Editorial

The General Assembly of the United Nations adopted and proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 60 years ago. The ceremony took place at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris. It was a much smaller Assembly, then, made up of 56 countries. Most other territories were still colonies or protectorates, their voice the voice of the colonisers. Since then, of course, French, British and Soviet colonies have turned into sovereign states and today more than 160 members make up the General Assembly.

As a matter of record, 48 voted in favour of the Declaration at the time, none against. There were eight abstentions; among these, not surprisingly, the USSR as it then was, Byelorussia, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia - Soviet satellites, South Africa, then running an apartheid state and Saudi Arabia.

The first chairman of the Commission on Human Rights was Eleanor Roosevelt, widow of the American President who had led the United States out of its isolation into the Second World War, a decision helped along by the heinous and unprovoked Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in December, 1941. She probably captured the moment when she described what was being drawn up as a document that "may well become the international Magna Carta of all men everywhere". And as recently as the year 2000, Pope John Paul 11 was calling it "one of the highest expressions of the human conscience of our time".

There were Islamic countries that criticised the Declaration for its failure, as they saw it, to take the cultural and religious context in which these exist, into account. As recently as 1982, the Iranian representative to the UN expressed the opinion that the Declaration trespassed Islamic law and, therefore, could not be implemented by Muslims.

The truth is that the Magna Carta envisioned by Eleanor Roosevelt is still some way away from being a pervading influence on the behaviour of States; and questionable rights have been invented that did not exist then. So that one is not being unduly cynical when one questions the theme selected for the year - "Dignity and Justice for all of us". While it is true, as the secretary-general reminded us, that the Declaration was indeed "the first global statement of what we now take for granted... the inherent dignity and equality of all human beings", it is a falsehood to even imagine that this inherent dignity and equality is recognised by all.

Take Zimbabwe and Sudan, for example. There are others. There is no inherent dignity that can be perceived in Zimbabwe, where a rogue dictator has sabotaged his country and his countrymen beyond what should be acceptable to the international community. Nor is there much dignity and equality visible in Sudan's treatment of its own countrymen, a treatment some have described as genocide. Yet both countries keep their seat in the United Nations, which does not have the prerogative to turn either of them out of the Assembly.

The objective that the High Commissioner for Human Rights has set when she called for "unprecedented efforts... to ensure that every person in the world can rely on just law for his or her protection" is, sadly, one that the UN will not achieve any time soon. This does not diminish the noble vision contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It highlights, if anything, the grotesqueness of those who fail to live up to it.