Newton Harris

On October 8, 1962, Hugh Shearer addressed the United Nations General Assembly as Jamaica’s Deputy Chief of Mission. Shearer, in the first speech by a Jamaican to the General Assembly since the recently independent nation’s admittance as a member state, began by lamenting “the problem of the arms race” and advocating for “the fundamental right to self-determination.” Rather than framing challenges in terms of a waning British empire and the rise of the Cold War, though, Shearer went on to place decolonisation into a different context: “it is apparent that one of the great unsolved problems of this age is the translation into actual practice of the democratic ideal of fundamental concern for individual rights and for the basic freedoms with which man has been endowed by the Creator...I propose, therefore, that the United Nations concern in this area be intensified through an international year for human rights.” #Jamaica #Caribbean

JAMAICA’S PIONEERING ROLE IN ADVANCING GLOBAL HUMAN RIGHTS October 8, 1962, Jamaica had been a United Nations’ member for barely three weeks when Hugh Shearer, Minister with responsibility for foreign affairs, rose in the General Assembly. Amid the Cuban missile crisis and the nuclear standoff, he proposed an International Year of Human Rights: to turn the 20th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of 1948 into a deadline for concrete progress. Within a year the UN had adopted it. 1968 became that year. Jamaica’s intervention reflected a deliberate strategy that made the island, for a brief but decisive stretch of the 1960s, the most effective broker of human-rights diplomacy at the United Nations. At a time when the Cold War superpowers treated the subject warily and many newly independent states were more preoccupied with sovereignty than individual rights, Jamaica insisted that the two were inseparable. Human rights, it argued, were not a Western luxury but a practical instrument for managing decolonisation, racial justice and development. Shearer supplied the political vision. A trade-unionist by vocation and outlook, he framed rights in universal terms while linking them to Jamaica’s own experience of slavery, colonialism and racial hierarchy. In subsequent speeches he pressed the campaign against apartheid, reminding the Assembly that Jamaica had been among the first to impose trade sanctions on South Africa. The proposal for the International Year was not mere ceremony; it was meant to force completion of unfinished legal instruments, create monitoring mechanisms and mobilise civil society. The operational heavy lifting fell to Sir Egerton Richardson, Jamaica’s permanent representative to the United Nations from 1962 to 1967. An Oxford-educated former colonial civil servant, Richardson secured the co-sponsorship of nearly two dozen countries for the key drafts, chaired the special committee established to organise the International Year, and steered preparatory work for the 1968 International Conference on Human Rights in Tehran. There he helped push through measures on human rights in armed conflict and the treatment of opponents of racist regimes; early steps toward what later became more formal international humanitarian law. Contemporaries credited his networks and persistence with keeping the project alive against bureaucratic inertia and great-power indifference. Jamaica’s approach was distinctive in several respects. In 1964 it became the first country to write explicit human-rights goals into its foreign-policy strategy. It treated the Universal Declaration not as a finished monument but as a political target. It linked civil and political rights to economic and social ones, arguing that poverty and discrimination were themselves rights violations. And it used the platform of a small state to shame larger ones into consistency: if the UN Charter and the Declaration meant anything, they applied to Jim Crow, apartheid and colonial remnants alike. The results were tangible. The International Year and the Tehran Conference helped sustain momentum for the two international covenants on human rights, adopted in 1966, and for the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. Jamaica sat on the Commission on Human Rights and kept the subject prominent in the Third Committee. Scholars of the period now describe the island as the main broker of the 1960s breakthrough that moved human rights from aspirational language toward binding obligations; work that laid foundations for the better-known activism of the 1970s. #Jamaica #Caribbean