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Panelists at the seminar included (from left) Jean-Marc  Coicaud, Philip Alston, Michael Doyle and Simon Munzu.

Governments have failed to strike a balance between fighting terrorism and protecting human rights, according to a leading US authority on international law.

Many Governments had exploited the opportunity to restrict and derogate from human rights in order to achieve objectives which had all too little to do with rights, Philip Alston, Professor of International Law at New York University Law School told a UN University seminar in New York.

"We seem to have forgotten the lessons of efforts in Latin America to establish ‘national security states’ premised on the argument that all measures, no matter how brutal or dirty were justified in order to defeat the enemies of the State," Alston said.  "Such policies had failed disastrously, and the risk is that we are moving down a similar path again in some countries."

The seminar, held at UN headquarters on International Human Rights Day (December 10), marked the New York launch of the UNU Press book The Globalization of Human Rights, co-edited by Jean-Marc Coicaud, Michael Doyle, and Amy Gardner and written under the auspices of the United Nations University’s Peace and Governance Programme.

Opening the event, Mr. Coicaud said that although the projection of Western power worldwide had left many victims throughout the world, the West had also been instrumental in developing the modern discourse and practice of human rights.

The international community, although it feels both the moral and legal need to enforce human rights, has not "expressed a decisive and consistent commitment that goes beyond lip service," he said.

Michael Doyle, who is Harold Brown Professor at Columbia University and another co-editor of the book, told the audience that under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the human rights discourse has evolved in three generations.  The first focused on civil and political rights such as free speech, the second on economic and social rights such as education and employment and the third generation on rights of language and representation for minority groups within a state.

He argued that the recognition that human rights are universal, interrelated, indivisible and interdependent has been a significant landmark of human rights education.

Mr. Munzu said that the development activities of the UN were helping to promote economic and social rights globally but much remained to be done. "In many failed or weak states and low-income countries the state is unable effectively to secure the economic, social and other rights of its citizens, raising the question of whether human rights are 'citizen' rights to be claimed from the country of citizenship or truly 'human' rights to be claimed from the global human community.

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