"Human rights" is a banner raised by protagonists of nearly every ideological stripe and political agenda. Progressive and liberal force can enlist entertainment megastars to perform in defense of international "human rights." Right-wing forces in the U.S. threaten to unseat congressmen and torpedo cabinet-level appointments in defense of the "human rights" of the fetus. The U.S. government uses "human rights" as propaganda fodder against Nicaragua, Cuba, and the Soviet Union. Political movements invoke "human rights" to mobilize opposition to entrenched Communist bureaucracies and rightist dictatorships alike. Some "human rights" activists are awarded the Nobel Peace Prize; others are jailed, tortured, "disappeared," or assassinated. Yet the very fact that such an array of often antagonistic forces can embrace the notion of "human rights" is clear indication that the concept is poorly understood and far from universal in its definition.

In December 1987, Bill Felice and I, the editors of this issue, were fortunate to attend an international conference on human rights and peoples' rights, held in Paris by the International League for the Rights and Liberation of Peoples.1 The presentations at that conference provided the inspiration and the majority of articles for this issue of Social Justice,2 which is dedicated to the memory of Sean MacBride, who made one of his last public appearances at the League's gathering. MacBride's lifetime commitment to human rights and the rights of peoples is chronicled below by Alexander Cockburn.

In the rich and provocative articles that follow, a few themes in particular are worth highlighting.

Individual Rights and Collective Rights

Woven throughout this issue of Social Justice is the constant tension and dialectical interplay between the human rights of the individual member of society and the collective rights of a people. In the historical evolution of the concepts of rights -- components of which are presented here in three complementary articles by Theo van Boven, Salvatore Senese, and Bill Felice -- "human rights," or the rights of the individual, have become more generally accepted and codified in modern Western law than the collective "rights of peoples." This is a reflection primarily of the ideological underpinnings of capitalism and of the American and French revolutions. However, the historical reluctance on the part of Western policy-makers to emphasize peoples' rights also stems from the fact that frequent abuses of individual freedoms have taken place in the name of doctrines associated with "collective rights," such as "national security." Van Boven points out, for example, that the horrors of European fascism left the drafters of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights hesitant to give any prominence to collective rights. The complete text of that important document, together with Rita Maran's history of the Declaration, are included in this issue.

The more recent adoption of language in international law that asserts peoples' rights -- most notably, self-determination -- was the result of great efforts by non-Western powers and met with much resistance by colonial interests, according to van Boven. In an effort to more fully elaborate and legitimize the concept of peoples' rights, the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Peoples (also known as the Algiers Declaration) was drafted on July 4, 1976, by a gathering of distinguished jurists, political leaders, and figures of high moral authority brought together largely at the initiative of the late Italian legislator, Lelio Basso. The text of that document, also reproduced in this issue, articulates the rights of a people to existence and political self-determination, to control over its resources, economic system, culture, and environment. It also elaborates the rights of minorities and calls for the protection of liberation movement combatants under the humanitarian law of war (the latter theme being addressed more specifically here in the article by Louis Joinet). Since the drafting of this declaration, other important international documents have been adopted that establish a legal basis for peoples' rights in dialectical relationship to human rights; these include the 1986 United Nations Declaration on the Right to Development and the 1981 African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights, both of which are discussed by van Boven.

Closely related to the often difficult symbiosis of human rights and peoples' rights is the relationship between external and internal self-determination. As defined here by Salvatore Senese, external self-determination is "the recognition that each people has the right to constitute itself as a nation-state or to integrate into, or federate with, an existing state." (Implied in this right, of course, is the right to defend that state.) Internal self-determination, on the other hand, is described by Senese as "the right of people to freely choose their own political, economic, and social system." Or, as defined by van Boven, the essence of internal self-determination is captured by the phrase: "the will of the people shall be the basis of authority of the government."

The establishment and maintenance of the proper relationship between these rights -- individual and collective, internal and external -- is key to the establishment of a just and equitable society. The complex struggle to accurately define and implement that relationship is being waged throughout the socialist world today. Clearly, a major component of the political and social changes currently afoot in the Soviet Union is an effort to correct imbalances between individual and collective rights and needs. In the case of Nicaragua, a commitment to protect the rights of the individual as well as the rights of the people, even in the face of war, has been a distinguishing characteristic of the Sandinista Revolution. This has been manifested, for example, in the Sandinistas' commitment to political pluralism, the maintenance of a mixed economy, and the active participation of Christians in the government and Sandinista party. One may rightfully be critical of persisting tendencies within socialist societies to excessively stress the rights of the collective over the rights of the individual -- as in the case of Cuba's current policy of quarantining AIDS patients. Yet, one cannot ignore the fact that it has been Cuba's adamant defense of its people's right to self-determination that has allowed for the realization of its people's right to education, housing, and health care.

Can the same be said of the United States, where growing masses of homeless call into question the U.S. government's commitment to human rights and where the right of Black, Hispanic, and Native American peoples is still the right to permanent poverty and ghettoization? The deficiencies of U.S. human rights policy are addressed here in Greg Tewksbury's account of organizing a People's Tribunal on Human Rights in the United States and in the article about the Campaign for Amnesty and Human Rights for Political Prisoners. Clearly, the dark record of the U.S. government is not a justification for overlooking the shortfalls of socialist societies, but it is significant to note that some of the most vital experimentations in redefining the relationships between the individual, a people, and political power are taking place in the socialist world, as well as within the context of Third World liberation struggles.

Domination, Self-Determination, and Liberation

It is impossible to address the issue of human rights and peoples' rights in the Third World without taking into account what remains the overwhelmingly dominant context of the South: imperialism and foreign intervention. As Richard Falk and Francis Boyle argue in the following pages, the United States government continues to play the dominant role in obstructing human rights and peoples' rights through its refusal to ratify major international treaties or to abide by existing international law, and through its covert and overt intervention against various governments and movements.

The particular way in which U.S. domination serves as an obstacle to self-determination and democratic rights in Latin American is addressed in contributions by Eduardo Galeano of Uruguay and Pablo González Casanova of Mexico, while Japanese antimilitarism activist Oda Makoto discusses the role of both the United States and Japan in opposing self-determination for nations in East Asia and the Pacific.

Given the recent moves toward détente between the United States and the Soviet Union, as well as advances in the direction of disarmament, new victories by Third World liberation movements in, for example, El Salvador and South Africa could perhaps be expected. Richard Falk warns, however, that "apparent Soviet withdrawal from the Third World in the Gorbachev era may tempt U.S. policyrnakers to believe that 'cheap' interventions can succeed." Falk further argues that there is a tendency in this new period of muted East-West rivalry for the U.S. to explain "its involvement in controversy by reference to ideology and geopolitical interests, and to its need to master the challenge of so-called low-intensity conflict. There is less effort to conceal or to claim the mantle of law."

Luciana Castellina likewise foresees ongoing difficulties for peoples who fight for self-determination, despite the de-escalation of tensions between the superpowers and despite the emergence of a multipolar world order:

Democracy and Rights: Redefining the Terms

The days of imperialism may well be numbered in units far greater than many of us had once hoped, and liberation movements may not triumph at the pace we once expected. However, as Eduardo Galeano and Pablo González Casanova, two powerful voices from the South, testify in these pages, the staying power and complexity of world capitalism is matched by the creativity, sophistication, righteousness, and popular will of peoples' movements in the Third World. González Casanova elaborates some of the major advances made in the analysis, strategy, and tactics of Latin American liberation movements in response to their many victories and defeats over the past several decades. He emphasizes in particular their efforts to reclaim and redefine the concept of democracy: "In Latin America today, the word liberation is used less than the words democracy and revolution.... Democracy with 'people power' is the great objective."

The struggle to redefine terms like democracy and rights, long encrusted with Western ideological biases, has become a powerful component of the struggle for self-determination. Galeano zeros in on this theme with both humor and anger:

Salvatore Senese sees such contradictions as part of today's global crisis, which "is also a crisis of the false universality of transcultural values that were advanced after World War II to unify the world." He argues that the ideology of human rights and the ideology of development were "born in the West" and "have failed to recognize the differences between the world's peoples."

Concepts such as democracy, human rights, and self-determination are neither universal nor politically neutral, as Sandro Canestrini's article on ethnic minorities in Italy further demonstrates. In Italy, the relative autonomy granted the German-speaking minority population has helped create one of the strongest political bases for an active neofascist party. Should this be taken as reason for the Left to moderate its support of self-determination? For many years the principle of a people's self-determination has been subordinated to the sometimes real and sometimes questionable necessities of national security in the Soviet Union. Fortunately, however, just as these concepts are not universal, neither are they stagnant. Fresh political and social winds of change are forcing a reassessment of peoples' rights on many levels and in many places: in the Soviet Union's changing policies toward the Baltic republics; in Nicaragua's changing stance toward the Miskito population; in the Spanish government's secret negotiations with the Basque ETA; in the assertion of "rainbow" politics into the mainstream of the U.S. electoral process.

The creative power of social forces to redefine reality is a theme addressed by Galeano in his discussion of democracy in Latin America:

There is some reason for Galeano's optimism, for peoples engaged in struggles for social change often seem to emerge, even in the darkest moments, with renewed intelligence, clarity, and determination. Castellina writes of the transformation and revitalization of the European peace movement following a difficult period of retrenchment. González Casanova likewise describes the process of internal transformation that has accompanied the struggles of the liberation forces in Latin America:

Political activists are also rethinking the nature of internal democracy and the internal balance of individual and collective rights, issues that are central to the effectiveness of the organizations and movements struggling for the creation of truly democratic societies. Unleashing the "participatory will and creative energy of the people" is a task of organizations and movements, as well as of societies. For many participants in the multitude of progressive political organizations and social movements that have experimented with various forms of internal democracy (including democratic centralism), this has often been a difficult lesson to integrate. González Casanova goes quickly to the heart of this issue in his assessment of the lessons learned from the overthrow of Maurice Bishop's New Jewel government in Grenada. On a less dramatic level, though one probably closer to the reality of many of our readers, Piero Basso's article on the tasks facing the International League for the Rights and Liberation of Peoples discusses the merits of centralized priorities (for the sake of effective action) versus respect for the autonomy of the national chapters.

If the issue of rights and democracy are integral to the internal workings of the organizations seeking social change, they are certainly central to the strategies and tactics employed by such organizations in their efforts to mobilize popular movements. In his article on "'Rights' in Theory and Practice," Bill Felice uses the example of organizing around the rights of the homeless in the United States to highlight the contradictions and potential pitfalls of struggles for bourgeois rights and immediate reforms. He calls for more dialogue among organizers in order to better understand "the theoretical premises of a new vision for society" and the relationship of that vision to the immediate tasks facing organizers. Almost as if in response, González Casanova writes:

The dialogue among Latin American leftists regarding issues of reform and revolution is, not surprisingly, more developed than that carried on by progressive forces within the United States. Necessity accelerates the dialectical process of theory and practice, and so González Casanova can write accurately of Latin America: "The demise of reformism is manifested in the revolutionary potential of reforms." Within the context of the United States or Europe, however, a response to the questions posed by Felice is not so easily formulated.

Clearly, many complex and critical questions regarding human rights and peoples' rights have been raised by the authors in these pages. One of the great strengths of the International League for the Rights and Liberation of Peoples is that it brings together activists and intellectuals from many corners of the globe in dialogue about such concerns. It is our hope that this issue of Social Justice will help advance the much needed reassessment of the questions presented herein.

NOTES

1. Founded in 1976 by an Italian member of Parliament, Lelio Basso, the International League for the Rights and Liberation of Peoples has two basic goals: to support peoples striving for emancipation and to inform the public about the grievances and suffering associated with those struggles. With its central office in Rome, the League has chapters in Western Europe, Latin America, and the United States. Since its founding, the League has emphasized its commitment to being completely independent of any government, political party, or special ideology. In 1979, the United Nations granted the League status as a Non-Governmental Organization and accredited it to the U.N. Economic and Social Council. For more information on the League, see Greg Tewksbury's article on the League's U.S. Chapter in the "Organizing" section of this issue.

2. The editors especially wish to thank Piero Basso, secretary of the International League for the Rights and Liberation of Peoples, for his help in compiling this issue. We are also grateful to Ingrid Arnesen for translating several of the articles originally written in French, and to Elizabeth Martínez, Rita Maran, and Tony Platt for their translation and editorial assistance.