The United Nations Charter, International Human Rights, and the Hollowness of Sovereignty Claims

Abstract

The negotiators of the United Nations Charter provided a special place for the emergent field of human rights. With a preamble focused on an end to human suffering and a principal purpose of “promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion,” the UN system has human rights in its DNA. The course of human rights practice in the UN, moreover, reflects a decades-long understanding that matters within the corpus of international human rights law are not excluded from UN debate, investigation and action. Nonetheless, states have increasingly pushed back, perhaps none more so than China, which objected vehemently to UN consideration of its massive rights abuses in Xinjiang in 2022. What of these renewed sovereigntist arguments? Do they have merit? This paper returns to an issue many scholars and governments thought they had buried, revisiting the fundamentals of the Charter and restating the Charter’s rejection of sovereignty as a magic wand to wave away human rights claims.

Keywords: Human Rights, United Nations, International Law, Sovereignty