aspect of the human rights records of member states.

But it didn’t start like that. In 1948, when the universal declaration was created, there was no UN human rights commissioner, no human rights council, no committees, and no special rapporteurs.

But there was a lot of hope. People, and their governments were, as Volker Türk rightly recognises today, exhausted and traumatised by the second world war. They were unified in never wanting such violence and cruelty to happen again.

But, soon after Second World War, the cold war began, the iron curtain descended. And governments, while queuing up to adopt the universal declaration, could not agree on how it should be implemented.

Jose Ayala Lasso, the very first UN human rights commissioner, remembers that while some thought the principles contained in the declaration were nice goals to have, others thought they should be obligatory, and that there should be some form of mechanism to uphold or even enforce them.

Cold war thaw

That debate continued for nearly 50 years, during which the UN’s human rights work was confined to a small, low-key office in New York. There was no UN human rights commissioner until 1994. But when the cold war ended in 1989 there was a rush of multilateral optimism. Remember the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992? Or Copenhagen’s World Summit for Social Development in 1994? For a few brief years the world united around some big goals, and included in that was the Vienna Conference on Human Rights in 1993.

Jose Ayala Lasso, now 91, was at that time representing Ecuador at the UN. He was deep in negotiations for reform of the security council, and wasn’t, he tells Inside Geneva this week, especially interested at first in moving from that role to negotiations over expanding the UN’s human rights work.

But, he tells us, the more he thought about it, the more he felt the time was right to put the universal declaration front and centre of the UN’s work, with a UN human rights commissioner, in charge of a Geneva based team tasked with upholding the principles of the declaration – principles Ayala Lasso believes should be obligatory.

“There were different interpretations about the validity of the declaration,” he remembers. “Some thought it was a declaration, not a compulsory and obligatory law for the states. Others thought the principles in the declaration were so important that they should be applied as a law. I tried to support this second position”.

Divisions and challenges

Ayala Lasso’s diplomacy succeeded in getting the new post of UN human rights commissioner approved. To get there he had to beat off a potentially divisive proposal from the United States which would have caused a vote of member states, and to persuade some sceptical African governments to back the creation of a new UN body. He managed, and even succeeded in his key goal of getting the post of commissioner approved by consensus, not a single member state objected or called for a vote.

The then UN secretary general Boutros Boutros Ghali rewarded Ayala Lasso for his hard work by appointing him to be the UN’s first ever human rights commissioner. He took office in April 1994, just as the Rwandan genocide was beginning.

“I had to go there,” he tells Inside Geneva. By the time Ayala Lasso got to Rwanda it was already May, and the Tutsi leader Paul Kagame complained bitterly that the genocide inflicted on his people was “near to completion”. Nevertheless, Ayala Lasso felt he “had to do something … the only action I considered useful at that point was to talk with the government, the Hutus, and to talk with the Tutsis.”

His strategy came too late, and did not achieve much; in fact the UN had already failed in Rwanda before Ayala Lasso even arrived in Geneva, to an office, he told me had “not a dollar” of budget, and just two staff.

Dialogue or confrontation

Ayala Lasso’s memories of Rwanda, and his attempts to talk to people committing the most horrific human rights violations, are a thread running through our summer series of human rights podcasts, in which we will be hearing from all the previous human rights commissioners. (Join us four weeks time for an in-depth interview with Mary Robinson).

What is the best way to confront atrocities? Dialogue, or confrontation? Over the years different commissioners have taken different approaches. Ayala Lasso believes both are necessary, depending on the circumstances, but urges human rights commissioners to keep listening.

“If you see human rights through the lens of communism, probably you see them in a different manner when you see them through the eyes of democratic governments. I do not think that we should…accept violations. But we should try to understand the reasons of the other: why {does} the regime, the totalitarian regime act in a way? Why?”

Do take a listen to the interview with Jose Ayala Lasso on Inside Geneva, it is fascinating, and, despite the horrific challenges he was confronted with as soon as he took office, this first human rights commissioner hasn’t lost his faith in humanity.

“The basic principle is the human being. Human beings are to be respected, they are equal in dignity and in rights as the declaration says in the first article. We should believe, we should not lose our faith in the capacity of human beings to act correctly.”