As Russian troops retreat from areas around Kyiv, the world is learning of the horrors inflicted on Ukrainian civilians. Pressed to address those atrocities, the UN General Assembly voted on Thursday to suspend Russia from the Human Rights Council. But that did little to make up for the UN’s limited response thus far. “If this continues, the finale will be that each state will rely only on the power of arms to ensure its security, not on international law, not on international institutions,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a speech before the Security Council earlier in the week. “Then, the UN can simply be dissolved.”
In the wake of World War II, Moscow was one of the central players in the commission tasked with drafting what would become the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and designing a United Nations body to uphold it. Eleanor Roosevelt, representing the United States, chaired the commission. In a 1948 essay for Foreign Affairs, she described the work of uniting the world—including the Soviet Union—behind a commitment to human security and dignity. Even while hailing that achievement, Roosevelt acknowledged the limits of what it could achieve in the near term. But a shared commitment to human rights, she wrote, “might become one of the cornerstones on which peace could eventually be based.” Nearly 75 years later, the world has made only limited progress toward that goal.
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— Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, Editor |
