2004 Carnegie-Wateler Peace Prize
| DOI | 10.1177/016934410502300108 |
| Date | 01 March 2005 |
| Published date | 01 March 2005 |
| Subject Matter | Part C: Appendices |
2004 CARNEGIE-WATELER PEACE PRIZE
STATEMENT BY THEO VAN BOVEN*
Distinguished President and Members of the Board of Directors of the Carnegie
Foundation, ladies and gentlemen,
It is with pride and great pleasure that I have accepted the 2004 Carnegie-Wateler
Peace Prize. I consider it a special honour that the Board of Directors of the
Carnegie Foundation has chosen me as their laureate in the year that the Carnegie
Foundation celebrates its hundred years’ anniversary. This year’s award of the
Carnegie-Wateler Peace Prize also symbolises and affirms that an inherent link exists
between peace and human rights.
This event in the venerable Peace Palace in The Hague offers me the opportunity
to reflect on some four decades of involvement in human rights issues, and in
particular on the growing role of human rights in international law and
international relations. Quite some time ago a Norwegian member of an
international human rights expert body observed with a slight sense of scepticism
that their meetings at the basement level of United Nations Headquarters in New
York were an indication of the modest place attributed to human rights. Today, if he
would still have been alive, he could witness that human rights, at least at the
bureaucratic level, are accommodated in palaces. I am not referring to the Peace
Palace here in The Hague which is hosting highly respected international legal
institutions, but to the Palais des Droits de l’Homme in Strasbourg and the Palais Wilson
in Geneva. Leaving aside the question whether a palace is a fitting place for human
rights, the move from the basement to the palace clearly symbolises a trend. A trend
which generates high dignitaries, officials and institutions all over the world in
numerous countries, such as Ministers and State Secretaries for Human Rights,
Human Rights Ambassadors and Special Envoys, Human Rights High Commissio-
ners, National Human Rights Commissioners, Human Rights Professors, Human
Rights Study Centers and a variety of other human rights professionals, practitioners
and academics. There remains though the intriguing question whether the move
from the basement to the palace and the professionalisation of human rights is
having a commensurate impact on the actual enjoyment of human rights in the
world at large.
It may be tempting to speak about this proliferation of human rights officials and
institutions with a critical intonation and to consider this trend as window-dressing,
but such an approach would not do justice to the efforts of many, practitioners and
academics, to enhance respect for human rights and to strengthen their basis in law
and education. Moreover and most importantly, this trend also inter-acts with and
responds to the almost explosive growth in the past forty or fifty years of civil society
PART C: APPENDICES
Netherlands Quarterly of Human Rights, Vol. 23/1, 133-149, 2005.
#Netherlands Institute of Human Rights (SIM), Printed in the Netherlands. 133
* Theo van Boven is Professor of International Law at the University of Maastricht, the Netherlands.
He was up until 1 December 2004 Special Rapporteur on Torture of the UN Commission on
Human Rights. He delivered this statement at the Carnegie-Wateler award ceremony on 22 October
2004.
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