Human Rights for and against Empire – Legal and Public Discourses in the Age of Decolonisation

Abstract

Against the background of an ongoing debate about the role of human rights in the age of decolonisation this essay approaches the issue from two different angles. It concentrates on the paradoxical situation that anti-colonial movements as well as colonial powers instrumentalised international human rights documents such as the Genocide Convention, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Geneva Conventions, and the European Conventions on Human Rights for achieving their political goals. In combining legal and public discourses in a significant way both sides accused each other of gross human rights violations while at the same time presenting themselves as respecting and even guaranteeing fundamental human rights. Especially during the course of the wars of decolonisation after 1945 this phenomenon became obvious in various diplomatic debates at the United Nations and made universal rights a diplomatic pawn in international debates.

Decolonization Struggles at the United Nations: The Question of Algeria, 1955-1961

“…Reference to the UN Charter was made in the first public statement issued by the FLN, in which it enumerated one of its core objectives as “assertion, through the United Nations Charter, of our active sympathy towards all nations that may support our liberating action” [Evans 2012: 114-117]. This objective was part of the FLN’s broader goal of “restoration of the Algerian state” both through a “national struggle” and the “internationalization of the Algerian problem.” Algerian revolutionaries engaged simultaneously in local armed resistance and international diplomacy and activism, both at the UN and beyond [Bedjaoui 1961; Byrne 2016; Connelly 2002; Johnson 2016; Kinsella 2011; Klose 2016]. Historian Matthew Connelly has thus aptly termed the FLN’s successful fight over “world opinion and international law” as constituting “a diplomatic revolution” [Connelly 2002].…”

“…This line of reasoning was carried further in subsequent UNGA sessions by Christian Pineau, who succeeded Pinay as Foreign Minister, and Jacques Soustelle, a parliamentarian and former Governor General of Algeria. Soustelle, provided with dossiers compiled by the French interior ministry on France’s development measures in Algeria, had been specially instructed by Prime Minister Guy Mollet to join France’s UN delegation [Klose 2016: 324; Le Sueur 2001: 197]. In elaborate speeches, the two diplomats described French efforts in bringing “medical, economic and social progress” to Algeria 47…”

“… 32 See K lose 2016, on how the FLN drew on human rights language to describe and disseminate its struggle directly to various bodies in the UN. …”

“… 46 In fact, France had instructed its diplomatic missions in pro-FLN anticolonial countries to gather social development data (health, education, etc.) which it then compiled into handbooks for propaganda purposes [K lose 2016: 323]. …”