The Not-So-Universal Declarations: Human Rights in the UN General Assembly

• In Event: Human Rights in the U.N. System

Abstract

It is widely recognised that international human rights language has come to dominate world politics. Some scholars have expressed optimism about the potential for this growth of human rights rhetoric to bring about improvements in human rights. However, many others have questioned this view, pointing to the use of human rights language by states that commit rights abuses and the willingness of repressive states to ratify international human rights treaties. These scholars argue that human rights commitments are examples of ‘cheap talk’.
In this study, we examine this issue using new empirical evidence. We argue that to date, insufficient attention has been given to the types of human rights rhetoric used by different states. Using natural language processing (NLP) methods, we examine countries’ engagement with human rights in their annual statements in the General Debate of the UN General Assembly (UNGA). We do this using the UN General Debate Corpus (UNGDC), which we extend back to 1946. Hence, we use NLP methods to systematically identify the different types of human rights references in the UNGA between 1946 and 2020. We then statistically examine the relationship between specific types of human rights rhetoric and human rights performance over a 75-year period.
Therefore, the paper makes several contributions. First, it unpacks human rights rhetoric in world politics by identifying the different types of human rights references by member states in the UNGA. Second, it identifies trends in these different types of human rights references over a 75-year period. Third, it examines the relationship between different types of human rights reference in the UNGA and countries’ actual human rights performance. In doing so, the paper provides important new empirical evidence to address a core issue in the global politics of human rights.

Authors

• Niheer Dasandi, University of Birmingham

• Olga Gasparyan, Hertie School

• Slava Jankin Mikhaylov, University of Essex