United Nations Issues a Conduct Code for Law-Enforcement Officials

Date September 12, 1979

With the adoption of its Code of Conduct for Law Enforcement Officials, the United Nations established international standards for police treatment of accused persons and prisoners.

Also known as Code of Conduct for Law Enforcement Officials

Locale New York, New York

Key Figures

• Jimmy Carter (b. 1924), president of the United States, 1977-1981
• Kurt Waldheim (1918-2007), secretary-general of the United Nations, 1972-1981
• Andrew Young (b. 1932), U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, 1977-1979

Summary of Event

The United Nations proposed in its charter to take all necessary measures to safeguard human rights and fundamental freedoms. In particular, people in police or military custody must not be subjected to torture or degrading treatment or punishment. People accused of crimes must receive hearings by competent, independent, and impartial judiciaries. The U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, although subject to intense debate prior to its adoption, especially with objections from the Soviet Union, was a step toward instituting common standards among nations concerning respect for the dignity and worth of every human being.

The significant history of a conscientious international movement for human rights goes back only to the last decades of the eighteenth century. However, history reveals that the idea of respect for the dignity of the human being is rooted in major world religions, including the Judeo-Christian moral tradition. Although many examples of this might be cited, one well-known manifestation of this during the Middle Ages was the Magna Carta, accepted by King John at Runnymede in 1215. The Magna Carta rejected the custom of arbitrary determination of guilt by the executive authority of the state. King John’s barons compelled him to concede to them trial by their peers for all breaches of the king’s peace. Although the Magna Carta was not a comprehensive bill of human rights, it was a first step. The American Declaration of Independence (1776) asserted belief in individual liberty as an inalienable right, and the American Bill of Rights enthroned the principle that the individual has certain natural political rights that government cannot abridge. The French took the American example and devised, in the course of their great social and civil revolution, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789).

The concept of individual liberty as a shield against variable and despotic use of public power was adopted throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in written bills of rights of most European countries and throughout the Americas, Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. These bills of rights or guarantees by government to respect individual liberties constituted sets of civil rights possessed, at least in theory, by each citizen in connection with law-enforcement officials within their communities. These bills of rights generally were meant to deter government from suppressing dissent and became the foundation for procedural and substantive rights for persons accused of crimes.

The great difficulty with civil rights was the implementation of an international standard within particular states. Civil rights were construed as intrastate business and beyond the reach of international law. Governments were opposed to international censure and unilateral action by one nation, or a coalition of nations, to remedy assumed violations of human or civil rights within a state. As was often the case in the progression of human rights, private individuals were more willing than were governments to contest national boundaries to work for acceptable minimum standards of conduct by governments. A number of philanthropists, social reformers, and economists aroused the interest of diplomats in convening a conference on international social legislation, and the Congress of Berlin was convened in 1890. The congress, while timid in its proclamations, supported the idea that government should respect the social and civil rights of its citizens. Several other conferences were held, again at the insistence of private individuals, including the first international conference concerned with the protection of people in reference to slavery and forced labor.

After World War I, the League of Nations sought to institute a human rights standard for nations in connection with peacekeeping, genocide, slavery, forced labor, and cruel treatment of accused persons. These efforts were transferred to the United Nations in the 1940’s. The U.N. Charter (1945) supported the principle of respect for the dignity and worth of the human person and pledged the world’s states the assistance of the United Nations in promoting respect for human rights and in the realization of human rights and basic freedoms. The charter is silent on the “protection” of human rights, because members rejected proposed clauses on that subject. Furthermore, the charter contains a “domestic justification” clause, which explains that nothing in the charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters that are essentially domestic in character.

The United Nations proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Along with the 1966 International Bill of Rights, it filled a gap in the area of protecting human rights and thus sidestepped the domestic justification clause of the charter. The stage was set for a number of declarations on various issues related to state violations of human rights: colonialism, torture, racism, and the rights of members of ethnic, religious, and linguistic minority groups to practice their own cultures and religions and to use their own languages.

One of the major achievements of the United Nations was the extension of the principles of human rights into intrastate affairs, especially the use of police powers on the local or community level. This was a complex issue that many U.N. member states concealed from international attention. The Soviet Union was wary of such attention, and the United States had previously objected to international prying, as it was fearful of other nations’ condemnation of racial segregation and the lynching of blacks in the American South. After the U.S. government opposed and ultimately abolished the legal status of segregation and racial discrimination, the United States was prepared to adopt and defend international standards for protection of citizens treated brutally by their governments.

This new attitude toward human rights was evident with the election of Jimmy Carter to the presidency of the United States. President Carter declared that protection of human rights was a major pillar of his foreign policy. As a white southerner, Carter had witnessed discrimination and cruel treatment of African Americans. It was within this context that he appointed, to the chagrin of the foreign policy community, Andrew Young as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Young’s knowledge of foreign affairs was limited, but he brought with him his personal experience in the civil rights struggle. As ambassador, he was most effective in stirring the consciences of world powers, although he was timid in criticizing repressive regimes in Third World countries.

On September 12, 1979, the United Nations adopted the draft Code of Conduct for Law Enforcement Officials. The draft code was prepared by the Committee on Crime Prevention and Control; it was contained in a draft resolution recommended by the U.N. Economic and Social Council. Kurt Waldheim, secretary-general of the United Nations, noted in his report to the U.N. General Assembly that the purposes proclaimed in the charter of the United Nations included the achievement of international cooperation in promoting and encouraging respect for human rights. The secretary-general was aware of the nature of the exercise of law enforcement and that this exercise has effects on the quality of life of individuals as well as of society as a whole. Waldheim noted the potential for law-enforcement abuse in the exercise of duties to safeguard the public.

In his report, Waldheim recognized the necessity for a code of conduct for law-enforcement officials, including the agencies of the criminal justice system. Law-enforcement officials must be representative of, responsive to, and accountable to the community as a whole. From the arresting officer to the presiding judge, they must obey ethical standards derived from a humane system of laws. The secretary-general argued that law-enforcement officials need to assert self-discipline by conforming to the principles of conduct established in the draft resolution. That is, the actions of law-enforcement officials should be examined by a review board, a ministry, an ombudsman, or a citizens’ committee.

The adoption of the Code of Conduct for Law Enforcement Officials marked a high plateau for the protection of human rights. The code defied the principle of intrastate absolute competence to control national subjects free from international inquiry. The five articles of the resolution were strong statements. Article 3 allowed use of force by law-enforcement officials only when strictly necessary and to the extent required for the performance of their duty. Article 5 reaffirmed the principles of human and civil rights in reference to central-government violations and extended them to law-enforcement officials on all levels of authority within the state. Law-enforcement officials would not be allowed to justify cruel and inhuman treatment of accused persons by claiming that they were following “superior orders” or responding to a threat to the national security or some other unclear public emergency.

Significance

The 1979 Code of Conduct for Law Enforcement Officials provided important moral suasion to Western countries and numerous ethnically mixed countries such as South Africa, the Soviet Union, and some Eastern Bloc countries. The code advanced a high standard. The ideal picture of law-enforcement officials keeping high ethical standards and abandoning torture and other cruel treatment of accused persons and prisoners contrasts with real cases of police brutality in major American cities and the frequent misuse of firearms by the police and military in South Africa and Northern Ireland.

In the United States, as in virtually all countries, the standards of behavior, as well as the actual behavior, of law-enforcement officials differ from locality to locality. The quality of justice in Western countries is generally connected with the economic status of the accused persons. The U.N. Code of Conduct for Law Enforcement Officials is a standard for nations to strive toward, regardless of how distant it might appear. The code is consistent with the many conventions that have addressed the numerous issues of human rights violations by government.

It is certain that some nations, after abolishing their own injustices against minorities and other persons, are keen to insist on improving the human rights records of countries that mistreat accused persons and prisoners. The care that American federal courts have given to the health and legal rights of prisoners, for example, is a great departure from the days of chain gangs and preventive detention. Many Third World countries are still grappling with the establishment of humane and politically neutral systems of criminal justice. The U.N. code fails to acknowledge serious cultural differences in approaches to breaches of the peace and punishment of convicted persons.

Even though not fully implemented, the 1979 code is praiseworthy for its recognition of the need to implement worldwide, as an extension of international conventions for human rights, a minimum standard of conduct for law-enforcement officials. President Carter, in proclaiming human rights as a legitimate facet of U.S. foreign policy, helped stir Western and non-Western nations, even the Soviet Union, to observe the letter of the code or suffer international condemnation. The 1979 code is another rejection of the letter of the domestic exclusion clause.

Bibliography

Andenaes, Johannes. Punishment and Deterrence. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1974. Examines the treatment of prisoners in Norway, which has a penal system that is quite humane even when compared to those of other European nations.

Ayouty, Yassin El-, Kevin J. Ford, and Mark Davies, eds. Government Ethics and Law Enforcement: Toward Global Guidelines. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2000. Collection of essays addresses the principles that governments need to apply in establishing law-enforcement policies. Includes informative appendixes and index.

Conquest, Robert. Inside Stalin’s Secret Police: NKVD Politics, 1936-1939. New York: Macmillan, 1985. Discusses Stalin’s purges, during which innocent persons were compelled to confess to crimes to avoid torture.

Dando, Shigemitsu. Japanese Criminal Procedure. Hackensack, N.J.: F. B. Rothman, 1965. Shows that in theory Japanese criminal procedures are based on American rules of evidence, but notes that Japanese paternalism makes for a less cumbersome criminal justice system.

Friedman, Lawrence M. A History of American Law. 3d ed. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005. Comprehensive and impressive coverage of the history of American law. Objective and tough study examines the faults and shortcomings of the legal system, including vigilante law as an important facet of American legal heritage.

Nagel, Stuart S. The Legal Process from a Behavioral Perspective. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984. Argues that ideals are often at loggerheads with practice, as law-enforcement officials, from patrol officers to appellate judges, are influenced by their respective class norms. Asserts that the criminal justice system is too often dependent on factors having little to do with law.

United Nations. Code of Conduct for Law Enforcement Officials. New York: Author, 1988. Presents the full text of the code of conduct.