Source: Amnesty International –
This month marks 60 years since the UN General Assembly adopted the International Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), one of the first foundational international human rights treaties.
The way the story is often told is that Western countries gifted human rights to the world and are the sole guardians of it. It may come as a surprise for some, then, that the international legal framework for prohibiting racial discrimination largely owes its existence to the efforts of states from the Global South.
In 1963, in the midst of the decolonisation wave, a group of nine newly independent African states presented a resolution to the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) calling for the drafting of an international treaty on the elimination of racial discrimination. As the representative from Senegal observed: “Racial discrimination was still the rule in African colonial territories and in South Africa, and was not unknown in other parts of the world … The time had come to bring all States into that struggle.”
The groundbreaking ICERD was unanimously adopted by the UNGA two years later. The convention rejected any doctrine of superiority based on racial differentiation as “scientifically false, morally condemnable and socially unjust”.