The crises that will challenge Obama

SIXTY YEARS AGO this week, the United Nations adopted two unprecedented statements: the Convention on the Prevention of the Crime of Genocide on Dec. 9 and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on Dec. 10 - a date we now mark as International Human Rights Day.

Both documents reflected a deep-seated revulsion on the part of people around the world to the terrible atrocities of World War II and the Holocaust. "Never again" became a popular refrain. Sadly, it also became an empty slogan. The Declaration was adopted without any opposing votes, although South Africa, Saudi Arabia, and members of the Soviet bloc abstained. The Genocide Convention was adopted without any opposition or abstentions. As the legal scholar Mary Ann Glendon has observed, governments appeared to agree that "certain things are so terrible in practice that no one will publicly approve them and that certain things are so good in practice that no one will publicly oppose them." But even as the United Nations accorded rhetorical support to lofty human rights standards, it failed to create effective machinery to monitor compliance let alone to hold violators accountable.

Back then, the world looked different than it does today. The General Assembly had 58 member states. Great Britain did not wish to see the Declaration apply to people in its vast colonial empire. The Soviet Union did not want international scrutiny into how it treated its citizens. The United States could not stop the lynching of African-Americans or defend the rights of millions of people to vote in the Jim Crow South. The Truman administration had to assure Southern Democrats, who controlled the Senate, that neither the Universal Declaration of Human Rights nor other international human rights agreements could be invoked against legalized segregation. And then it took decades for the US government to ratify the Genocide Convention.

It was this vacuum of leadership on the part of the United Nations that led to the development of the modern-day human rights movement. Groups of activists, without the resources of governments or the prestige that the UN claimed for itself, showed that they could conduct research in every region of the world and campaign effectively to gain the release of prisoners of conscience and improve the conditions they face in detention.

We mark the 60th anniversary of the Declaration of Human Rights at an auspicious time. President-elect Barack Obama will take office in January. He has pledged to close the US detention center in Guantanamo Bay. But closing the prison and releasing or transferring the detainees for trial is only part of what needs to be done. As the US Supreme Court has made clear, the prisoners in Guantanamo cannot be placed "beyond the law." We need to know what judicial procedures will be put in place to ensure the detainees have the chance to defend themselves in a fair and impartial tribunal. And we need to see an executive order barring the use of torture altogether.

Other crises will also challenge the Obama administration. In Darfur, a hybrid force of UN-African Union peacekeepers is still not fully deployed. In Afghanistan, violence has been escalating between coalition forces and the Taliban, leaving killed and injured civilians in its wake. In Russia and Georgia, the recent military confrontation left villages destroyed and families displaced. Repressive governments exist in Burma, Cuba, China, Belarus, and Libya, as well as in scores of other countries.

As we mark the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we must match the impulse to celebrate with an equal determination to persevere.

Joshua Rubenstein is Northeast Regional Director of Amnesty International USA.