Direitos Humanos na historia - livro

New Birth of Freedom
By BELINDA COOPER
The New York Times, Sunday Books Review, September 24, 2010

THE LAST UTOPIA: Human Rights in History
By Samuel Moyn
337 pp. The Belknap Press/Harvard University Press. $27.95

Human rights have come to dominate international discourse, but while this fact is often portrayed as the culmination of a centuries-old tradition, Samuel Moyn, a professor of history at Columbia University, takes a different view. The modern concept of human rights, he says in “The Last Utopia,” differs radically from older claims of rights, like those that arose out of the American and French Revolutions. According to Moyn, human rights in their current form — applicable to all and internationally protected — can be traced not to the Enlightenment, nor to the humanitarian impulses of the 19th century nor to the impact of the Holocaust after World War II. Instead, he sees them as dating from the 1970s, exemplified by President Jimmy Carter’s effort to make human rights a pillar of United States foreign policy.

Today’s human rights movement emerged “seemingly from nowhere,” Moyn says, as a depoliticized, moral response to disillusionment with revolutionary political projects, specifically the anticolonial independence struggles of the 1950s and ’60s. Moyn credibly juxtaposes the hopes placed in a new internationalist “utopia” of human rights against the failure of national self-determination to guarantee human dignity.

The idea that international legal protections apply directly to individuals, outside the authority of their governments, is indeed a recent phenomenon. Yet in his untidy attempt to decouple human rights entirely from what went before, Moyn stretches his argument too far. In all-too-brief asides, he dismisses the anti­slavery campaign and the development of the laws of war in the 19th century because neither was explicitly framed in terms of human rights. Yet both contained universalist and internationalist aspects. Moyn also fails to explain how an early international organization like the Red Cross, which engaged with governments to protect individuals from mistreatment in wartime, differed from the modern human rights organizations he describes.

Moyn argues that the Holocaust played a relatively small role in post-World War II rights debates and correctly reminds us that the Nuremberg tribunal, which put Nazi leaders on trial for war crimes, did not concentrate primarily on the genocide of the Jews. But he ignores Nuremberg’s crucial contribution to the development of the modern human rights movement: for the first time, international law was directly applied to crimes against individuals in a forum that transcended national boundaries.

At the same time, Moyn overestimates the extent to which human rights today take precedence over the sovereignty of states. International treaties designed to protect individuals are still directed to national governments, which remain the first line of defense, even in the modern world of globalized thinking. The concept of national sovereignty has hardly disappeared: the continuing debate over whether to intervene in places like Sudan testifies to the difficulty of overcoming deep-seated resistance to interfering with what are still seen as internal affairs.

In the end, Moyn’s main pieces of evidence for taking the 1970s as the time of a human rights breakthrough are Carter’s abortive steps to inject human rights into foreign policy and the 1975 Helsinki accords with the Soviet Union. But if one must find a recent starting point, a more appropriate decade would be the 1990s, when human rights organizations truly flourished and international criminal tribunals became reality. It was arguably the collapse of the cold war blocs, far more than the end of decolonization, that allowed international human rights to emerge as a viable program, rather than merely a propaganda tool employed by antagonistic political systems. If Moyn’s argument isn’t persuasive, it is in large part because an alternative history to his own is far too easy to construct.

Belinda Cooper, a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute, is the editor of “War Crimes: The Legacy of Nuremberg.”