UN Charter’s human rights journey

DECEMBER 2023 marks the 75th anniversary of three significant contributions by India to the UN Charter’s references to human rights. The anti-apartheid campaign, the Genocide Convention and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), adopted in 1948, bear the imprint of three prominent Indian women — Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, Hansa Mehta and Lakshmi Menon.

Reforming the UN system to effectively address challenges requires leadership. The UN Summit of the Future will provide a good opportunity for such reform.

Though the Preamble and Articles 1.3 and 55 of the UN Charter referred to ‘human rights’, the Charter did not specify what these rights were. The UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) was mandated by Article 68 of the Charter to set up a Commission on Human Rights (CHR) to identify these rights. India was a part of the 18-member CHR as it began to draft what would become the UDHR.

Pandit, the leader of India’s delegation to the First Session of the UN General Assembly (UNGA) in 1946, prioritised implementing the UN Charter’s commitments to human rights. As a first step, on June 22, 1946, India inscribed racial discrimination against Indians in South Africa on the UNGA agenda as a violation of this provision in the UN Charter.

South Africa, supported by the United Kingdom, argued that this was a matter of ‘domestic jurisdiction’ and, therefore, outside the UN Charter. India succeeded in getting the UNGA to include racial discrimination on its agenda through Resolution 44(1), adopted on December 11, 1946, with the support of 32 states in the 51-member UNGA. South Africa formalised its racial discrimination policies as ‘apartheid’ in 1948. India’s initiative in the UNGA metamorphosed into the anti-apartheid movement, eventually resulting in the successful holding of multi-racial elections in South Africa and the election of President Nelson Mandela in 1994.

India was a prominent supporter of the UNGA’s resolution to mandate negotiations for the Convention on Genocide. The convention was the brainchild of

a Lithuanian/Polish-American lawyer, Raphael Lemkin. The word ‘genocide’ was coined by Lemkin, joining ‘genos’ (meaning ‘race/social group’ in Greek, Latin; gana in Sanskrit) with the suffix ‘-cide’ (meaning ‘to destroy’ in Latin). Facing a lukewarm response from the major powers, Lemkin succeeded in November 1946 in getting the signatures of Panama and Cuba, which were from the 20-member Latin American group in the UNGA, as co-sponsors of the resolution. He wanted India as his third co-sponsor, which he felt would ensure a majority support for the resolution.

Pandit was introduced to Lemkin in the Delegates’ Lounge of the UN by British suffragette Dame Margery Corbett Ashby. Lemkin told Pandit that the proposed Genocide Convention would focus on “the unity of mankind in diversity and the rule of law for the protection of national, racial and religious groups against destruction”. She responded that India had many races and creeds, but “we have the concept of oneness”. She agreed to sign the resolution as a co-sponsor. UNGA Resolution 96(1), mandating the negotiation of a Genocide Convention, was tabled and adopted unanimously on December 11, 1946. Following discussions on outlawing genocide, an ECOSOC ad hoc committee, set up in March 1948, drafted the Convention with 19 Articles.

This was sent to the Sixth (Legal) Committee of the UNGA in September 1948 for final approval. On December 9, 1948, in the UNGA meeting at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris, India was chosen by a draw of lots as the first country to vote on Resolution 260(III) containing the text of the Genocide Convention. All 56 countries present at the UNGA voted in favour. The Genocide Convention became the first UN human rights treaty.

Meanwhile, between January 1947 and December 1948, former US First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt led the drafting of the UDHR. The final text was negotiated by the UNGA member states from September 1948. Along with 48 member states, India voted to adopt UNGA Resolution 217 (III), containing the UDHR, on December 10, 1948.

India’s delegates inserted gender equality into the UDHR. Hansa Mehta is credited with changing the phrase — ‘All men are born free and equal’ to ‘All human beings are born free and equal’ in Article 1 of the Declaration. Lakshmi Menon, India’s delegate to the UNGA’s Third Committee, insisted on referring to the “equal rights of men and women” in its Preamble.

Since 1948, the implementation of the Genocide Convention has been disappointing. Major Western powers were reluctant to implement it due to geopolitical reasons. This was why over 36,800 reports given to the UN War Crimes Commission, including a dossier on future UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim, remained restricted from public knowledge.

In Asia, the Genocide Convention was unable to prevent the genocide of three million people in East Pakistan (Bangladesh) in 1971 and almost two million in Cambodia between 1975 and 1979. These crimes remain open wounds, even as recent images of mass atrocities in West Asia have overwhelmed people worldwide.

The UDHR has inspired over 80 international, regional and national human rights laws since 1948. These give meaning to the Charter’s references to human rights. They contextualise human rights linked with development, including the 1986 UNGA decision declaring the ‘right to development’ as an inalienable human right, and the UNGA’s ambitious Agenda 2030 on Sustainable Development, adopted in September 2015, dominated by its human-centric 17 Sustainable Development Goals.

The challenges confronting the UN Charter’s commitments to human rights are stark. As many as two billion people, mainly in the Global South, are living in zones of violent conflicts across the world; an additional 100 million people have been pushed into extreme poverty by the Covid-19 pandemic; 20 million Afghan women have been placed under ‘gender apartheid’ since mid-August 2021.

Reforming the UN system to effectively address these challenges requires leadership. The UN Summit of the Future, scheduled for September 2024, will provide a good opportunity for such reform. The summit must mandate a UN General Conference to integrate human rights into the provisions of the UN Charter.