Volume 50, Number 8 · May 15, 2003
The Rights Stuff
By Brian Urquhart
Taking Liberties: Four Decades in the Struggle for Rights
by Aryeh Neier
Public Affairs, 406 pp., $30.00
In all the bloodshed and violence of the twentieth century, a conspicuously hopeful development was the emergence of human rights as a concern that governments can no longer ignore. The official reaction to the 1915 massacre of 800,000 Armenians by the Turks or to Hitler's first anti-Semitic atrocities was that no government had a right to interfere in the domestic affairs of another state. The final years of the century saw at least one major armed international intervention to stop a gross abuse of human rights in Kosovo, as well as the arraignment of two former heads of state (Milosevic and Pinochet), and many other politicians, soldiers, and officials, for crimes against humanity.
Review, 4377 words
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