Making of International Human Rights

About this book

"This book fundamentally reinterprets the history of international human rights in the post-1945 era by documenting how pivotal the Global South was for their breakthrough. In stark contrast to other contemporary human rights historians who have focused almost exclusively on the 1940s and the 1970s - heavily privileging Western agency - Steven L. B. Jensen convincingly argues that it was in the 1960s that universal human rights had their breakthrough. This is a ground-breaking work that places race and religion at the center of these developments and focuses on a core group of states who led the human rights breakthrough, namely Jamaica, Liberia, Ghana, and the Philippines. They transformed the norms upon which the international community today is built. Their efforts in the 1960s post-colonial moment laid the foundation - in profound and surprising ways - for the so-called human rights revolution in the 1970s, when Western activists and states began to embrace human rights"-- "On 14 June 1993, the Secretary-General of the United Nations Boutros Boutros-Ghali delivered the opening address to the World Conference on Human Rights held in Vienna. The world had undergone massive political transformations in the preceding four years and the Vienna conference's purpose was to lay new foundations for international human rights protection in the post-Cold War era. Since 1945, the evolution of international human rights had been closely linked to the United Nations. The Cold War and North-South debates had for almost 50 years determined the uneasy existence of human rights at the United Nations"--