Human rights and international labour standrads

The present volume is an expansion of a lecture delivered before the New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University on October 9. 1958. Human freedom in a world of increasingly interdependent and increasingly industrialised societies characterised by an unprecedented rate of technological change depends primarily on the reconciliation of civil liberties with social discipline. The terms of this reconciliation and of the parallel reconciliation needed between the ever more imperative claims of world order and the growing assertion of their freedom and independence by a greatly increased and still rapidly increasing number of vigorous national communities with widely divergent interests, outlooks and aspirations represent the fundamental political challenge of our time. This volume is an attempt to discuss briefly the relevance for this purpose of the action taken recent years, particularly since the Second World War, to promote and protect human rights by the formulation and application of international labour standards.

The developments which have occurred are so new that there is relatively little understanding of the scale of the international obligations already assumed, the potential effectiveness of the procedures developed to verify the full discharge of these obligations, or the scope for further effective action and the measure of responsibility resting upon us all to ensure that we make our full contribution to such action. This responsibility rests on nations great and small at every stage of development and in all parts of the world. But a special responsibility, as model and example, rests upon the more seasoned democracies.