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A Most Uncertain Crusade traces and analyzes the emergence of human rights as both an international concern and as a controversial domestic issue for US policy makers during and after World War II. Rowland Brucken focuses on officials in the State Department, at the United Nations, and within certain domestic non-governmental organizations, and explains why, after issuing wartime declarations that called for the definition and enforcement of international human rights standards, the US government refused to ratify the first UN treaties that fulfilled those twin purposes. The Truman and Eisenhower administrations worked to weaken the scope and enforcement mechanisms of early human rights agreements, and gradually withdrew support for Senate ratification. A small but influential group of isolationist–oriented senators, led by John Bricker (R-OH), warned that the treaties would bring about socialism, destroy white supremacy, and eviscerate the Bill of Rights. At the UN, a growing bloc of developing nations demanded the inclusion of economic guarantees, support for decolonization, and strong enforcement measures, all of which Washington opposed. 

Prior to World War II, international law considered the protection of individual rights to fall largely under the jurisdiction of national governments. Alarmed by fascist tyranny and guided by a Wilsonian vision of global cooperation in pursuit of human rights, President Roosevelt issued the Four Freedoms and the Atlantic Charter. Behind the scenes, the State Department planners carefully considered how an international organization could best protect those guarantees. Their work paid off at the 1945 San Francisco Conference, which vested the UN with an unprecedented opportunity to define and protect the human rights of individuals. 

After two years of negotiations, the UN General Assembly unanimously approved its first human rights treaty, the Genocide Convention. The UN Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR), led by Eleanor Roosevelt, drafted the nonbinding Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Subsequent efforts to craft an enforceable covenant of individual rights, though, bogged down quickly. A deadlock occurred as western nations, communist states, and developing countries disagreed on the inclusion of economic and social guarantees, the right of self-determination, and plans for implementation. 

Meanwhile, a coalition of groups within the United States doubted the wisdom of American accession to any human rights treaties. Led by the American Bar Association and Senator Bricker, opponents proclaimed that ratification would lead to a U.N. led tyrannical world socialistic government. The backlash caused President Eisenhower to withdraw from the covenant drafting process. Brucken shows how the American human rights policy had come full circle: Eisenhower, like Roosevelt, issued statements that merely celebrated western values of freedom and democracy, criticized human rights records of other countries while at the same time postponed efforts to have the UN codify and enforce a list of binding rights due in part to America's own human rights violations.

This volume aims not to retrace the fairly familiar terrain of establishing the legal character of human rights, or to argue the proposition, now well accepted, that human rights are part and parcel of the discipline of international law, but to consider the influence of human rights and humanitarian law on general international law. Although human rights and humanitarian norms are central to the book, then, it is not a book about human rights and humanitarian law. Rather, it deals with the radiation, or the reforming effect, that human rights and humanitarian law has had, and is having, on other fields of public international law. Because of the peculiarities of human rights law, this influence cannot be taken for granted. It is sometimes said that the elaboration of human rights norms and institutions has produced no less than a revolution in the system of international law. Is this true and if so, in what parts of international law? By examining most of the general areas of public international law, the author attempts to demonstrate that the influence of human rights and humanitarian norms has not remained confined to one sector of international law, and that its influence has spread to many other parts, though to varying degrees

The human rights regime adopts a legalist approach to limit the harm the powerful may inflict on the vulnerable The attacks of September 11, 2001 and the ensuing ‘war against terrorism’ test the limits of the legalist approach. Human rights constrain state responses to terrorism more directly than they govern the conduct of terrorists. As a result, the international human rights regime is disadvantaged rhetorically and politically. While substantive human rights standards have not changed since September 11, six possible norm developments may occur: (1) alterations in norms governing the use of force may increase the perceived legitimacy of pre‐emptive defensive action, for example with regard to targeted assassinations; (2) reconceptualization of counter‐terrorism as a new species of international armed conflict may displace human rights law and international criminal law, and substitute new rules that are less detailed than those that apply to conventional armed conflicts; (3) derogation principles may be refined, especially in relation to the temporal element and the non‐derogability of the prohibition on arbitrary detention and of fair trial rights; (4) an increase in the commission of extraterritorial human rights violations may spur the clarification of the scope of human rights treaties ratione loci; (5) the targeting of non‐citizens, Muslims and Arabs may clarify non‐discrimination norms; and (6) exclusion from refugee protection may expand. In institutional terms, the ‘war against terrorism’ has not yet had significant effects, but the following issues are notable: (1) integrating human rights into UN counter‐terrorism initiatives; (2) the aggressive campaign by the United States Government against the International Criminal Court; (3) the tendency toward American exceptionalism; (4) leadership by Europe to preserve human rights principles in counter‐terrorism; (5) increased polarization of UN human rights bodies around the Israeli–Palestinian crisis; (6) silencing of criticism of gross violators in exchange for counter‐terrorist cooperation; and (7) marginalization of human rights treaty bodies as effective monitors of counter‐terrorist policies.