Louise Arbour: The declaration of human rights ‘is more than worth defending’

Louise Arbour was Human Rights Commissioner from Ville de Montréal / Sylvain Légaré. Illustration: Helen James / swissinfo.ch 

Louise Arbour is the third UN Human Rights Commissioner in our series – but before we tell you about her, we should remember the human rights commissioner who can’t give us an interview. Sergio Viera de Mello was appointed by Kofi Annan to the post in 2002, but in 2003, he, along with 21 other UN workers, was killed when suicide bombers attacked the UN headquarters in the Canal Hotel in Baghdad.

So great were the shockwaves following the bombing, that when Kofi Annan called Louise Arbour to ask her to “replace Sergio” her first reaction was hesitancy. What’s more Arbour had just begun serving as a judge on Canada’s supreme court – not a position people normally leave after a few months.

But, she remembers, Kofi Annan was “very persuasive”, and she finally accepted the job, knowing, she says, that the secretary general “would have my back.”

Throughout 2023, SWI swissinfo.ch has been 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. The current UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, describes the declaration as “a transformative document… in response to cataclysmic events during the Second World War.”

The very first UN commissioner, Jose Ayala Lasso from Ecuador, took office in 1994. Why did it take so long to appoint someone when the Universal Declaration was drafted in 1948?

Our Inside Geneva podcast has interviewed all the former UN High Commissioners for Human Rights (a job sometimes called the UN’s toughest) to hear their experiences, their successes, and their challenges.

The law will prevail

Louise Arbour is first and last a lawyer. Before taking up her UN post she had served on the international tribunals for former Yugoslavia, and for Rwanda.

“The work I did both with the tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda were, if anything, a vindication for me of the significance of law” she remembers.

She is perhaps best known for indicting Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic for war crimes. “If I did not firmly believe that one day he would stand trial in the Hague, I wouldn’t waste my time doing this really hard job. The law is very patient.”

Challenges inside and out

Taking on the job of human rights commissioner posed different challenges. The human rights commissioner has no prosecutorial powers. Instead, he or she must uphold international human rights law by simply reminding governments of their obligations, and keeping a spotlight on violations.

When Arbour took office, the very countries which had, since 1945, set themselves up as world leaders, seemed to be rowing back on their human rights commitments.

The United States set up Guantanamo Bay. The “war on terror”, some US leaders suggested, meant that fundamental principles, such as the Geneva Convention or the absolute prohibition on torture, were no longer relevant.

“These were very challenging times,” says Arbour. “2004, you know, this was in the backyard of 9/11. A new, dangerous, unknown world was starting to unfold with a lot of uncertainties, including on the human rights front.”

At the same time Arbour faced a UN structure that, she felt, was bureaucratic and unwieldy. “We were too absent from the field,” she remembers.

Today, UN human rights has monitoring missions in many parts of the world, among them Ukraine and Afghanistan. This is, for Arbour, a source of satisfaction. “Field work, it’s very challenging for the member states, you know, you’re never welcome anywhere but…it’s where it’s happening.”

Today, Arbour believes the best way to mark the 75^th anniversary of the universal declaration of human rights is to stick to its fundamental principles. them. Laws, believes this lawyer, are there to be upheld and obeyed.

“The blueprint is more than worth defending,” she says. “If you came from another planet and you just looked at the human rights framework; the universal declaration of human rights, all the treaties, the conventions, the work of the treaty bodies, you’d think you’d arrived in heaven. So why is it not the case?”