Ramacharan, Bertrand. "Norms and Machinery", In The Oxford Handbook on the United Nations, edited by Sam Daws and Thomas G. Weiss. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Ramacharan, Bertrand. "Norms and Machinery", In The Oxford Handbook on the United Nations, edited by Sam Daws and Thomas G. Weiss. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

• The contemporary human rights situation is controversial and faces a number of difficult problems in its function. Primarily it needs to walk the line between punishing human rights violations and pursuing a cooperative rather than confrontational role in human rights so as to maintain good faith in international relations (440).
• Human rights were only included in the Charter of the UN because of the intense pressure of civil society groups in the founding countries, as all were major human rights violators at the time: the USSR was characterized by pervasive repression and the gulag system; the UK and France committed scores of war crimes in the colonial empires; the Republic of China was engaged in a devastating civil war; the US enforced racial segregation throughout the South (441).
• The principles they managed to secure in the Charter were the decolonization of the world, pushed through by the US, which sought to erode European power, universal nondiscrimination, and a general commitment to vaguely defined human rights (441).
• The Charter carefully avoids any mention of the 'protection' of human rights, instead deciding that they should be improved through cooperation. ECOSOC, the body responsible for their promotion, was not given any power that could then to change the gulag system, Jim Crow laws, or discrimination in European colonies (442).
• The first changes to the non-interventionist regime established by the great powers in 1945 came in the 1960s as increasingly large numbers of newly independent countries pushed for collective action against gross human rights abuses in the remaining colonies and apartheid South Africa (442).
• The development of international human rights norms was mediated by the Cold War. The West primarily argued for the inclusion of civil and political rights, called first-generation, or negative, rights, while the Eastern Bloc argued for the provision of economic and social rights, called second-generation, or positive, rights (443).
• This conflict resulted in two separate covenants on human rights. There are also major splits on individual aspects of human rights, resulting in the non-inclusion of major elements, like minority rights or the rights of indigenous peoples, both aspects particularly rejected by Latin American countries, who denied the existence of minorities (444).
• Several elements of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, issued in 1948, were later expanded during the 1990s to put human rights at the center of UN policy. One of these is the idea that human rights, democracy, and development are interdependent and mutually reinforcing concepts (446).
• The UN Commission on Human Rights [UNCHR] was created under ECOSOC in 1946 and developed the legal framework and norms of human rights until its replacement in 2006 by the Human Rights Council [UNHRC]. The UNCHR originally had 18 members, but this was repeatedly expanded so that it had 53 members at the time of its dissolution (447-448).
• Countries with the worst human rights records had the most incentives to control the agenda of the UNCHR, and so consistently tried to secure elections on the Commission. This happened on many occasions throughout the Commission's history, leading to severe criticism (454).
• The new mandate of the UNCHR was designed to address many of the complaints about the Commission, but it still retained a role as promoting, rather than protecting, human rights. It was smaller than the Commission and functioned by a simple majority. It also placed greater scrutiny on members, which, combined with majority voting, was designed to deter major offenders from joining the Council (450-451).
• Cooperation is heavily encourage not only between the UNHRC and national human rights bodies, but also between the Council and NGOs and international organizations with a role in protecting humans. The Council is expected to develop better relations with regional human rights bodies than its predecessor (451).
• There is also the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights [OHCHR], a position directly underneath the Secretary-General. It was essentially no budget or official power, but is designed to serve as the UN's spokesperson for the advancement of human rights (452).
• Outside of major politicized human rights issues, like apartheid rule in South Africa, the UN has often failed to act. Early in its existence, bombarded by thousands of petitions regarding human rights abuses, the UNCHR designed that it lacked competence and would only respond to the petitions of states (453).
• Many developing nations felt that this system was not able to confront the worst violators of human rights, and in 1967 were able to push through an annual review and debate in which member states decided the issues they would confront and what working groups would be created (453).
• In 1970, the Commission finally created a way to deal with human rights concerns at the national level, created individual dialogues with member state, who could be confronted by the Commission for human rights abuses upon the petition of other states (453-454).
• The common tools of human rights bodies are the investigation of contemporary incidents of human rights abuses, providing experts and technical assistance to national governments to help in enforcement, suggesting improvement to national systems of protection, conducting fact-finding missions, disseminating information about human rights, and naming and shaming individual offenders (455).
• In 1986, the UNCHR instituted the 'right to development', proclaiming that countries had the responsibility to make sure that their patterns of development were equitable and benefited all their citizens. Although enforcement is weak to nonexistent, it proclaims that the Darwinian model of economic development is internationally unacceptable (456-457).
• This was reflected in the Millennium Development Goals, which hold that violations of human rights through discrimination are impediments to development, as are other forms of human rights abuses (457).