opted in the two Covenants of the UN General Assembly in 1966, one on Civil and Political Rights and the other on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. These were slow to be ratified, but more quickly ratified was the more specialized Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination approved by the General Assembly in 1965 and effective three years later and the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide approved by the General Assembly in 1948 and in force since 1951 (Carey 9-10).
The many international agreements formulated since 1945 to institutionalize and guarantee human rights have often come from the United Nations and its constituent bodies, and some have resulted from the actions of regional groups. While these accords have been ratified by the requisite number of countries and have sometimes provided detailed machinery for implementation, they have often remained dead letters with no power:
The development of a new majority of nondemocratic states, the desire of governments to protect themselves from accusations of repression, the cynical employment of such issues for political advantage, and selectivity to the point of absurdity in application, have all vitiated these accords (Laqueur and Rubin 195).
The various treaties have managed to set forth detailed definitions of political and economic rights, and along with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, there have been special statements on genocide, the rights of women, and racial discrimination. It has been difficult to detect many material improvements resulting from these diplomatic moves, but these agreements have provided the basis for the renewed concern in the 1970s and 1980s over the promotion of human rights, both by some governments and by a multitude of private organizations. in the 1980s there were efforts to expand the definition of human rights so that it would cover more groups and areas of life,...