I Book Review: Human Rights at the UN: The Political History of Universal Justice
| Published date | 01 June 2009 |
| Date | 01 June 2009 |
| DOI | 10.1177/016934410902700213 |
| Subject Matter | Part D: DocumentationI Book Review |
Documentation
312 Intersentia
Roger Normand and Sarah Zaidi, Human Rights at the UN: e Political History
of Universal Justice (foreword by Richard A. Falk), Indiana University Press,
Bloomington and India napolis, 2008, xx xi + 486 pp., ISBN: 978–0-253–34935–4*
For those who, like the present reviewer, are sti ll eagerly awaiting the second edition
of Philip Alston’s celebrated 1992 book e United Nations and Human Rights, now
announced for publication in 2010, the new book by Normand a nd Zaidi is a worthy
stand-in. e book is part of the United Nations Intellectual History Project, edited
by Louis Emmerij, Richa rd Jolly and om as G. Weis s. e two authors of the present
volume are both associate professors at Lahore University in Pakistan. ey are
respectively a Pak istani Muslim female social scienti st trained in international public
health and development and a Jewish ma le lawyer from the United States trained in
international law and theolog y (p. xxii). eir purpose is ‘to shed l ight on the political
history of human rights’ (p. 5). In this e ort they have succeede d.
e book consists of ten chapters, divided over three parts: (1) Human Rights
Foundations in the First Half of the Twentieth Century; (2) Establishing the UN
Human Rights Framework; and (3) e Impact of Civil Society and Decolonization.
It contains a full account of the international history of human rights, from its early
beginnings u ntil the present day. It is well documented, using both prim ary and many
secondary sources. W hile not adding much that is part icularly new or surprising, th is
book would be well suited for teaching pur poses, although some students are likely to
be overwhelmed by the plethora of deta iled information provided by the authors.
A great dea l of attention is paid to t he role of the United States of Ame rica. at is
understandable in view of t he leadership the United States has taken in the past both
in developing the notion of international organisation (by Woodrow Wilson) and of
human rights ( by Franklin Delano Roos evelt). It is only in more recent t imes that the
United States has will ingly abandoned that position (under George W. Bush).
e role of the United Ki ngdom is also dealt with at length. It is quite shock ing to
read that the British Government refused to appoint the famous international jurist
Hersch Lauterpacht, ‘a Jew fairly recently come from Vienna’, as its representative to
the UN Commission on Human R ights. Top legal advi sor Eric Beckett wrote:
I think that the representative of HMG [Her Majesty’s Government] on human rights
must be a very Engl ish Englishman imbued t hroughout his life and heredita ry to the real
meaning of huma n rights as we understand t hem in this country (p. 152).
e authors rely greatly on well-chosen secondary sources. us chapter 2, ‘ e
Decline of Human Rights between World Wars’, is to a considerable extent based
* Peter R. Baehr.
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