Volume 4 No 1 - Journal for the Study of Antisemitism

48 JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM [ VOL. 4:27
Social and Cultural Rights, both of 1966, intended as one document but
inability to agree brought forth two; and, in the same year, the International
Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination,
whose Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD),
relatively unpoliticized, has done good work in monitoring compliance and
prompting improvements and the enactment of implementing national legislation.
These instruments long set the global standard for human rights and
automatically included Jews without specifically mentioning them. Jewish
suffering was sometimes the occasion for documents to be initiated, a notable
example being the Genocide Convention, particularly in that once it was
ratified by twenty nations on October 16, 1950, it became the first human
rights treaty to be adopted by the UN, and also because there had been
strenuous opposition to defining genocide as a crime punishable under
international law on the argument that to do so was to deflect international
law into an area where it had, supposedly, no business. As emerges from
the travaux préparatoires, Jewish concerns were often in the minds of the
documents’ framers or brought to their attention by Jewish organizations.
Such circumstances led to human rights guarantees being inserted in the
peace settlements with Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, and Italy in 1947 and
Austria in 1955. Implicitly, all these documents outlaw antisemitism, but
steadfast attempts to include specific reference to antisemitism long failed.
According to UNESCO’s eloquent 1978 Declaration on Race and Racial
Prejudice, “mass media and all organized groups within national communities”
ought to refrain from offering “a stereotyped, partial, unilateral or tendentious
picture of individuals and of various human groups,” and that
“states ought to prohibit and eradicate racism [and] racist propaganda” and
“combat racial prejudice,” but its authors could not be induced to specify
antisemitism. 33
Except in hortatory language, UN efforts to address antisemitism as
racial and religious discrimination in one comprehensive document were
thwarted by thoroughgoing Soviet indifference to the religious issue and
Arab insistence on dispensing with the issue of antisemitism entirely.
Attempts to introduce the term in the two separate conventions, when legal
logic and outbreaks of “swastika epidemics” revived memories of the racist
horrors of World War II appeared to make it imperative, also failed. A first
step was taken, though non-binding in law, in 1963 with the UN Declaration
on Racial Discrimination, paving the way for the 1965 Convention on
the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, which is binding.
Although the term was very much in the mind of their authors, neither doc-
33. Natan Lerner, “Group Libel Revisited,” Israel Yearbook on Human Rights,”
17 (1987): 195.