The Twelve and the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights,

Between 1990 and 1993, the preparation and meeting of the World Conference on Human Rights held in June 1993 in Vienna was all but the triumph of a global human rights regime for the new era. Indeed, in Spring 1993 the Twelve contemplated the possibility that the conference be postponed or end without a consensus declaration. In July, however, they credited themselves for its successful conclusion. The Twelve claimed credit for the insertion in the Vienna Declaration of key statements and purposes: that the universal nature of human rights and fundamental freedoms was “beyond question” and the protection of human rights was a legitimate concern of the international community; that a human rights-democracy-development nexus ought to be acknowledged, the human person being the central subject of both human rights and development, and that the lack of development could not be invoked to justify the abridgement of internationally recognized human rights; the preference for positive rather than negative (i.e. conditionality) action to promote human rights globally. Based on the Coreu and French Foreign Ministry files, the chapter recollects the uneasy internal debate involving the member states and the Commission in agreeing a common action in the preparation of the conference. It explains why the Twelve unenthusiastically engaged in a second LDC-sponsored conference on human rights and how they started taking an active role in its preparation only after the failure of the second and third meetings of the Preparatory Committee: a majority among the Twelve became convinced that a failure of the conference would put at risk the achievements of the last decades and that a European initiative was due and needed, taking some distance from the rest of the Western Group at the UN, but also countering attempts to alter and weaken the existing international human rights statements and protection instruments. Increasingly, the initial minimalist approach was abandoned in favour of a more affirmative action, aimed at showing the strength, cohesion and influence of the EC on the international stage, at vindicating a European peculiar role in human rights, at isolating “extremists” in the non-Western regional groups and to prevent a Tehran-like result. The risk of a North-South opposition – on political and civil against economic, social and cultural rights, on the non-interference principle, on issues such as apartheid and the Palestinians’ situation - that could play in the hand of the “radicals” in the regional groups was defused also through the enhanced affirmation, initiated by the Commission and stated in Council declarations, of a doctrine on the human rights-democracy-development nexus, that bound the LDC governments while accepting their claim about the right to development. The Europeans considered the World Conference their own political success, also a consequence of the disappearance of the bipolar system in which the NAM group usually framed their action on human rights in UN bodies. The chapter also argues that the Conference was an earlier arena of a confrontation between the West and “Asia” as a challenger to Western hegemony and of their perceiving each other as the protagonists of a political-cultural confrontation for the next century, against the dire scenario in which the end of the Cold War soured amidst anti-Muslim ethnic cleansing in former Yugoslavia, massive killings in Cambodia and persecution against Palestinians in Kuwait and Kurds in Iraq after Desert Storm.