Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 August 2009
The Challenge of Terrorism
In 2002, the International Council on Human Rights Policy published a report entitled Human Rights After September 11, based on an international seminar of distinguished human-rights scholars and practitioners (International Council on Human Rights Policy, hereafter ICHRP, 2002). The title implied that human rights after 9/11 were different from human rights before 9/11. How could that be?
Human rights are commonly thought to be ‘timeless’, because they are grounded in ‘the dignity and worth of the human person’. However, they have a history. After the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, the struggle for human rights took place in a world dominated by the Cold War and the consequences of decolonization. The period from the mid-1980s to 2001 witnessed a surge of human-rights optimism, as many countries made the transition from authoritarianism to democracy. There were human-rights disasters in this period, such as the Rwandan genocide and the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, but, overall, the idea of human rights moved from the margins to the centre of international politics. The events of 9/11 seemed to bring an abrupt change. The dominant terms of political discourse became ‘terrorism’, ‘security’ and ‘war’. It is true that ‘terrorism’ was represented as a threat to Western values, including human rights, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq toppled two regimes that had been massive human-rights violators. Nevertheless, human-rights activists have generally believed that the ‘war on terrorism’ has created new challenges for their cause.
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