Content area
Full Text
Steven L. B. Jensen, The Making of International Human Rights: The 1960s, Decolonization, and the Reconstruction of Global Values (New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2016), ISBN 9781107112162, 313 pages.
In this diplomatic history, Steven L. B. Jensen, a Ph.D. Researcher at the Danish Institute for Human Rights, succeeds in showing how human rights diplomacy at the United Nations in the 1960s paved the way for the development of international human rights legal norms in the 1970s,1 a point he drives home clearly in Chapter 6. His evidence for the 1960s' connection to the 1970s-which revisionist historians of human rights, following Samuel Moyn's polemical book, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (2010), have overemphasized as the "moment" of their breakthrough- builds throughout the previous chapters. This "moment" of human rights history is overemphasized because-although undeniable changes do occur in the late 1970s, changes which result in the institutionalization of human rights and their incorporation into foreign policy in the global North-human rights as a matter of activism, policy-making, international law, and even foreign policy, predated this paradigm shift.
In Chapter 2, "'The Problem of Freedom': the United Nations and Decolonization, 1 960-1961," Jensen argues that by focusing on how to bring a legal end to colonialism, the UN debates on decolonization signalled a new trajectory for human rights norms in international relations.2 In Chapter 3, "From Jamaica with Law: The Rekindling of International Human Rights, 1962-1967," Jensen focuses on Jamaica's role as a "human rights broker on the international scene"3 through its proposal of an International Human Rights Year in 1968 and its leadership in forming "the first human rights foreign policy" in 1964.4 In Chapter 4, "The Making of a Precedent: Racial Discrimination and International Human Rights Law, 1962-1966," Jensen boldly declares that "International human rights law has been built on a foundation of race,"5 and, to back up this claim, offers a detailed account of the negotiation of the Convention on Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD) of 1965. He shows convincingly that CERD "paved the way for the universal legal recognition of civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights elaborated in the Human Rights Covenants from 1966."6 In Chapter 5, "'The Hymn of Hate': the Failed Convention on...