V o L u m e I : a d

and ideologically awkward alliance between Western democracies and the

Soviet Union required some positive common denominator—good versus

evil—that transcended a common enemy. These two trends were further

strengthened after the war, when the true scale of Nazi atrocities and the

Holocaust became apparent and World War II acquired its established char-

acter as a war of good against evil. This good was interpreted by many as

human rights. The Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunals of 1945–1946, pre-

sided over by American, British, French, and Soviet judges, introduced the

concept of crimes against humanity into international law. Although formu-

lated and applied after the fact, the construct of crimes against humanity set

standards of human rights according to which Nazi leaders could be tried and

punished not just for atrocities committed in occupied territories but also for

those against German citizens on German territory.

The United Nations (UN) went even further to promote the rhetoric, if

not the practice, of human rights in its founding Charter and in the Decem-

ber 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of

Genocide and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The significance

of these documents was declarative rather than normative, because no en-

forcement mechanisms with appropriate powers were created following these

declarations. As noted above, there are no rights for some without duties for

others. For humans to have rights, some institution must be entrusted with

enforcing them; otherwise, declarations remain just that. Since the Universal

Declaration of Human Rights was a compromise between communist and

democratic representatives, it included economic rights clauses that clearly

make no normative sense in a universal context; for example, the right of

every human to enjoy a paid vacation.

The onset of the Cold War stifled attempts to enforce a universal regime

of human rights because communist totalitarianism was inherently founded

on the state’s right to violate any right of its subjects, while Western democ-

racies protected its client states that abused human rights in the developing

world, from Iran to Haiti to Latin America. The so-called realist approach to

international relations promoted by Henry Kissinger, for example, dictates

nonintervention in the internal human rights policies of other countries and

the determination of U.S. foreign policy based exclusively on its geopolitical

interests. For example, in 1973 the United States supported the Chilean mil-

itary in deposing leftist President Salvador Allende and instituting a regime

that exhibited worse human rights violations than its predecessor. For polit-

ical expediency, it also engaged in an alliance with Maoist China, although

China’s Cultural Revolution violated human rights on a scale far greater than

in the Soviet Union.

A variety of UN-sponsored human rights covenants and agreements from

the 1960s further broadened the rhetorical connotations of human rights to

encompass social, economic, and ethnic issues but also deepened the divide

between the public rhetoric and actual practices of signatory nations to these

covenants. Both sides in the Cold War used human rights rhetoric as a tool

in their ideological war. The West lambasted communist states for allegedly

violating the liberties of their subjects, while the communists harped on the

936

Human Rights

The Nuremberg War

Crimes Tribunals of

1945–1946, presided

over by American,

British, French, 

and Soviet judges,

introduced the

concept of “crimes

against humanity”

into international

law.

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alleged violation of the right to work of the unemployed in free market

economies.

The policing of human rights became more effective by the mid-1970s

through the introduction of various new methods for enforcement. The

United States attempted to use its economic might to pressure human rights

violators. In 1973, the U.S. Congress linked foreign aid to the human rights

record of recipient countries. The Jackson-Vanik Amendment to the U.S.

Trade Act of 1974 attempted to use the Soviets’ reliance upon American

wheat to pressure the Soviet Union to increase Jewish, Baltic, and Baptist

emigration by linking free emigration with a most-favored nation (MFN)

trade status. However, the generally low volume of trade between the two

blocs limited the effectiveness of this kind of leverage. The Soviets reacted

by linking emigration to the state of their negotiations with the United States

over disarmament and other political issues.

The 1975 Helsinki Final Act Covenant on Human Rights was probably

viewed by the Soviet leadership as yet another declarative statement of little

lasting effect. It included safety clauses that precluded intervention in the

internal affairs of Soviet-bloc countries. Yet its ratification by Soviet-bloc

Human Rights

937

A Chinese peasant, bound for execution, kneeling before a tribunal of local communists at an outdoor court at Fukang,

Guangdong Province, China, in 1953. The man’s crime was owning a small parcel of land. (Library of Congress)

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nations provided international legal grounds for East European dissidents

to assist their governments in its implementation. The Helsinki Process pro-

vided a legal basis for the resurrection of civil society in Eastern Europe,

especially through the Charter 77 dissident movement in Czechoslovakia

and the Soviet Human Rights Committee of Andrei Sakharov and Sergei

Kovaljov. Dissident groups were able to pressure their governments to

respect human rights through exposure of their violations in the Western

media, which were then broadcast back beyond the Iron Curtain via Radio

Liberty. Dissidents pressed on to assert their rights to express their opinions

in samizdat publications (typed carbon copies that circulated among friends)

and in informal gatherings where banned music and theater could be per-

formed and critical lectures could be delivered. The dissidents were sup-

ported most effectively by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in the

West, which put greater pressure on the Soviet regimes than governments

ever could.

A somewhat parallel development took place west of the Iron Curtain,

where NGOs such as Amnesty International became significant in enforcing

human rights through monitoring and reporting and by embarrassing the

perpetrating governments in the forum of world public opinion. When U.S.

President Jimmy Carter took office in 1977, he refocused his nation’s foreign

policy to promote global human rights, although he continued to support

some traditional U.S. allies, such as Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi of Iran,

despite their dismal human rights records. Still, the idealistic shift in policy

persisted through the presidency of Ronald Reagan. The Reagan adminis-

tration attempted to improve the human rights situation in nations in Latin

America, Indonesia, and East Asia, albeit through private channels rather than

public diplomacy and sometimes by utilizing illegal means. In 1985, human

rights were one of four items on the agenda of Soviet and American negotia-

tors as the Cold War began to wind down.

In 1987 the Soviet Union moved to improve its human rights record by

releasing political prisoners and granting freedom of speech, the press,

assembly, and travel, which ultimately led to political freedom and, after

1991, to national self-determination. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s per-

estroika and glasnost policies were in large measure responsible for these

momentous turns of events. The problem then, as now, has been the lack

of institutional guarantees of human rights in the former Soviet states that

would systematically enforce rights.

Gorbachev’s attempt to reform communism proved that totalitarian com-

munist regimes could not easily introduce human rights into their system.

Totalitarianism is, in essence, an all-or-nothing proposition. Once it allows its

people to possess rudimentary human rights, it loses its claim to power; the

people demand greater distribution of rights from the rulers to the ruled, and

totalitarianism ends. This process had already been predicted by Czech dis-

sident Václav Benda in his 1978 essay “A Parallel Polis.”

In the closing years of the Cold War, as international tensions subsided,

the U.S. interest in supporting regimes that violated human rights for the sake

of political expediency waned. Consequently, a wave of democratization

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