Vol. 3 No. 8 (August, 1993) pp. 87-88

WORLD HUMAN RIGHTS GUIDE (3rd edition) by Charles Humana. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Reviewed by Cecelia Lynch, Department of Political Science, Northwestern University.

Charles Humana's human rights survey remains the most succinct, yet complete, country-by-country guide to the observance of civil and political human rights around the world. As such, it provides an accessible reference for anyone seeking concrete information on the respect for legal, personal and individual rights ranging from freedom from torture to gender equality in marriage and divorce laws for each of 104 countries.

Humana, formerly of Amnesty International, presents his findings for each country in the form of a forty-question survey covering freedoms of movement, assembly, belief and expression; freedoms from censorship, coercion, slavery, torture and execution; rights to peaceful political opposition and free multiparty elections; rights to nationality, legal representation and fair trial; and rights to noninterference in private affairs. Humana takes women's oppression seriously; several questions specifically target women's rights to political, social and economic equality with men. On the basis of a system that assigns one of four "grades" to each response and weights rights violations entailing physical abuse more heavily than other infractions (by a ratio of 3:1), Humana arrives at an overall "human rights rating" for each country evaluated. His sources are varied, including reports by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, journalists and UN agencies, among others. Humana also solicits responses to his questionnaires from each of the countries evaluated, but relies on reports from monitoring organizations and journalists in order to assess the veracity of state-provided responses.

Humana does not cover micro-states with a population of fewer than one million, nor does he attempt in this edition to cover states whose boundaries are being redrawn or whose civil wars have led to considerable domestic turmoil. Unfortunately, the latter decision, although understandable from the point of view of assessing violations with precision, has led to the omission of such human rights hot-spots as Haiti, Somalia, Lebanon, Liberia, Ethiopia and the Occupied Territories (strangely, Israel enjoys a relatively high human rights score, although exception is made in almost every category for the Occupied Territories). Perhaps a better solution would be to return to the compromise Humana adopted in the second edition of the book, in which he evaluates in summary form (rather than providing a specific break-down of the forty rights assessed) those states for which a general evaluation can be made despite extremely unsettled conditions. Nevertheless, Humana's guide presents certain advantages over several other periodic assessments of human rights, including those of both Freedom House and Amnesty International. While the prose form adopted by the latter gives flesh (and much blood) to the description of rights observances and violations, Humana makes it possible to compare, if still in fairly general terms, the observance of forty specific rights across states and over time. His breakdown and classification of rights also makes his overall country scores transparent, enabling him to avoid the erratic value judgments often made in Freedom House country surveys.

Nevertheless, the guide does have a significant shortcoming: it purports to be a guide to human rights as defined and enumerated by the three major United Nations treaties on the subject, but in fact it only partially fulfills its objective. Although Humana emphasizes more than once that his questions are taken from rights enumerated in the UN's Universal Declaration on Human Rights of 1948 (the first definitional document negotiated by the international community) and its two follow-up covenants adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1966, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the book

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gives priority to the first two documents. Only three of the forty questions are based on the ICESCR (the right to unionize, the prohibition of child labor, and the right to "take part in cultural life" and "enjoy the benefits of scientific progress"). This choice has definitional and political implications. Because, broadly speaking, the industrialized, capitalist West supports civil and political rights (those that dominate this guide), while many Third World states support the rights embodied in the ICESCR (the right to an adequate standard of living including food, clothing and housing; the right to education; the right to medical services), the relative lack of attention to the latter document leaves Humana open to the charge of Western bias in defining which of the rights agreed upon by the international community are the most significant. Humana's response to this charge is two-fold: a) he included only those rights capable of some sort of measurement, and b) he asserts that most rights in the ICESCR are phrased as aspirations or "vague guarantees". But this reasoning is faulty: surely access to education, medical resources and shelter are as measurable as the freedom to travel, practice one's religion or "use contraceptive pills and devices". It also appears inappropriate to label rights articulated in the ICESCR as "aspirations" given the fact that political maneuvering always plays a role in the wording of final documents and when, according to Humana himself (p.7), "The guide simply sets [states'] performance against their obligations." If the guide purports to be an assessment of states' performance according to norms set by the international community, then it should evaluate performance against all agreed-upon obligations. If it chooses not to do so, then it should call itself a guide to political and civil, not "human", rights.

Humana decided to update his previous editions (the second was published in 1986) both despite and because of the rapid changes occurring in the post-Cold War world; one in which democracy appears to be spreading while simultaneously the break-up of existing states and emergence of new ones makes evaluating human rights extremely difficult and the final assessment of any given country quite tenuous. He is right that we cannot wait until the dust settles to continue our evaluations of the treatment of peoples all over the world, and is to be lauded for his ongoing work in compiling data that is useful in assessing important aspects of the human condition. Humana will be kept busy with the rapid changes and massive rights violations in the Balkans and some republics of the former Soviet Union, which are described in this edition only in their infancy. As he is well aware, however, any assessment of human rights is contentious and partial. We can only hope that, if his objective remains the comprehensive assessment of internationally-mandated and agreed-upon human rights, the next edition will be less partial, although it would surely remain contentious.


Copyright 1993