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During the 1970s, a time when the Beijing government was becoming more active internationally, the human rights regime reached a major turning point. In 1976, the two international human rights covenants, first introduced in 1966, came into force. Several democratic countries also introduced a human rights element in their foreign policies. Matters did not stand still after these innovations, and when the Chinese government began its final debate on whether to sign the two major international covenants, it must have been influenced by the knowledge that it was joining a group that, from June 1997, comprised 138 state parties to the ICCPR (International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights) and 136 to the ICESCR (International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights), although neither covenant has any effective coercive means of ensuring implementation of its articles. However, considerable normative convergence has occurred and, therefore, this chapter focuses on participatory and rhetorical behaviour in this issue area, even while it notes that actual levels of protection have frequently fallen far short of the required standards. The different sections of the chapter are: Building the Human Rights Regime; The Renewal of Activity, (which started in 1965); The Contribution of Non‐Governmental Organizations; Human Rights and the Foreign Policy of States; The Post‐Cold‐War Era; and Conclusion.

The first 18 months after the Tiananmen bloodshed marked the height of global criticism of China's human rights record, but the years 1992–1995 quickly gave some indication of the difficulties that would be faced by those who wished to move China beyond tactical concessions towards genuine acceptance of the validity of some of the core human rights norms. Major Western states, together with Japan, continued to reduce the bilateral pressure, for economic and strategic reasons, and China's recapturing of its high economic growth rates from 1992 enhanced its ability to pose policy dilemmas for those interested in competing in the Chinese market, as well as for far weaker countries that were poised to benefit from China's economic dealings with them. The Beijing leadership, which was plainly on the defensive with respect to its international interlocutors on human rights, decided to renew its efforts to regain the initiative. China's 1991 White Paper, which signalled limited engagement in the human rights discourse, was a major first stage in that strategy, providing China with an authoritative text upon which to draw in response to international criticisms. Beijing, however, went further and tried to link up with other governments in East Asia in the exploitation of a common dislike of Western triumphalism, and a common commitment to ‘Asian values’, questioning the universal application of democracy and human rights. The Chinese leadership began to launch more extensive, direct attacks on Western countries and on the major international NGOs. Nevertheless, the relative density of the human rights regime ensured that some constraints still operated on China's international diplomacy, and as the major states’ sanctions policies weakened, governments tended to make greater use of such multilateral institutions as the UN. The different sections of the chapter are: The Uses of the 1991 White Paper; Relativism versus Universalism —in democracy and human rights; The Economic Weight of China; The Rootedness of Human Rights Policy; The UN Commission on Human Rights; China and the Thematic Mechanisms — the work of the UN Special Rapporteurs and the new 1995 Chinese White Paper; and Conclusion.

This chapter analyzes the early development of the Carter administration's human rights agenda, built in tandem with a new approach to U.S.–Latin American relations during its first year in office. From the outset, the Carter administration envisioned a human rights policy that would simultaneously mitigate human rights violations abroad, build U.S. credibility and stature in the international sphere by reasserting a moral and ideological pole of attraction, and signify a move away from the excessive secrecy and power of the Cold War presidency at home. Although Carter largely shared the premises of the Movement's vision, differences over the implementation and signifiers of this policy in high-level diplomacy created rifts between like-minded advocates and policy makers. Carter found himself grappling with the legacies of both U.S. intervention in the region and also congressional and public distrust stemming from past excesses of the Cold War presidency. The administration's options in implementing its policy were bounded by both past regional relations and human rights advocacy itself.

This chapter examines the dramatic reinvention of U.S. human rights policy during Reagan's first year in office. The Carter administration pursued human rights as a corrective to U.S. interventionist legacies, emphasizing pluralism and eschewing regime change. The Reagan administration, in contrast, aggressively promoted human rights within a reinvigorated but narrow Cold War framework. This construction, championing a limited range of civil and political rights, downplayed the human rights violations of pro-American governments, focusing instead on what it considered the much greater moral flaws and violations of communist regimes. The Cold War framing of human rights under Reagan empowered a pairing of military power and moral values, leading the United States to not only not limit arms sales to governments but also recast military aid as a critical aspect of both hemispheric defense against communism and the advancement of human rights. The chapter studies this policy shift in the Reagan administration's first year in regard to Chile and Argentina.

This chapter traces the rise of the Movement — an influential coalition of left-liberal human rights actors targeting U.S. policy in Latin America — in response to the 1973 Chilean coup. It reveals the centrality of Latin America in 1970s human rights activism and formulation of human rights foreign policy mechanisms, including foreign aid legislation and bureaucratic structures in the State Department. Unlike human rights violations in the Soviet sphere, U.S. advocates viewed human rights abuses in Chile as a product of U.S. political dysfunction resulting from Cold War paradigms of national interest and excessive concentration of power in the presidency. Coming in the wake of the Watergate scandal and the failures of Vietnam, U.S. complicity in the Chilean coup and the subsequent repression underscored the antidemocratic nature of Cold War foreign policy, highlighting the connections between foreign human rights abuses and U.S. policies. Using the information generated by South American advocates, newly organized and vocal human rights groups in the United States and their congressional partners advanced a slate of legislative initiatives targeted at the nexus of foreign repression and U.S. policy, challenging the logic and substance of Cold War alliances.

This chapter evaluates the impact of the Carter administration on human rights. Following Jimmy Carter’s inauguration, the administration set out to institutionalize human rights in the policymaking process, and as a result, the locus of human rights advocacy shifted from Capitol Hill and the nongovernmental sector to the White House and the Department of State Human Rights Office. One of the most widely recognized Carter administration appointees was Patricia Derian, the Department of State coordinator for human rights and humanitarian affairs. Upon realizing the extent of the Argentine military’s human rights violations during her 1977 visit to Argentina, Derian set out to make the country a defining test for the Carter administration’s human rights policy. Utilizing the power and leverage of her office, Derian worked to redefine the U.S. Cold War relationship with Argentina by publicly denouncing dirty war violence and consistently opposing U.S. economic and security assistance.

This chapter addresses U.S. relations with Chile during the Carter administration as an avenue to explore the innate tensions within a policy that simultaneously sought to promote human rights abroad and champion nonintervention. The administration, seeking to appeal to both domestic and international constituencies, sought an approach that balanced distancing the U.S. government from the Pinochet regime, maintaining pressure to improve human rights, and avoiding overt interference in domestic Chilean affairs, which could prompt a nationalist backlash. The competing demands of demonstrating to domestic audiences a cooler relationship with the Pinochet regime on the one hand, and implementing a human rights policy that would improve conditions in Chile on the other, shaped and at times undermined the Carter administration's efforts. The administration was always aware that its leverage was limited and that regime change from without was not a primary objective. The assassination of former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier in Washington, D.C., on September 21, 1976, highlighted the tensions between the domestic and foreign policy objectives of the administration's human rights policy.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of how different groups deployed human rights language to reform domestic and international power, which reveals the multiple and often conflicting purposes of U.S. human rights policy. U.S. Cold War policies were deeply implicated in the human rights violations perpetrated by many of Latin America's governments. This entanglement of U.S. policy and human rights abuses make the Western Hemisphere a critical site for the development and implementation of U.S. human rights diplomacy during the Ford, Carter, and Reagan presidencies. New human rights advocacy targeting Latin America in the 1970s not only sought to mitigate foreign abuses but also challenge Cold War relationships between the United States and repressive right-wing regimes, contesting presidential prerogatives over the very mechanisms of U.S. foreign policy making. Latin America is essential for revealing the uniquely anti-interventionist and self-critical elements of human rights policy that took shape at this time; it was at the core — not the periphery — of both U.S. domestic policy debates and the new international policies that reached far beyond the hemisphere.

This chapter discusses human rights and the U.S.–Argentine relations in 1979–1980. Having spearheaded U.S. efforts to promote human rights in Argentina for three years, Patricia Derian was outraged when she discovered that the Carter administration had decided to initiate “a major policy shift” toward the South American nation in order to “normalize relations and end our official criticism of the regime.” It was evident that the Carter administration’s success in organizing the Argentine military junta’s invitation to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) had come at a heavy political cost. Indeed, the administration’s decision to make Export–Import (Exim) Bank approval of the $270 million Allis-Chalmers sale of a hydroelectric turbine factory to Argentina contingent on the junta’s invitation to the IACHR sparked criticism from American business leaders and conservative journalists, who accused the Carter administration of obstructing profitable bilateral trade relations in the interest of a poorly defined and badly executed human rights policy.

This concluding chapter looks at human rights during the Reagan administration. In accordance with its aggressive posture in the international arena, the Reagan administration set out to dramatically downplay the promotion of human rights as a U.S. foreign policy goal. The Reagan administration’s repudiation of Jimmy Carter’s human rights policy was particularly evident in U.S.–Argentine relations. Indeed, Reagan’s foreign policy team made clear that human rights would be conducted through “quiet diplomacy.” Two months after entering the Oval Office, the Reagan administration announced plans to convince legislators to lift the ban on military sales to Argentina, and ended the Carter administration’s policy of voting against international financial institution loans to Argentina on human rights grounds.

This chapter studies the role of human rights in EU development policy. The place of human rights in development policy was solidified at the constitutional level with the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty, which made the promotion of human rights in all EU external action a legal obligation. As a result, different institutional mechanisms, thematic guidelines, and dedicated instruments and strategies have been put in place to consolidate a comprehensive operational framework aimed at ensuring that EU development programs advance human rights worldwide coherently and consistently. EU development policy is a shared competence, which means that both the EU and its Member States are entitled to act within this domain, as long as national actions do not undermine EU laws and positions. The sharing of competences, however, makes it more difficult for the EU to live up to the commitment of coherent and consistent promotion of human rights. In any case, substantial amount of coordination between the EU and the Member States is required in order to deliver coherence in development policy. However, the role of the EU as a normative leader in development cooperation remains subject to a multitude of long-standing criticisms and various evaluations of EU human rights policy point to a series of mixed results and missed opportunities.

This chapter presents a brief overview of the official human rights policy of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and examines China's record on personal integrity rights and civil and political rights. It puts China under the notorious level-4 ranking on the Political Terror Scale (PTS) based on both Amnesty International and Stated Department reports. It also gives China a low score on civil and political rights. Furthermore, it explains China's stand on freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, pornography, and freedom of assembly. It concludes that China clearly falls far short on civil and political rights when judged against countries in its income class.

This concluding chapter explains that for Movement advocates, the human rights vision of the 1970s was intimately connected with a reckoning with the U.S. failures of Vietnam, Cold War national security strategy, and, of course, Chile. The Movement and the Carter administration shared a vision of human rights as a way to improve not only the world but also the U.S. government and its policies. This is not to say the Movement's views were universally shared, or that human rights faded away after the 1970s. Rather, human rights continued to serve as an instrument of its time, a powerful idea and language, flexible and indelible. The Carter administration's human rights policy was far from perfect or consistent. It was, however, a uniquely self-reflective policy that restrained U.S. intervention and addressed abuses taking place in areas where the United States was most directly complicit in empowering violators.

This book discusses human rights problems that arise from international trade and outlines specific paths that governments must follow to use trade for the advancement of human rights. Drawing on actual examples from the thirty-five nations of the Western Hemisphere, it explores human rights policies involving poverty, sustainable development, conscripted child labor, health promotion, equality of women, human trafficking, indigenous peoples, citizenship, and economic sanctions. It also examines the premises of the trade and human rights debate from the perspectives of both free trade advocates and human rights activists, and how each is—or should be—attempting to avoid a clash that could have profound consequences for human rights and the global market.

An intense debate was sparked in the late 1990s: should the EU become a ‘Human Rights Organization’? Twenty years later, in the midst of a migration, security, and economic crisis, the relevance of the debate has been anything but tempered. Despite the clear rejection of a general mandate for the EU in this field, over the past two decades competences have emerged to give shape to a given fundamental right. EU equality law provides a particularly useful example of such a policy. The principle of equal treatment has gained a particularly clear and forceful human rights connotation. It has also been encapsulated in a remarkably ambitious as well as homogeneous set of legislative instruments. As such specific fundamental rights competences and relevant areas of law have emerged despite the reluctance of the Member States to grant the EU a core human rights policy, the constitutional setting in which they are embedded today warrants investigation. What characterizes equality law today, as our key example, is twofold. First, the narrative on equality law is very often couched in constitutional terms. Second, the equality law directives adopted from the year 2000 onwards have brought in a diverse set of rules intended to support a change in mentality from within domestic legal and policy arenas. The EU, in developing legislation that shapes the content of a right deemed to be fundamental and that diversifies the governance tools for anchoring that right in our societies, has unique strengths as well as weaknesses.