From Rights of Nations to the Right to Self-Determination

Abstact How did self-determination become a human right? According to existing accounts, self-determination was added onto what was originally an individual rights regime. In this article, I offer a different history of the human right to self-determination, exploring the role of Latin America in advocating for this right during the earliest debates over human rights in the United Nations. They did so in the form of the rights of nations to exist, to recognition, and to self-government free from interference or domination. A Declaration on the Rights and Duties of Nations was put forward as one half of a two-part “international bill of rights” recognizing the rights of individuals within states and their rights constituted as states. This initiative resulted in the successful Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the failed 1949 Declaration on the Rights and Duties of States. The rights of nations were then merged with the right of colonized peoples to self-determination—to become states—in the UN individual rights covenants. In telling this revised history, I show that early human rights advocates viewed protecting individual rights within states as equally important as and closely connected with regulating the international exercise of power and curtailing illegitimate interference.