Abstract
While the UN Charter clearly establishes collective security as the central goal of the UN, it accords human rights and humanitarian aid much less prominent roles. Nonetheless, over time both the protection of human rights and provision of humanitarian aid have become major roles of the UN system, and of regional international organizations (IOs) and international NGOs as well. This chapter compares the role of the UN system as protector of human rights with its role as provider of humanitarian aid. Even though the two roles would seem at first to have much in common as two parts of a broader human security agenda, the UN’s role in the two issue-areas is very different.
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Notes
United Nations General Assembly, Resolution 48/141: High Commissioner for the Promotion and Protection of All Human Rights (New York: UN, 1994).
See Daniel C. Thoma s, The Helsinki Effect: International Norms, Human Rights, and the Demise of Communism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).
Figures for the breakdown of funding sources are for 2010, and are from United Nations High Commission for Refugees, UNHCR Global Report 2010 (Geneva: UNHCR, 2011), pp. 85–88.
This critique is made, among other places, in Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore, Rules for the World: International Organizations in Global Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004).
See, for example, Adamantia Pollis, “Liberal, Socialist, and Third World Perspectives on Human Rights,” in Human Rights in the World Community, ed. Richard Claude and Burns Weston, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992).
For an argument that the promotion of human rights internationally is in the U.S. national interest, see William F. Schultz, In Our Own Best Interest: How Defending Human Rights Benefits Us All (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2001).
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© 2013 J. Samuel Barkin
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Barkin, J.S. (2013). Human Rights and Humanitarian Aid. In: International Organization. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137356734_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137356734_9
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-30240-3
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