2019 年 51 巻 p. 119
The United Nations (UN) Declaration on the Right to Peace was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2016. The right to peace is an individual human right; however, it also implies the involvement of individuals in upholding the rights in the peace and security field. Human rights were originally established as constraints on states, and they cannot be violated by any state power, including members of the UN Security Council.
This paper advocates the effectiveness of a human rights approach in the international peace and security field. The human rights approach differs from that of the national interest, which entails decisions based on general, subjective, and political priorities, whereas the former is rooted in individual, objective, and nonpolitical concerns.
The author has attended UN and non-governmental organization (NGO) meetings involving discussions on the right to peace, for which international NGOs initially launched a campaign for global codification and brought the outcome to the UN Human Rights Council. The author analyzes the discourse of government representatives and NGOs during their deliberations on the UN Human Rights Council from the perspective of the conflict between national security and human rights. In opposing the establishment of the right to peace, most Western countries expressed concerns about possible constraints on states’ exlusive rights to the use of force and self-defense. However, representatives of other countries implied the possibility of developing effective means of establishing the right to peace.