Towards a Human Rights Century

In confusion of world situation created by waning of cold war, people in power and their advisors and teachers have usually failed to set distant aims to guide current action on enjoyment of human rights. When they have done so, their aims have been rhetorical or dangerous. True, amid turmoil of a dissolving Soviet empire, Mikhail Gorbachev has called for creation of a civilization.2 But he has failed to distinguish any civilization from old ones, in which cultural advances have been combined with empire building and denial of human rights and freedoms to so-called inferior peoples. His words also carry faint overtones of earlier Communist promises of a new Soviet man. These overtones have resounded loudly in Georgia, Lithuania, and even in Russian republic as a KGB and other armed forces have taken action to limit promises of glasnost (openness) and hold back pace of perestroika (restructuring). True, US President George Bush has looked ahead by declaring in 1988, and repeating many times later, that the has not ended.3 But in 1990 his way of restoring American Century thinking involved

Human rights · Political science · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · International Law and Human Rights · Law