United Nations

   The UN Charter, drawn up in 1945 in the wake of the Holocaust, committed the organization and its members to the protection of human rights. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, prepared by the Human Rights Commission (UNHRC) and adopted by the UN General Assembly on 10 December 1948, recognized two categories: economic, social, and cultural rights, which include the right to an adequate standard of living for individuals and their families (Article 25); and civil and political rights, which include freedom from arbitrary arrest (Article 9) and freedom from torture (Article 5). When the Declaration was first adopted, there was not enough agreement among members to make it legally binding. Later the two categories of rights were separated into two documents. The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights came into effect on 3 January 1976; the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights came into effect on 23 March 1976. The two covenants and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights make up the International Bill of Human Rights.

   The UN established agencies and procedures to address humanrights concerns. Primary responsibility fell to the UNHRC and its Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities (renamed in 1999 the Sub-Commission on Discrimination and Protection of Human Rights). One difficulty lay in deciding how to protect human rights without interfering in the domestic affairs of a nation—the charter prohibited interference. For many years, there was no procedure in place for acting on complaints. In 1967 the UN introduced resolution 1235, which allowed the UNHRC to review complaints for consistent patterns of “gross violations.” In 1970 a new resolution, 1503, took the procedure a step further, allowing for the preparation of a confidential blacklist of offending governments. Under 1503, complaints received by the UN would first undergo a general review. Those revealing a consistent pattern would be passed on to a group of five subcommissioners, who would compile a preliminary blacklist. After being voted on in August by the full subcommission, the list would go to the UNHRC, where a similar process would take place six months later. Blacklisted governments would first be reprimanded in private. If they did not improve, the procedure called for them to be reprimanded in public.

   Offending governments, however, were themselves members of the UNHRC and went to considerable efforts to avoid censure; hence the importance within the UNHRC of Special Procedures, or Special Rapporteurs, consisting of working groups and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) concerned with human rights. Some rapporteurs focused on themes (for example, disappearances, summary execution, and torture); others focused on individual countries. Free of government constraints, the rapporteurs documented human-rights abuses and issued reports suggesting the actual scope of the problem. NGOs, such as Amnesty International and the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), had to abide by strict rules. To participate in the UN—to speak at meetings and distribute documents—they had to become accredited, proving their financial independence and promising to refrain from “politically motivated” attacks on governments.

   This was the context in the 1970s when the UN examined the human-rights situation in South America.

   ARGENTINA: After the military coup of March 1976, Gabriel Martínez, Argentina’s ambassador to the UN, turned his attention from trade (his specialty) to the defense of the junta’s human-rights record. As early as August 1976, the UN subcommission, meeting in Geneva, drafted a resolution on behalf of two thousand political refugees—mostly leftists—who had escaped military regimes in their own countries and were now at risk in Argentina. The resolution had been prompted by the deaths of Héctor Gutiérrez Ruiz and Zelmar Michelini, Uruguayan legislators who disappeared in Buenos Aires in May. The resolution passed despite Martínez’s objections, and Argentina was well on its way to making the blacklist. The case against the junta began to build. In November a team from Amnesty International went on a fact-finding mission to Argentina. The team’s report, published on 23 March 1977 (on the eve of the first anniversary of the coup), contained a clear record of political abductions and won Amnesty International the Nobel Peace Prize for 1977. The junta, however, took the offensive. It accused four NGOs of making politically motivated attacks, citing a longneglected UN rule requiring NGOs to renew their accreditation, or consultative status, every four years. The UN called a special meeting early in 1978 to consider the charge. Nothing definitive came out of the meeting, but Martínez claimed victory, noting that from then on the NGOs would have to act with more caution. Meanwhile, in 1977, Argentina had avoided the preliminary blacklist by the narrowest of margins. Given a year’s reprieve, Martínez set out to pack the subcommission—his own role on the commission was limited to that of observer. In 1978 he engineered the election of Mario Amadeo, a fellow Argentine, and the defeat of several of Argentina’s most vocal critics. Martínez’s efforts paid off for the junta. When Argentina made the preliminary list in 1978 and the case advanced to the full subcommission, Amadeo asked for one more year, arguing that the abductions had ceased and that the government needed more time to examine individual complaints. The subcommission voted to spare the junta once again.

   The junta’s reprieve was short-lived. On 20 December 1978 the UN General Assembly passed a resolution condemning disappearances, citing excesses committed by police and security forces. The resolution did not mention any country but was clearly aimed at Argentina. An even stronger statement—this time naming Argentina—came in February 1979 at the session of the UNHRC in Geneva. Delegates from Western Europe and North America proposed that complaints about disappearances be collected and analyzed by the secretary general. The proposal carried a strong threat of establishing a working group like the one that had been sent to Chile. Martínez answered the threat using a variety of methods. He drafted an alternative proposal, lobbied Socialist and non-Western delegates for support, filibustered, and at a crucial moment in the negotiations walked out of a UNHRC meeting. The issue was tabled until the 1980 session. For three years Martínez had managed to keep Argentina off the blacklist. In 1979 he conceived a plan to buy even more time. He decided to stop fighting the inevitable and to allow the blacklisting, knowing that the case would be kept confidential for a year. Both the five subcommissioners and the full subcommission voted to forward the name of Argentina on to the UNHRC, which would meet the following February. On 28 January 1980 Martínez appeared before a group of five UNHRC delegates and presented a 92-page response to concerns raised at the 1979 session of the UNHRC. The delegates found the response lacking and put tough questions to Martínez. The implication was that a failure to answer the questions would open the case to the public the following year. The next month, at the UNHRC meeting, Jerome Shestack, the delegate from the United States and a Jimmy Carter appointee, maintained the tough line of questioning despite the Carter administration’s softened stance toward Argentina. His efforts earned him a rebuff from the State Department but moved the case of Argentina forward at the UN. The French renewed the call for a working group on disappearances in response to the 1977 abduction and murder of two French nuns who had been working with the Madres de Plaza de Mayo (Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo). Martínez was in retreat—so much so that in August 1980 an Argentine foreign ministry official advised the junta to put an end to the disappearances and return the country to civilian rule. Meanwhile, the UN formed the Working Group on Disappearances and, over the objections of Martínez, authorized it to intervene on behalf of individuals and to collect information from nonaccredited NGOs, a category that would include most of the NGOs in Argentina. The junta received a public reprimand in December 1980 when the UN working group released its report on disappearances (the group had visited Argentina in October). By then, however, Ronald Reagan had been elected president, and the junta gained renewed life. Michael Novak, Shestack’s successor, voted with Argentina and Chile against extending the working group’s mandate.

   BOLIVIA: In 1981 the UNHRC passed a resolution condemning human-rights abuse in Bolivia. The country would also be mentioned in reports of the UN’s Working Group on Disappearance, created in 1980.

   BRAZIL: Because of the efforts of Amnesty International, the UN had become aware of the practice of torture in countries such as Brazil, Chile, Greece, South Vietnam, and Uruguay. In 1975 the UN General Assembly passed a declaration against torture, but it neither named nor confronted the offending governments. The failure prompted a call for a convention specific to torture. The UN’s Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment went into effect on 26 June 1987.

   CHILE: In 1975 the UN established a working group to visit Chile. It was not until July 1978, however, that the regime of Augusto Pinochet Ugarte allowed a visit to take place. The group, led by Theo van Boven, the director of the Human Rights Division of the UN, met with Pinochet Ugarte, with former democratically elected Chilean presidents, and with relatives of people who disappeared. It visited prisons as well, including Villa Grimaldi, a detention center where the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA, Directorate of National Intelligence), the secret police, once tortured its prisoners. Although Chilean officials denied that the villa had been put to that use—it was now an officers’ club—prisoners previously held there convinced team members of its former purpose. Many believe that Pinochet Ugarte permitted the visit in the hope of being rewarded for his cooperation. After all, Chile was the first country to allow a human-rights investigation by the UN. The group’s report, however, provided a comprehensive look at the human-rights situation in Chile, covering not only torture and disappearance but also issues such as health care, unemployment, child welfare, and labor laws. The visit helped direct the attention of van Boven—and the UN—to Latin America in general, and in 1981 the UNHRC passed a public resolution condemning rights abuse in Chile.

   PARAGUAY: Paraguay was placed on the UNHRC confidential blacklist in 1975. Like other countries labeled “gross violators by the UNHRC,” it benefited from the confidentiality requirement of the 1503 resolution. In speaking before the UNHRC, one NGO representative resorted to referring to Paraguay as “a small landlocked country somewhere in Latin America.” In 1986 the UN reported that 94 percent of Paraguay’s political prisoners were unsentenced.

   URUGUAY: Uruguay was placed on the UNHRC confidential blacklist in 1976. Like Paraguay, it benefited from the confidentiality provided by the 1503 resolution. For three years, the case was kept under review without any improvement in the country’s humanrights record. The commission’s failure to make the case public during that period is attributed to the personality of its Uruguayan delegate, Carlos Giumbruno, whose emotional displays in defense of his country were effective and mistaken for cooperation. In 1979 the commission, faced with a decision, opted to send an envoy to Uruguay. UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim appointed the Peruvian-born Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, an experienced diplomat, the current undersecretary general for political affairs, and the future secretary general.

   Pérez de Cuéllar traveled to Montevideo in December 1979, accompanied by Carlos Giumbruno. His 1980 report, sympathetic with the military regime, was leaked and proved embarrassing to the UN. Its conclusions—that prison conditions were reasonable and that no one was imprisoned because of his or her ideas—were flatly contradicted by those of another report, also leaked, issued about the same time by the Red Cross. The commission, which could neither reject the report of its own envoy nor embrace its findings, decided to keep the case of Uruguay under review and to ask Secretary General Waldheim to make additional efforts the following year.

   Despite its efforts, the UNHRC came under criticism. Jeane Kirkpatrick and others accused it of double standards—for singling out Argentina and Chile, for example, instead of Cuba. Other critics pointed out that it failed to respond to issues or responded slowly—in 1981 it passed a resolution condemning Cambodia, after Pol Pot’s murderous regime (1975–1979) had been ousted. These criticisms persisted. In 2006 the failure to act against Sudan and Zimbabwe prompted UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to scrap the UNHRC and replace it with the Human Rights Council, a smaller, standing body whose members, it was hoped, would include human-rights proponents from every region.

   See also ORGANIZATION OF AMERICAN STATES.