Billions of people living in the United States and countries around the world have legal rights their governments may not likely have told them that they have.
Following World War ll and the filmed horrors of Adolph Hitler’s Nazi death camps, a new United Nations, meeting in San Francisco in the spring of 1945, moved with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to begin putting in place a new body of binding international human rights laws. These new measures, evinced in comprehensive multilateral treaties and protocols, provided basic human rights for the first time in human history to billions of people living in countries which ratified and pledged to comply with the new laws.
Evolving from the work of the new laws’ framers came further a new notion of sovereignty, – “popular sovereignty”, the sovereignty of the individual, a sovereignty that derives from the vested individual and not, as before, singularly from the state.
Before World War ll, what a country did to its own citizens behind its own borders was a country’s own business. After the war, this would no longer be the case.
The hundreds of nations that would become parties to the new international treaties and protocols would no longer be able to perniciously inveigh against their own citizens with complete impunity as before.
Systematically, between 1948 and 2006, the United Nations family of nations crafted and ratified a series of robustly binding comprehensive multilateral human rights treaties with the vast majority of the world’s nations signing on – the Genocide Convention (1948), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966), the International Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights (1966), a treaty to combat racism in 1966, a treaty to foil discrimination against women in 1979, a convention against torture in in 1984, a treaty to protect the rights of children in 1989 – twenty-three major United Nations conventions in all.
However, virtually no nation – rich or poor, big or small – wanted intrusive outside supervision or enforcement of the new laws. It was a counter-punch for traditional sovereignty.
The countries would implement the laws themselves.
But have they done so? Have they honored their pledge? Kept their word?
The countries that ratified the new international statutes agreed to respect the civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights of individual citizens living within their borders and throughout the world.
World on Trial, the public television program I created and host, has assembled many of the world’s best lawyers, judges, and witnesses to test by jury-trial the extent to which ratifying nations have honored their treaty obligations and protected the human rights of their citizens and non-citizens living under their jurisdiction.
The ongoing series of trials presents both sides of sharply contested human rights issues in the context of courtroom trials conducted before multinational juries. Remote juries sitting at distinguished universities throughout the world view the proceedings, deliberate and render verdicts. Professional commentators drawn from every corner of the world remark the dissimilarity between verdicts reached, and the varying and, often, conflicting cultural prisms through which the proceedings are viewed, sifted and refracted.
The pilot episode of World on Trial examined the legality of France’s “headscarf” law (full episode: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_cahKQdSI0; episode preview : www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnYndWXGJQM). Episode Two examined the legality under international human rights law of American drone-use in Yemen (full episode vimeo.com/117607758; episode preview: www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3MhagrDcuQ). They were both sponsored by, and filmed at, Penn State Law School.
Among a list of issues being considered for future trials are:
- South Korea’s detention and expulsion of Falun Gong political asylum seekers.
- Nigeria’s despoilment of the Niger River Delta region and the inequitable distribution of oil wealth.
- Ireland’s discriminatory policy towards non-Catholic children applying for school entry.
- Paraguay’s destruction of the Gran Chaco forest.
- Australia’s private prisons.
- The United States’ disproportionate execution of blacks and Hispanics.
Education is the critically essential tool of social progress. World on Trial is a global human rights education project.
Randall Robinson, human rights professor at Penn State Law School, is author of The Debt – What America Owes to Blacks, The Reckoning – What Blacks Owe to Each Other, and several works pertaining to human rights and foreign policy.