Celebrating Human Rights: Sixty Years of the Universal Declaration.

• Author: Hoadley, Stephen
• Position: Book review

CELEBRATING HUMAN RIGHTS: Sixty Years of the Universal Declaration Editor: Roderic Alley Published by: New Zealand Human Rights Commission and New Zealand Institute of International Affairs, Wellington, 2009, 132pp, $20 (+ p and p).

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This proceedings of a conference held in Wellington in December 2008 is timely and informative. Its contributors are academics and community leaders of standing in the endeavour of human rights protection, led by Sir Kenneth Keith (Judge, International Court of Justice) and Rosslyn Noonan (Chief Commissioner, New Zealand Human Rights Commission).

The focal points of the 15 contributions vary, ranging from the history of treaties and processes of international institutions to specific appeals on behalf of Maori, Canadian Aborigines, and persons with disabilities, and rights issues surrounding welfare, sex, reproduction, and health. The proceedings editor Roderic Alley offers four observations by way of encompassing the diverse contributions:

* the vitality and expansion of the human rights project,

* the growing resistance by people and groups to claims of sovereign state authority,

* the narrowing of the gap between formal law and actual compliance, and

* the marginalisation of cultural relativity by the universality of human rights ideals. As Nelson Mandela put it, 'Freedom has no truck with conditionality'.

Without prejudice to the other worthy contributions, this reviewer found four papers particularly relevant to his graduate teaching. The first, by Natalie Baird, was an informative account of the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) process, the principal innovation of the new Human Rights Council. This process assures that all UN member governments, even China, which by adept diplomatic tactics evaded scrutiny by the predecessor Human Rights Commission for three decades, are assessed by an independent, randomly selected panel of states-representatives at least every four years. The contribution also documents the poor human rights treaty accession record of the Pacific Islands states, flags the tensions between international treaty law and Pacific Islands custom, and describes the outcome of a UPR assessment of Tonga and Tonga's response. I shall be assigning this paper to my students.

The second paper that caught my eye was a description by Matt Frost of how the concept and implementation of rights of the disabled unfolded in New Zealand, and how the New Zealand government, and the...