Have You Heard about CERD? Including & Excluding Race in Human Rights Law

• In Event: Race and U.S. Foreign Policy (Virtual Session)

Abstract

In 1965, the UN adopted the first of its nine core human rights treaties – the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD). The study of race and international relations has received deserved recent attention, but US attention to promoting racial justice as a human right was controversial and its conviction challenged. During UN CERD treaty drafting in the 1960s, Soviet treaty negotiators repeatedly criticized the US for hypocritical foreign policy on race as it simultaneously actively discriminated against and harmed Black Americans domestically. An historic lack of attention to advancing race as a human right in US policy may well mirror the US academic field of international relations’ inattention to incorporating the UN CERD treaty into full study and analysis alongside other core human rights treaties. The quantitative analysis of international human rights law ratification and compliance has largely overlooked the UN CERD amidst the robust and rigorous testing of treaty effects and determinants of ratification. I argue that given its historic importance and ongoing racial discrimination and violence it is important to include the UN CERD in political science/international relations analyses and conceptualizations of human rights. In this paper, I provide a background on the CERD treaty including US foreign and domestic policy contexts and argue that US policy approaches to human rights have influenced how political science defines and has largely excluded racial discrimination as an important human rights component. I examine political science, international relations, and human rights specific journals 2000-2020 to analyze trends and determinants of when CERD was included or excluded from articles studying questions of human rights treaty commitment, compliance, and legal engagement. In doing so, this paper contributes to international relations and political science by 1) extending the understanding of the nexus between US foreign policy on race and academic study of race and human rights 2) taking a critical lens to how human rights scholars and scholarship have contextualized race in international human rights law and 3) documenting publishing trends on an important intellectual and foreign policy area.

Author

• Audrey Lynn Comstock, Arizona State University