Colonialism and the Making of the Instruments

In one line

Human rights language and colonial administration were produced by the same States at the same time, the instruments contain provisions that assumed colonial rule and provisions that undermined it, and the second were used by the colonised to dismantle the first.

The contradiction, stated concretely

In 1948 the Universal Declaration was adopted by an Assembly in which several of the drafting powers administered colonies, and much of Africa and Asia had no representation of its own.

The same century produced both: the laws of war, the abolition treaties, the League's minorities system and the Declaration, and also the partition of Africa, the mandates system and the administration of hundreds of millions of people without their consent.

The 1884 to 1885 Berlin Conference is the sharpest single illustration, because it undertook the suppression of the slave trade and set the framework for the colonial division of a continent in the same process, as [The Nineteenth Century: Abolition and Labour] recorded.

And the rejection of the racial equality proposal in 1919 is the moment to cite, because it is documented and decisive: the proposal obtained a majority of the votes cast in the commission at the Paris Peace Conference and was declared not carried on the ground that unanimity was required. [The League of Nations and the International Labour Organization] gave it.

What the instruments assumed

Charter Chapter XI, on non-self-governing territories, requires administering Members to accept as a sacred trust the obligation to promote the well-being of the inhabitants, to ensure their political, economic, social and educational advancement, to develop self-government, and to transmit information to the Secretary-General.

It does not require independence, and its language of advancement and development towards self-government assumed that colonial administration would continue.

Chapter XII's trusteeship system replaced the mandates and carried the same structure, with a basic objective of progressive development towards self-government or independence as may be appropriate.

And the Declaration itself contains no article on colonial peoples' independence, which [Drafting the Universal Declaration] recorded as a deliberate omission.

What the instruments nonetheless supplied

Three provisions did the work, and each was contested when drafted.

Article 2 of the Declaration, second sentence. No distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty. [The Universal Declaration: Articles 1 to 11] called this the most consequential sentence in the instrument, and it is here that it does its work: a person under colonial administration holds the same rights as a person in a metropolitan capital, which is inconsistent with the legal structure of empire.