A day or two before the Editor asked if I would review this Dictionary, viewers of British television were informed of two new cases which showed how unexpected controversies can suddenly arise in the laws of human rights. In one, it was revealed that a traveller passing through an international airport does not have the same legal safeguards against detention without charge as he would have had if he had been walking down the road outside it. In the other, several multiple murderers contended, to the consternation of some observers, that to be sentenced to life imprisonment was a breach of their human rights. These random examples confirm that there should be a market for a book of this kind.
The Dictionary fulfils its title in being devoted to 450 entries none of which is longer than about 350 words, and some only a tenth as long. Nearly all of these deal either with important international agreements on human rights, past and present, or with the specific rights protected by them, or wrongs prohibited by them. There are also articles describing relevant international organizations, general ethical principles, or technical terms in human rights law.
Apart from the main text, the book includes a list of abbreviations, and a substantial Appendix which lists 250 human rights agreements and declarations (most of them not the subject of entries in the text) giving their full titles, dates, descriptions of their scope in about 100 words each, and the URLs of web sites where their full texts can be found. They range from the English Bill of Rights of 1689 to the American Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (still in draft in 2012) and include many documents no longer in force but still relevant because of their historical importance (such as the Covenant of the League of Nations of 1919).
There is neither an index nor a bibliography. These omissions may be regretted. Since the main entries are perforce very concise, they often leave the reader wanting to know more, and while the Appendix would often help, it points the way to texts but not to explanatory commentaries. An index, or even a classified list of entries, would have assisted the reader who, as it stands, seems to be expected to know what heading to look up, but might not. For example, several of the agreements included refer to racism, but there is no main entry under that heading, so the reader would have to study the whole book to find them.
While I am no expert on international law, it did seem to me that there were one or two questionable statements in the text. For instance, the definition “Nation: one of the words used to describe a country or state” begs several vital questions of politics which are now being closely analysed here in Scotland, a country generally admitted to be a nation, whereas the possibility of its becoming a state again is a matter of acute controversy in the run-up to a referendum on independence.
The Dictionary certainly succeeds in showing a broad panorama of the evolution of human rights legislation through the ages, from the Code of Hammurabi in 1700 BCE, to recent attempts to grapple with the implications of current developments in bioethics. Conversely, it may also give the impression that in our own day, international organizations have propounded a stream of idealistic declarations which, if sincerely carried out everywhere, would make the world a Utopia, but which in fact are frequently honoured more in the breach than the observance. This book will be useful to students and general readers who have questions about human rights, but in any substantial reference collection, it would need to be supplemented by other works which would supply a more detailed picture of this important field of study.
