Ghost of human rights advocacy past

After 40 Years, Let's Ratify U.N. Bill of Rights

 

To the Editor:

Richard N. Gardner, in ''Eleanor Roosevelt's Legacy: Human Rights'' (Op-Ed, Dec. 10), recounts the integral participation of Mrs. Roosevelt in drafting the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights on the 40th anniversary of the declaration's adoption. ''Mr. Reagan's Human Rights Conversion,'' an editorial the same day, congratulated the Administration for paying increasing attention to human rights in regard to United States foreign policy. Both pieces justly praised the declaration and its contribution to raising consciousness of human rights around the world.

What was missing was mention of the declaration's three companion documents: the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Civil and Political Covenant's Optional Protocol. Together with the declaration, these documents compose the United Nations International Bill of Human Rights. At the declaration's genesis, its drafters understood it to represent a very general view of the rights considered universal and fundamental. The delegates agreed that an additional document, detailing the expansive rights accorded by the declaration and supplying necessary legally binding language, must be composed to give the declaration teeth.

The drafting of this additional document began in 1951. Though only one covenant was originally intended, in 1952 the General Assembly decided to prepare two documents simultaneously - one on economic, social and cultural rights, and the other on civil and political rights. At the seventh and eighth sessions of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, during which much of the covenants was drafted, the United States was again formidably represented by Mrs. Roosevelt. After revision by the third committee of the General Assembly, the final drafts of the covenants and the optional protocol, with much of Mrs. Roosevelt's input intact, were approved by the General Assembly on Dec. 17, 1966.

These three documents, according to Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar, ''require states that have ratified them to recognize and honor the widest range of human rights ever recorded in history.'' Yet, despite Mrs. Roosevelt's championing of the covenants, and despite the ratification of them by more than 90 countries (including Canada, Britain, France, West Germany and the Soviet Union), the United States has yet formally to sanction these essential human rights instruments.

Signed by President Carter in 1978, they have languished before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, along with several other signed yet unratified human rights documents: the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment; the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women; the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, and the American Convention on Human Rights.

Several arguments have been made against ratification, most involving unwarranted concerns over the sovereignty of states. As the Senate recently demonstrated with its long-overdue ratification of the Genocide Convention, however, universal human rights transcends such minor issues. The United States, by ratifying the entire International Bill of Human Rights and the additional documents now before the Senate, can continue the battle for human rights begun 40 years ago by Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Only then will the United States thus commit itself under international law to its mission of promoting throughout the world the improvement of the human condition.

THOMAS G. EHR Athens, Ga., Dec. 12, 1988

The writer is with the Dean Rusk Center at the University of Georgia School of Law.