Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 July 2011
The new Asian and African states have laid much stress on human rights, but have often not lived up to them. The basic right of self-determination has been limited to colonies only. Democratic institutions have generally given way to authoritarian regimes, often run by the military, with popular participation denied rather than encouraged. The right to life, liberty, and security of person has been grossly violated in the cases of millions of refugees, temporary and permanent, in Africa and the Asian subcontinent. Many hundreds of thousands have been killed in domestic conflicts, as in Indonesia, Nigeria, and Burundi. One of the results is the emergence of a double standard: an all-out African and Asian attack upon the denial of human rights involved in colonialism and racial discrimination, but a refusal to face up to massive violations of human rights in the Third World itself.
1 Barbados, Iraq, Kenya, Lebanon, Libya, Madagascar, Syria, and Tunisia were the Third-World ratifiers as of that date. Thirty-five ratifications are required to bring each of the Covenants into effect, but only twenty-three had been received. The United States had neither signed nor ratified. The Soviet Union and four members of the Soviet bloc, plus Yugoslavia, were among the most recent ratifiers. See E/CN.4/ 907/Rev. 10 (December 13, 1973).
2 Mazrui, Ali A., “The United Nations and Some African Political Attitudes” in Gregg, Robert W. and Barkun, Michael, eds., The United Nations System and Its Functions (Princeton, N.J. (1968), 47Google Scholar.
3 See General Assembly Resolution 2105 (XX) of 1965 and its successor resolutions in other years.
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5 David H. Bayley has rightly pointed out that completeness in empirical researching into human rights in the new states cannot be expected because of the number of these states and their unwillingness to confess to restrictions of human rights. “A survey of the fortunes of liberty in all of these nations would be a task for many men and would require the expenditure of years of effort.” Public Liberties in the New States (Chicago (1964), 5Google Scholar.
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13 Tanzania inaugurated a significant experiment in 1965, when President Nyerere and the ruling Tanganyika African National Union allowed two TANU candidates to stand for each seat, with all phases of the election strictly controlled by the party.
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18 See Matthews, Robert O., “Refugees and Stability in Africa,” International Organization, xxvi (Winter 1972), 63.Google Scholar
19 India News (Washington, D.C.: Embassy of India, April 22, (1972)Google Scholar. It is dismaying to find in the New York Times of June 11, 1973, a headline: “Rising Bangladesh Unrest Marked by 2,000 Killings.”
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21 John Hatch, “Historical Background of the Refugee Problem,” ibid., 16.
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23 Michael Bowen, Gary Freeman, Kay Miller, Passing By: The United States and Genocide in Burundi (New York, n.d.), 1.
24 Ibid., 5–6.
25 UNHCR, No. 4 (July 1973).
26 See Holborn, Louise W., “The Repatriation and Resettlement of the Southern Sudanese,” Issue, II (Winter 1972), 23–26Google Scholar.
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30 In a Western-oriented “Comparative Study of Freedom” in Freedom at Issue (Freedom House, New York, January-February (1974), 151Google Scholar countries are rated in terms of their political and civil rights and the status of freedom. Of the Asian and African countries dealt with in the present article, only nine are rated as Free, including Israel and Mauritius; only two, Gambia and Botswana, are in Africa. A rating of Partly Free is given to 26, some of which must have crossed the line from Not Free by the slimmest of margins.
31 Sékou Touré, The International Policy of the Democratic Party of Guinea (Re-public of Guinea, n.d. ), VII, 121.
32 See, for example, General Assembly Resolution 2131 (XX), 1965.
33 “The Nigeria-Biafra Crisis,” mimeo (no date or place given; September 1969?).
34 New York Times, July 18, 1973.
35 See fn. 27. For another condemnation of the double standard, see Patel, Hasu H., “General Amin and the Indian Exodus from Uganda,” Issue, 11 (Winter 1972), 21Google Scholar.
36 UN Monthly Chronicle, VIII (October 1971), 124. Writing of “Uganda's Reign of Terror,” Hal Sheets, a Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, concludes that “Nearly thirty years after the founding of the United Nations, there is still no mechanism to protect citizens from the arbitrary madness of governments. Mass murder in Uganda and elsewhere remains, for the United Nations and the United States Government, a distant grief at best.” “The Week in Review,” New York Times, August 4, 1974. The enlargement in recent years of the jurisdiction and powers of the UN Commission on Human Rights and the Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities holds out new hope, but an effective system of intervention on behalf of human rights seems still a remote goal.Google Scholar