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Schabas, William A. --- "Freedom from Fear and the Human Right to Peace" [2012] ELECD 786; in Keane, David; McDermott, Yvonne (eds), "The Challenge of Human Rights" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2012)

Book Title: The Challenge of Human Rights

Editor(s): Keane, David; McDermott, Yvonne

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9780857939005

Section: Chapter 2

Section Title: Freedom from Fear and the Human Right to Peace

Author(s): Schabas, William A.

Number of pages: 16

Extract:

2. Freedom from fear and the human
right to peace
William A. Schabas

The human right to peace may be one of the best examples of a forgotten
right. It was central to the vision of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who launched
the modern process of recognition and codification of human rights with
his `Four Freedoms' speech. It was actually his `State of the Union Address'
to the United States Congress in 1941. The first three rights, freedom of
speech and expression, freedom of worship, and freedom from want, were
well-anchored in domestic legal provisions, many of them constitutional.
Freedom from fear, on the other hand, could not be ensured by national
law alone. It required international recognition and protection. Of course,
the list of four freedoms was really a form of political shorthand. Roosevelt
knew that many other rights were needed to complete the catalogue.
When the codifiers at the Commission of Human Rights put flesh on
the skeleton that Roosevelt had produced, they required 30 distinct pro-
visions, adding to the list rights to privacy, the protection of the family,
association, scientific progress, torture, fair trial and many more. The
`right to peace', labelled `freedom from fear' according to Roosevelt's
nomenclature, is included in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
(the preamble, for example, explicitly cites the four freedoms). But it
does not have the same prominence given in the speech to the first three
freedoms. Roosevelt's attention to `freedom from fear' cannot be chal-
lenged, ...