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A Most Uncertain Crusad e traces and analyzes the emergence of human rights as both an international concern and as a controversial domestic issue for US policy makers during and after World War II. Rowland Brucken focuses on officials in the State Department, at the United Nations, and within certain domestic non-governmental organizations, and explains why, after issuing wartime declarations that called for the definition and enforcement of international human rights standards, the US government refused to ratify the first UN treaties that fulfilled those twin purposes. The Truman and Eisenhower administrations worked to weaken the scope and enforcement mechanisms of early human rights agreements, and gradually withdrew support for Senate ratification. A small but influential group of isolationist-oriented senators, led by John Bricker (R-OH), warned that the treaties would bring about socialism, destroy white supremacy, and eviscerate the Bill of Rights. At the UN, a growing bloc of developing nations demanded the inclusion of economic guarantees, support for decolonization, and strong enforcement measures, all of which Washington opposed. Prior to World War II, international law considered the protection of individual rights to fall largely under the jurisdiction of national governments. Alarmed by fascist tyranny and guided by a Wilsonian vision of global cooperation in pursuit of human rights, President Roosevelt issued the Four Freedoms and the Atlantic Charter. Behind the scenes, the State Department planners carefully considered how an international organization could best protect those guarantees. Their work paid off at the 1945 San Francisco Conference, which vested the UN with an unprecedented opportunity to define and protect the human rights of individuals. After two years of negotiations, the UN General Assembly unanimously approved its first human rights treaty, the Genocide Convention. The UN Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR), led by Eleanor Roosevelt, drafted the nonbinding Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Subsequent efforts to craft an enforceable covenant of individual rights, though, bogged down quickly. A deadlock occurred as western nations, communist states, and developing countries disagreed on the inclusion of economic and social guarantees, the right of self-determination, and plans for implementation. Meanwhile, a coalition of groups within the United States doubted the wisdom of American accession to any human rights treaties. Led by the American Bar Association and Senator Bricker, opponents proclaimed that ratification would lead to a U.N. led tyrannical world socialistic government. The backlash caused President Eisenhower to withdraw from the covenant drafting process. Brucken shows how the American human rights policy had come full circle: Eisenhower, like Roosevelt, issued statements that merely celebrated western values of freedom and democracy, criticized human rights records of other countries while at the same time postponed efforts to have the UN codify and enforce a list of binding rights due in part to America's own human rights violations.

Abstract Despite being promulgated in 2014 by the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), the Gulf Declaration of Human Rights (GDHR) has received little academic attention. Khalifa Alfadhel is one scholar who has sought to engage with the declaration, citing it as a significant regional document worthy of commendation due to its reconciliation of both Islamic and international notions of human rights, a feat other comparable regional human rights documents have yet to achieve. Furthermore, Alfadhel praises the GDHR as it embodies the GCC's commitment to human rights and political reform, with the GDHR supplying the foundation for a regional customary law regime. This article questions such claims, arguing that Alfadhel has overlooked unambiguous flaws that contradict the GDHR's alleged regional promotion of human rights, ultimately undermining its supposed significance. Certainly, this article highlights how the GDHR is a rhetorical document that intrinsically negates the same rights it purports to protect.

The American attitude toward human rights is deemed inconsistent, even hypocritical: while the United States is characterized (or self-characterized) as a global leader in promoting human rights, the nation has consistently restrained broader interpretations of human rights and held international enforcement mechanisms at arm's length.Human Rights and the Negotiation of American Powerexamines the causes, consequences, and tensions of America's growth as the leading world power after World War II alongside the flowering of the human rights movement. Through careful archival research, Glenn Mitoma reveals how the U.S. government, key civil society groups, Cold War politics, and specific individuals contributed to America's emergence as an ambivalent yet central player in establishing an international rights ethic. Mitoma focuses on the work of three American civil society organizations: the Commission to Study the Organization of Peace, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the American Bar Association-and their influence on U.S. human rights policy from the late 1930s through the 1950s. He demonstrates that the burgeoning transnational language of human rights provided two prominent United Nations diplomats and charter members of the Commission on Human Rights-Charles Malik and Carlos Romulo-with fresh and essential opportunities for influencing the position of the United States, most particularly with respect to developing nations. Looking at the critical contributions made by these two men, Mitoma uncovers the unique causes, tensions, and consequences of American exceptionalism.

The human rights enunciated in Articles 23 and 24 of the UDHR concern aspects of rights related to work. This part of international human rights law is often neglected in human rights textbooks and teaching, and indeed is often omitted from the work done by national human rights institutes and by NGOs concerned with human rights, as though it were a separate discipline that did not fall properly into the human rights field. This volume addresses this commonly held, but erroneous, misconception.

Charles Malik was the youngest founding member of the UN Human Rights Commission (HRC), which produced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). While a representative of a small state, Malik's influence is demonstrable in the wording of the Preamble to the UDHR; in the expansion of Article 18, concerning religious freedom; and in Article 16. This article expands upon existing work on the influence of Malik's biography on his contributions to the UDHR. In particular, it is concerned with analyzing the influence of Malik's background on his insistence on the importance of religious liberty as a fundamental human right.

Abstract Two of the most laudable achievements of human rights are the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (udhr) and the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (undrip). Aside from advancing human rights, both are examples of soft law. For the undrip, this soft law status has generated significant controversy which is evocative of the earlier debate surrounding the legal status of the udhr. Yet unexamined, this article analyses this contemporary controversy surrounding the undrip in light of the historical debate surrounding the legal status of the udhr. Fleshing out points of convergence and divergence, these debates unearth narratives which shed light on the claims and advocacy strategies of Indigenous Peoples and the role of customary international law within human rights. Ultimately, it reveals that these narratives do little to secure the enforcement of indigenous rights.

Based on a synthetic overview that embraces the evolution of the ‘health’ concept, and its related institutions, from the role of health as the main indicator of fundamental human rights—as envisaged in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—to its qualification as the systems of disease control dependent on criteria of economic sustainability, the paper focuses on the implications and the impact of such evolution in two model scenarios which are centred on the COVID-19 pandemia. The article analyses COVID-19 both in the characteristics of its global dynamics and in its concrete management, as performed in a model medium income country, Argentina. In a world which has progressively assigned market values and goods an absolute strategic and political priority over the health needs and the rights to health of individual and peoples, the recognition of health as human right is confined to aspirational recommendations and rather hollowed out declarations of good will.