The UN at 75: Human rights and global pandemic
| DOI | 10.1177/0924051920943492 |
| Date | 01 September 2020 |
| Published date | 01 September 2020 |
| Author | Mark Goodale |
| Subject Matter | Column |
Column
The UN at 75: Human
rights and global pandemic
Mark Goodale
University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland
Abstract
This column reflects on the continuing relevance of human rights in the 75th anniversary year of
the founding of the United Nations. Despite the background circumstances, which included the
catastrophe of a recent world war, ongoing colonial violence, and the dawn of the nuclear age, the
new international body adopted the language and ideology of human rights as the moral foundation
for the new world order. 75 years later, amidst a global pandemic, and in light of other pressing
problems that include economic inequality, the return of pervasive ethno-nationalism, and the
inevitable consequences of human-induced climate change, how well has this moral foundation
stood the test of time?
Keywords
United Nations, global pandemic, human rights, genocide, COVID-19, mora l concern, empathy,
interreconnaissance
During the 75th anniversary year of the founding of the United Nations (UN), amidst a global
pandemic that is laying bare the frailties of internationalism as a political ideology, it is worth
taking the measure of the moral underpinnings of this political ideology, human rights. In thinking
of human rights as the most important moral project behind the creation of the UN in 1945, it is
useful to consider both the immediate precursor to its establishment and the language through
which this moral project was expressed.
Like the League of Nations before it, the UN was born of war, and not just any war or conflict,
but the cataclysm of ‘world’ war, in which approximately 80 million people died; nuclear weapons
were used intentionally to kill hundreds of thousands of civilians; and centuries of European anti-
Semitism that culminated in the ‘Final Solution’, in which German technological capacity was
combined with a doctrine of racial extermination in the most de vastating genocide in human
history. As the Preamble to the UN Charter makes clear, the creation of the UN was not just a
Corresponding author:
Mark Goodale, Professor of Cultural and Social Anthropology and Director, Laboratory of Cultural and Social Anthro-
pology (LACS), University of Lausanne, 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland.
E-mail: Mark.Goodale@unil.ch
Netherlands Quarterly of Human Rights
2020, Vol. 38(3) 163–168
ªThe Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0924051920943492
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