All Forms of Racial Discrimination

Abstract

One of the most important developments in international politics since 1945 has been the growth of human rights law. The judgement of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, as reformulated by the International Law Commisson, gave impetus to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the two covenants which, with it, now constitute the International Bill of Rights. The first major human rights convention deriving from the Universal Declaration to be approved by the United Nations General Assembly was the International Convention Against All Forms of Racial Discrimination. This broke new ground in making provision for monitoring the ways in which States Parties to the Convention actually implement the obligations they assume on accession. Drafting a Convention on such an emotional issue and giving it a substance which entailled some surrender of state sovereignty, was inevitably contentious. Were the rights to freedom of opinion, speech and association to be restricted in order to protect people from discrimination? How far did the protection of one right require the restriction of other rights? The representatives of different states had different conceptions of human rights. They also — and this will be my concern here — had different conceptions of the nature of the evil that was to be combated. I shall argue that it is easier to understand the nature of the opposition of views on this last point if the differences are seen as arising from different philosophies.