Human rights movement refers to a nongovernmental social movement engaged in activism related to the issues of human rights. The foundations of the global human rights movement involve resistance to: colonialism, imperialism, slavery, racism, segregation, patriarchy, and oppression of indigenous peoples.Clapham, Human Rights (2007), p. 19. "In fact, the modern civil rights movement and the complex normative international framework have grown out of a number of transnational and widespread movements. Human rights were invoked and claimed in the contexts of anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, anti-slavery, anti-apartheid, anti-racism, and feminist and indigenous struggles everywhere."
A key principle of the human rights movement is its appeal to universality: the idea that all human beings should struggle in solidarity for a common set of basic conditions that has to be followed by all.Clapham, Human Rights (2007), pp. 19–20. "...the sense of solidarity amongst those who believe they are the victims of a human rights violation can transcend class, gender, and other distinctions. This sense of connectedness is critical to understanding the changing world of human rights."
History
Human rights activism predates the 20th century, that includes the anti-slavery movement.Clapham, Human Rights (2007), p. 27. Historical movements were usually concerned with a limited set of issues, and they were more local than global. One account identifies the 1899 Hague Convention as a starting point for the idea that humans have rights independent of the states that control them.Normand and Zaidi, Human Rights at the UN (2008), pp. 40–43.
The activities of the International Federation for Human Rights (originally the International Labor Organization)—founded in France by the international labor movement in the 1920s—can be seen as a precursor to the modern movements.Normand and Zaidi, Human Rights at the UN (2008), pp. 56–57. This organization was quickly embraced by the United States and European powers, perhaps as a way to counteract the Bolshevik call for global solidarity among workers.Normand and Zaidi, Human Rights at the UN (2008), p. 57.
Anti-colonialism
Another major global human rights movement grew out of resistance to colonialism. The Congo Reform Association, founded in 1904, has also been described as a foundational modern human rights movement. This group used photographs to document terror wrought by Belgians in the course of demanding rubber production in the Congo. These photographs were passed among sympathetic Europeans and Americans, including Edmund Morel, Joseph Conrad, and Mark Twain—who wrote satirically as King Leopold:
...oh well, the pictures get sneaked around everywhere, in spite of all we can do to ferret them out and suppress them. Ten thousand pulpits and ten thousand presses are saying the good word for me all the time and placidly and convincingly denying the mutilations. Then that trivial little kodak, that a child can carry in its pocket, gets up, uttering never a word, and knocks them dumb!Mark Twain, King Leopold's Soliloquy, quoted in: Bruce Michelson, Printer's Devil: Mark Twain and the American Publishing Revolution, University of California Press, , p. 202.
The photos and subsequent literature triggered international outrage at Belgian crimes committed against the Congolese.Sharon Sliwinski, "The Childhood of Human Rights: The Kodak on the Congo ", Journal of Visual Culture 5(3), 2006.
As the century went on, African Americans including W. E. B. Du Bois, Walter White, and Paul Robeson joined with leaders of the African diaspora (from Haiti, Liberia, the Philippines, and elsewhere) to make a global demand for basic rights.Von Eschen, Race Against Empire (1997), pp. 1–2.John David Skretny, "The effect of the Cold War on African-American civil rights: America and the world audience, 1945–1968", Theory and Society 27(2), 1998. Although the origins of this movement were multifaceted (owing strength both to the capitalist Marcus Garvey and to the more left-wing African Blood Brotherhood), a definitive moment of international solidarity came after Italy's annexation of Ethiopia in 1935.Von Eschen, Race Against Empire (1997), pp. 10–11. "The Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 marked an especially critical moment in the articulation of diaspora thought and politics. Paul Robeson claimed it was a watershed for black American consciousness, since it exposed 'the parallel between [black American] interests and those of oppressed peoples abroad.'"
World War II and the United Nations In the aftermath of World War II, the Pan-Africanist contingent played a major role in causing the United Nations to explicitly protect "human rights" in its founding documents. Du Bois compared colonies across the world to ghettos in the United States and called for a world document affirming the human rights of all people.
Representatives of small countries (particularly from Latin America), as well as Du Bois and other activists, were unhappy with the version of human rights envisioned for the UN Charter at Dumbarton Oaks in 1944.Normand and Zaidi, Human Rights at the UN (2008), pp. 117–118. Du Bois stated at the time that, evidently, "the only way to human equality is through the philanthropy of the masters".Normand and Zaidi, Human Rights at the UN (2008), p. 115. However, the US government supported powerful domestic organizations willing to promote its concept of human rights, such as the American Bar Association and the American Jewish Committee. These organizations won public approval of the United Nations and the human rights concept.Normand and Zaidi, Human Rights at the UN (2008), p. 116.
The concept of human rights was indeed built into United Nations with institutions such as the United Nations Commission on Human Rights and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Active diplomacy by Latin American countries was instrumental to the process of promoting these ideas and drafting relevant agreements. As a result of this pressure, more human rights language was adopted at the 1945 San Francisco Conference to create the UN Charter.Normand and Zaidi, Human Rights at the UN (2008), p. 118. "These proposals were reintroduced in San Francisco during the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Latin America's significant intellectual production supporting human rights is a major reason the region has been called 'the forgotten crucible' of universal human rights. Latin American jurisprudence was particularly well suited to bridging cultural divides in human rights by linking civil and political rights with economic and social rights." Revelations about the Holocaust, followed by the Nuremberg Trials, also had a major influence on the movement, particularly among Jewish and Christian lobbying groups.Normand and Zaidi, Human Rights at the UN (2008), p. 127. Some NGOs represented the UN charter as a victory for the human rights movement, while other activists argued that it paid lipservice to human rights while basically serving the interests of the great powers.Normand and Zaidi, Human Rights at the UN (2008), pp. 136–138. "A few activists, in particular those whose agenda focused on racial equality and decolonization, were dismayed by the results of San Francisco. The NAACP and allied groups, which had invested significant time, resources, and hopes in using the global forum to highlight the evils of entrenched racism inside the United States and internationally, were bitterly disappointed at the outcome. To no avail, they criticized the failure to dent the vastly unequal power relations operating both between states and within their borders. Rayford Logan, civil rights activist and chair of the history department at Howard University, characterized the human rights articles in the Charter as a 'tragic joke'. But these were minority voices. Just as Roosevelt anticipated, the NGO consultants were thrilled with the role they had played in establishing the organization and fanned out across the country to spread the good news."
Early in the Cold War, the "human rights" concept was used to promote the ideological agendas of the superpowers.Langley, Encyclopedia of Human Rights Issues since 1945 (1999), p. xiv. The Soviet Union argued that Western powers had exploited people in colonized lands around the world. A large percentage of Soviet propaganda to the Third World centered on charges of racism and human rights violations. The United States countered with its own propaganda, describing its own society as free and the Soviet Union's as unfree. Human rights language became an international standard, which could be used by great powers or by people's movements to make demands.
Global human rights struggles
Within the United States, participants in the civil rights movement called for human rights in addition to civil rights. Du Bois, the National Negro Congress (NNC), the NAACP, the Civil Rights Congress (CRC), and other activists, soon began charging the U.S. with human rights violations at the U.N. In 1951, Du Bois, William L. Patterson and the CRC presented a document called "We Charge Genocide", which accused the US of complicity with ongoing systematic violence against African Americans.
An Appeal for Human Rights, published by Atlanta students in 1960, is cited as a key moment in beginning the wave of nonviolent direct actions that swept the American South.Edward A. Hatfield, "Atlanta Sit-ins", The New Georgia Encyclopedia, 28 May 2008. In 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. began to argue that the concept of "civil rights" was laden with isolating, individualistic capitalist values. He said: "It is necessary for us to realize that we have moved from the era of civil rights to the era of human rights. When you deal with human rights you are not dealing with something clearly defined in the Constitution. They are rights that are clearly defined by the mandates of a humanitarian concern."Sam Trumbore, "From Civil Rights to Human Rights, King's Legacy For Us ", Times Union, 15 January 2012. For King, who began to organize the multi-racial Poor People's Campaign just weeks before his April 1968 assassination, human rights required economic justice in addition to de jure equality.Tomas F. Jackson, From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King, Jr., And the Struggle for Economic Justice, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007.
After the decolonization of Africa and of Asia, former colonies gained majority status in the UN's Commission on Human Rights, and focused their attention on global white supremacy and economic inequality—in doing so, choosing to admit other types of human rights abuses. Some of these nations argued that focusing on civil rights, as opposed to human rights, was a privilege available only to the wealthy nations that had benefited from colonialism. Demands for human rights in the Third World increased throughout the 1960s, even as the global superpowers turned their attentions elsewhere.Kiyoteru Tsutsui and Christine Min Wotipka, "Global Civil Society and the International Human Rights Movement: Citizen Participation in Human Rights International Nongovernmental Organization", Social Forces 83(2), 2004; , .
Changes in the 1970s