Léo Matarasso
in Droits de l'homme et droits des peuples, textes présentés au séminaire international d'études, 27-29 juin 1980, République de Saint-Marin
Ladies,
Gentlemen,
Dear Colleagues,
My dear friends,
My first words will be to thank very warmly the Republic of San Marino for its initiative to organize, in collaboration with the International Foundation Lelio Basso and the International League for the Rights and Liberation of Peoples, this important symposium.
How can we fail to pay tribute to this valiant little people who, through their fierce energy, have been able to maintain their independence and freedom throughout the centuries, despite the small size of their territory? I see a happy symbol in the fact that it is here that a meeting on both human rights and the rights of peoples is being held.
In a world where these rights are almost universally violated or seriously threatened, no place could be better chosen.
My second tribute is, unfortunately, a posthumous one. It is not possible to begin our work without saluting the memory of our dear Lelio Basso, founder of the International League for the Rights and Liberation of Peoples, of the Foundation that bears his name and of the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal. He was the initiator of this Universal Declaration of the Rights of Peoples which is like the Charter of our League. There are many of us here who owe him a lot.
Why this conference?
It is striking that political language increasingly feels the need to use a legal vocabulary. We are not fighting for freedom, but for the defence of human rights. We are not fighting for the independence of nations, but for the right of peoples to self-determination.
But, paradoxically enough, these rights, which should go hand in hand, are often opposed to each other.
Among French intellectuals, for example, many came to believe that the notion of peoples’ rights was merely an abstraction designed to justify the replacement of one oppression by another, and that only human rights mattered.
Others, on the other hand, believe that human rights are invoked only as an ideological alibi to justify actions that violate the rights of peoples.
Those who, like us, believe that these are two categories of rights that cannot be opposed to each other, find the justification for this complementarity in history.
In fact, contrary to what is sometimes alleged, the two concepts “Human Rights” and “Peoples’ Rights” have the same origin and are often found in the same texts.
The United States Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776, states:
“When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political ties which have attached it to another, and to take, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal place to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle it, the respect due to the opinion of mankind obliges it to declare the causes which determine it to the separation.
We hold the following truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by the Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these rights are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness…”.
The same text proclaims, within a few lines of each other, the right of a people to dissolve the political ties that have attached it to another and the inalienable rights of man.
But it was mainly during the French Revolution that the notions of “Human Rights” were defined, at the same time as the theory of the “Right of Peoples to self-determination” was developed, which was later referred to as the principle of nationalities.
Although the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen makes no mention of the concept of the people, the various constitutions of the revolutionary period make express reference to it.
The Constitution of September 3, 1791 (Title VI): “The French Nation renounces undertaking any war with a view to making conquests and will never use its forces against the liberty of any people.
The plan of the Girondine Constitution of February 1793: “They (the generals of the Republic) will not be able, under any pretext and in no case, to protect, of the authority with which they are clothed, the maintenance of the customs contrary to freedom, equality and the sovereignty of the people…”.
The Jacobin Constitution of June 24, 1793: “Article 118: The French people are the natural friends and allies of free peoples…”.
Thus, the same texts that proclaim the Rights of Man to freedom and equality, proclaim the Rights of Peoples to freedom.
Then came the time of the Napoleonic wars, which were conducted in a very ambiguous ideological manner, to say the least. Sometimes Napoleon’s armies appeared to be the bearers of the ideals of the Revolution, sometimes they were clearly aimed at the oppression of peoples (Spain, Russia, etc.).
But all becomes clear after the fall of Napoleon and the triumph of the Holy Alliance. The ideas of the French Revolution are denounced as pernicious, and must be banished throughout Europe. These “pernicious” ideas are, on the one hand, the rights of man and, on the other, the principle of nationalities.
The people have no rights to claim from monarchs. Citizens have no rights other than those that the monarch wants to recognize. The supporters of the ideas of the French Revolution, often qualified, even when they are moderate, as Jacobins, are persecuted everywhere but lead the fight for both human rights and the rights of the people. The link between human rights and the principle of nationalities is very close.
1830. During this year, the peoples begin to awaken. It is the year of the Independence of Greece, of Belgium.
But it was soon 1848, which was called “the springtime of the peoples”. The agitation for democracy, human rights, independence and national unity spread throughout Europe.
The revolutions of 1848 did not really triumph. But the ideas of equality and human rights began to be accepted throughout Europe and were written into several constitutions.
In Latin America, many countries broke away from the Spanish or Portuguese colonizer and proclaimed their independence.
The cause of Poland moves all free minds, and soon that of Ireland. Several peoples are emerging from Ottoman domination (Bulgaria, Rumania, Serbia). But the Austro-Hungarian Empire remains, despite certain concessions, a mosaic of peoples. As for the empire of the tsars, it is called “the prison of the peoples”.
At the same time as the ideas of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man were spreading throughout the world, the philosophy on which they were based was increasingly criticized, particularly by the progress of Marxist ideas. It is not the place here to analyse this doctrine. Let us just say that it invited the workers to fight for the material means to exercise the formally proclaimed freedoms, freedoms that can only be fully exercised after the triumph of socialism.
The Communist Manifesto of 1848, launched by Marx and Engels, included, at the same time as a call to the workers to emancipate themselves, a call to the emancipation of peoples and the now famous sentence: “A people that oppresses another cannot be a free people”.
These ideas will animate the socialist fights of the 19th century.
The 1914-1918 war brought the right of nationalities back to the forefront of the news. Two men were to proclaim, with great solemnity, the right of peoples to self-determination, each of them undoubtedly giving a different meaning to the formula: Wilson and Lenin.
The right of peoples to self-determination will be expressly included in the fourteen points of Wilson and in the Treaty of Versailles, as it will be in the Declaration of the Rights of the Working People proclaimed in Moscow in January 1918.
Austria-Hungary is dismembered. Poland regains its independence. New states are created: Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia. Soon, Ireland became independent, albeit with the loss of Ulster.
The peace will be short-lived. It was already the war of 1939.
Fascist and Nazi ideologies are openly opposed to both the ideology of human rights and the principle of the right of peoples to self-determination.
No sooner had Paris been occupied than Alfred Rosenberg, the main theoretician of National Socialism, gave a conference in the French Chamber of Deputies, before an audience of high Nazi dignitaries, to proclaim that it was the end of all the ideas of 1789.
In 1943, all of Europe, excluding Switzerland and Sweden, was dominated by fascism or by governments allied or friendly to the fascists.
The Allied victory was followed by the United Nations Charter, signed in San Francisco in June 1945. Once again, but this time in the most explicit way, the rights of peoples and human rights are expressed simultaneously in the same document.
Article 55 of the Charter proclaims “the equal rights and self-determination of peoples” and “universal respect for, and observance of, human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion”.
On December 10, 1948, the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed a Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was supplemented by two international covenants voted unanimously by the General Assembly in 1966: an international covenant on economic, social and cultural rights and an international covenant on civil and political rights.
It is striking that these two covenants, which concern human rights, each contain an article written in the same terms, the first paragraph of which reads as follows
“All peoples have the right to self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.
Once again, the proclamation of human rights goes hand in hand with the proclamation of the rights of peoples.
Conversely, when, on the initiative of Lelio Basso, some of us, on July 4, 1976, in Algiers, proclaimed a Universal Declaration of the Rights of Peoples, we included an article 7 reiterating the effective respect of human rights as one of the fundamental rights of all peoples:
“Every people is entitled to a democratic system of government which represents all its citizens without distinction as to race, sex, creed or colour, and which is capable of ensuring effective respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms for all.
If it is true that the 19th century saw the appearance and development, at least in the texts, of the principles of 1789 and, at the same time, the principle of the right of peoples to self-determination, this is only true for the peoples of Europe or of European origin.
Despite the universal nature of the proclamation of these principles, European states, or states of European origin such as the United States, have been perfectly happy with slavery, colonialism and even genocide, not to mention all kinds of racial discrimination. It should also be added that, even in European countries, it was only very recently that texts affirming the equality of men and women appeared.
Slavery was only abolished in the second half of the 19th century. It took the United States a bloody war to achieve this.
The 19th century, the century of human rights and the principle of nationalities, was the golden age of colonisation. Millions of men were enslaved by powers that had written the beautiful principles of 1789 into their constitutions.
Even after the adoption of the terms, however categorical, of the United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, bloody colonial or neo-colonial wars were waged. It was the France of human rights that waged a cruel war against the Algerian people for four years, resulting in nearly one million victims.
It was in the name of the free world that the United States dropped more bombs on Vietnam than were dropped worldwide during World War II.
How can we forget, on the other hand, that it is in the name of a socialism that prides itself on having finally provided workers with the means to enjoy human rights, which until then had been reserved for the possessing minority, that coups de force have been carried out against the people in Budapest and Prague yesterday, and in Kabul today?
Our colloquium will have to study all the problems posed today by the demands of all peoples to see human rights and the rights of peoples respected everywhere.
Some may find these debates academic and derisory.
On the eve of 1939, international conferences of legal scholars had developed and studied the concept of genocide.
The war interrupted this work, and we know what followed.
The men and women gathered here are well aware of the limits of their debates.
We all know that behind the texts and legal formulas, there is a reality of flesh and blood.
We all know that a large part of humanity lives in misery and hunger. We all know that we live on a planet threatened by war, the great devastator of peoples.
This is why, in keeping with the thinking of Lelio Basso, we believe that it is not enough to observe and denounce a state of affairs, but that we must try to understand the causes and act to eliminate them.
Yes, we must try to understand the deep-seated reasons, often sordid interests, that explain the actions of states.
Yes, we must act relentlessly and fight at all times to free men and peoples from all forms of alienation.
At the risk of sounding like a utopian, at the risk of failure or disappointment, I believe that it is worth fighting for a world of free and equal peoples, composed of free and equal men and women.
Matarasso, Léo