Vol. 3 No. 8 (August, 1993) pp. 87-88
WORLD HUMAN RIGHTS GUIDE (3rd edition) by Charles Humana. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Reviewed by Cecelia Lynch, Department of Political Science,
Northwestern University.
Charles Humana's human rights survey remains the most succinct,
yet complete, country-by-country guide to the observance of civil
and political human rights around the world. As such, it provides
an accessible reference for anyone seeking concrete information
on the respect for legal, personal and individual rights ranging
from freedom from torture to gender equality in marriage and
divorce laws for each of 104 countries.
Humana, formerly of Amnesty International, presents his findings
for each country in the form of a forty-question survey covering
freedoms of movement, assembly, belief and expression; freedoms
from censorship, coercion, slavery, torture and execution; rights
to peaceful political opposition and free multiparty elections;
rights to nationality, legal representation and fair trial; and
rights to noninterference in private affairs. Humana takes
women's oppression seriously; several questions specifically
target women's rights to political, social and economic equality
with men. On the basis of a system that assigns one of four
"grades" to each response and weights rights violations
entailing physical abuse more heavily than other infractions (by
a ratio of 3:1), Humana arrives at an overall "human rights
rating" for each country evaluated. His sources are varied,
including reports by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch,
journalists and UN agencies, among others. Humana also solicits
responses to his questionnaires from each of the countries
evaluated, but relies on reports from monitoring organizations
and journalists in order to assess the veracity of state-provided
responses.
Humana does not cover micro-states with a population of fewer
than one million, nor does he attempt in this edition to cover
states whose boundaries are being redrawn or whose civil wars
have led to considerable domestic turmoil. Unfortunately, the
latter decision, although understandable from the point of view
of assessing violations with precision, has led to the omission
of such human rights hot-spots as Haiti, Somalia, Lebanon,
Liberia, Ethiopia and the Occupied Territories (strangely, Israel
enjoys a relatively high human rights score, although exception
is made in almost every category for the Occupied Territories).
Perhaps a better solution would be to return to the compromise
Humana adopted in the second edition of the book, in which he
evaluates in summary form (rather than providing a specific
break-down of the forty rights assessed) those states for which a
general evaluation can be made despite extremely unsettled
conditions. Nevertheless, Humana's guide presents certain
advantages over several other periodic assessments of human
rights, including those of both Freedom House and Amnesty
International. While the prose form adopted by the latter gives
flesh (and much blood) to the description of rights observances
and violations, Humana makes it possible to compare, if still in
fairly general terms, the observance of forty specific rights
across states and over time. His breakdown and classification of
rights also makes his overall country scores transparent,
enabling him to avoid the erratic value judgments often made in
Freedom House country surveys.
Nevertheless, the guide does have a significant shortcoming: it
purports to be a guide to human rights as defined and enumerated
by the three major United Nations treaties on the subject, but in
fact it only partially fulfills its objective. Although Humana
emphasizes more than once that his questions are taken from
rights enumerated in the UN's Universal Declaration on Human
Rights of 1948 (the first definitional document negotiated by the
international community) and its two follow-up covenants adopted
by the UN General Assembly in 1966, the International Covenant on
Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on
Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the book
Page 88 follows:
gives priority to the first two documents. Only three of the
forty questions are based on the ICESCR (the right to unionize,
the prohibition of child labor, and the right to "take part
in cultural life" and "enjoy the benefits of scientific
progress"). This choice has definitional and political
implications. Because, broadly speaking, the industrialized,
capitalist West supports civil and political rights (those that
dominate this guide), while many Third World states support the
rights embodied in the ICESCR (the right to an adequate standard
of living including food, clothing and housing; the right to
education; the right to medical services), the relative lack of
attention to the latter document leaves Humana open to the charge
of Western bias in defining which of the rights agreed upon by
the international community are the most significant. Humana's
response to this charge is two-fold: a) he included only those
rights capable of some sort of measurement, and b) he asserts
that most rights in the ICESCR are phrased as aspirations or
"vague guarantees". But this reasoning is faulty:
surely access to education, medical resources and shelter are as
measurable as the freedom to travel, practice one's religion or
"use contraceptive pills and devices". It also appears
inappropriate to label rights articulated in the ICESCR as
"aspirations" given the fact that political maneuvering
always plays a role in the wording of final documents and when,
according to Humana himself (p.7), "The guide simply sets
[states'] performance against their obligations." If the
guide purports to be an assessment of states' performance
according to norms set by the international community, then it
should evaluate performance against all agreed-upon obligations.
If it chooses not to do so, then it should call itself a guide to
political and civil, not "human", rights.
Humana decided to update his previous editions (the second was
published in 1986) both despite and because of the rapid changes
occurring in the post-Cold War world; one in which democracy
appears to be spreading while simultaneously the break-up of
existing states and emergence of new ones makes evaluating human
rights extremely difficult and the final assessment of any given
country quite tenuous. He is right that we cannot wait until the
dust settles to continue our evaluations of the treatment of
peoples all over the world, and is to be lauded for his ongoing
work in compiling data that is useful in assessing important
aspects of the human condition. Humana will be kept busy with the
rapid changes and massive rights violations in the Balkans and
some republics of the former Soviet Union, which are described in
this edition only in their infancy. As he is well aware, however,
any assessment of human rights is contentious and partial. We can
only hope that, if his objective remains the comprehensive
assessment of internationally-mandated and agreed-upon human
rights, the next edition will be less partial, although it would
surely remain contentious.
Copyright 1993