“Moral claims of today become the human rights of tomorrow.” Trace the efforts in the international protection of human rights in the twentieth century. (2001)
The maxim describes how rights are made. A grievance is first voiced as a moral demand by activists. It is then written into declarations and finally into treaties with monitoring bodies. Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink (1998) model this as a norm life cycle: emergence through norm entrepreneurs, a cascade of state acceptance, and internalisation. The twentieth century carried human rights through all three stages.
Before 1945: moral claims without a regime
- Anti-slavery campaigns produced the League’s Slavery Convention (1926); child-welfare campaigners won the Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child (1924). The ILO (1919) set the first international labour standards, the minorities treaties protected groups in the new European states, and the 1929 Geneva Convention extended the protection of prisoners of war.
- The limits were stark. At Paris in 1919, Japan’s racial equality proposal was blocked, and a state’s treatment of its own citizens remained its own business. The Holocaust showed the cost of that principle.
1945–1966: from claim to codified standard
- The UN Charter (1945) named human rights among the organisation’s purposes. The UDHR was adopted on 10 December 1948, by 48 votes to none with eight abstentions. India’s Hansa Mehta secured “all human beings” in place of “all men” in Article 1.
- The Nuremberg Tribunal (1945–46) punished crimes against humanity, and Raphael Lemkin’s new word “genocide” (1944) became the Genocide Convention (1948), the clearest case of the maxim. The Geneva Conventions (1949), the European Convention (1950) and the Refugee Convention (1951) followed.
- Decolonisation widened the agenda. India had raised racial discrimination in South Africa at the first General Assembly in 1946. Steven L. B. Jensen (2016) shows that newly independent states, with Jamaica in the lead, drove the breakthrough of the 1960s: ICERD (1965), then in 1966 the two Covenants that turned the UDHR into binding law.
1966–1989: monitoring and new claimants
- The Covenants entered into force in 1976. The Helsinki Final Act (1975) let dissidents hold Eastern bloc governments to their own signatures, and Amnesty International received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1977.
- New groups turned moral claims into treaties: the Apartheid Convention (1973), CEDAW (1979), the Convention against Torture (1984), the Declaration on the Right to Development (1986) and the CRC (1989).
The 1990s: universality and accountability
- The Vienna Conference (1993) declared all rights universal, indivisible and interdependent and led to the High Commissioner’s Office. The Beijing Conference (1995) affirmed that women’s rights are human rights.
- Individual criminal accountability returned with the ICTY (1993) and the ICTR (1994), the latter holding that rape can constitute genocide. The Rome Statute (1998) and the Pinochet case (1998) showed that heads of state could be held to account.
Assessing the maxim
The century bears out the maxim: slavery, genocide, apartheid and gender violence moved from moral outrage to legal prohibition. Three qualifications apply. Upendra Baxi notes that the “modern” paradigm excluded colonised peoples; only the post-1945 “contemporary” paradigm included them. Samuel Moyn (The Last Utopia, 2010) dates rights as a mass political language to the 1970s. And codification is not enforcement: Rwanda and Srebrenica followed every treaty. Yet the process continues: the General Assembly recognised a right to a healthy environment in 2022, a moral claim of the 1970s.
Conclusion
Twentieth-century efforts turned human rights from moral aspiration into international law, and from a state’s domestic matter into a shared international concern. The unfinished task is enforcement. Rights can now be claimed everywhere, but they can still be denied wherever power protects the violator.