12 - The United Nations, Humanitarianism, and Human Rights

Summary

[T]he happenings in East Pakistan constitute one of the most tragic episodes in human history. Of course, it is for future historians to gather facts and make their own evaluations, but it has been a very terrible blot on a page of human history.

U Thant, Secretary-General of the United Nations, 3 June 1971.

A significant part of the human rights regime established by the United Nations after the Second World War was the protection of group rights and the further regulation of warfare by prosecuting the violators of these new international laws. Unlike the interwar period when the League of Nations stood by haplessly as Italy invaded Abyssinia, the protection of human rights and international law was supposed to have teeth. Thus the United Nations General Assembly passed the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide on 9 December 1948 (it came into force in 1951), one day before it adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. On the heels of the Nuremberg Trials, the Genocide Convention provides explicitly for prosecutions of suspected perpetrators. Article 6 says: “Persons charged with genocide or any other acts enumerated in article III shall be tried by a competent tribunal of the State in the territory of which the act was committed, or by such international penal tribunal as may have jurisdiction with respect to those Contracting Parties which shall have accepted its jurisdiction.” What is more, Article 8 stipulates that contracting parties can have recourse to the UN: They “may call upon the competent organs of the United Nations to take such action under the Charter of the United Nations as they consider appropriate for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide.”

A year later, in 1949, the Third Geneva Convention was signed by members of the “international community.” With respect to “grave breaches” of that Convention, which overlap in part with the Genocide Convention, it requires states “to enact legislation necessary to provide effective penal sanctions” and “to search for the persons alleged to have committed or ordered the commission of grave breaches and to try such persons before their own courts, or alternatively to hand them over to another contracting state that has made out a prima facie case.” The Convention also requires that states assist one another in criminal proceedings, such as extraditing suspects, as does the Genocide Convention.