Science in the Service of Human Rights. By Richard Pierre Claude. Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. Pp. 263. $42.50, cloth.

There are a variety of ways to think about the intersections between science and human rights. Access to the products of scientific research might be a universal right; the same products might be threats to humanity. Scientists themselves possess human rights; they also promote them. With such broad concepts at hand, this variety of themes is inevitable and each could inspire a book in itself. Richard Pierre Claude took a comprehensive approach to the study of science and human rights, and the resulting volume is a passionate and unique testament to the challenges and opportunities facing both fields in an interdependent world. The spirit guiding the sometimes unwieldy undertaking is evident in one of Claude’s many well-chosen quotations. For example, from Andrei Sakhorov: “It is now both morally and technologically true that we can no longer ignore the way people are treated in their human rights from one country to another.”

The book is divided into three parts: International Standards, which discusses widely misunderstood international guidelines and the varying ways they bind actors; Issues, which treats health and medical ethics and then information technology as the most difficult areas at the junction of science and human rights; and Politics, which tells some of the myriad process stories of the range of players in the still-new movement for international human rights.

International Standards begins by looking historically at the links between science and human rights. Claude uses a post-World War II UNESCO survey of scientists to challenge the notion that science, being supposedly neutral and objective, can or should exist within a vacuum. Modern terrorist threats and the “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity” in 1992 underscore the idea that the accomplishments of science are not without an underside. This sets the stage for an examination of United Nations human rights standards related to science. A chapter is devoted to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Claude illuminates the surviving document and its attempt to protect both a universal right to the benefits of science and scientists’ rights to freedom by telling the “story of people making plans in a setting of evident hopelessness surrounded by the shadowy wastelands of Asia and Europe.”

International standards ends with two chapters devoted to Article 15 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ESC): the Declaration on the Use of Scientific and Technological Progress in the Interests of Peace and for the Benefit of Mankind. This 1976 document—based in part on Article 27 of the UDHR and adopted as a treaty by 144 countries (not the United States)—is a less customary, more binding source of international law. Using both the framer’s debates and modern-day violations, Claude attempts to explain the “core minimum” requirements of each abstract right in Article 15. For instance, Section 5 mandates international cooperation on scientific development of developing countries. Claude gives meaning to the mandate by analyzing the growing practice of bio-prospecting, or “bio-piracy,” whereby corporations from developed countries search for medical miracles in the rain forests, with the help of indigenous peoples, and then leave none of the benefits behind in the developing countries. The analysis includes a discussion of accountability, a notoriously difficult concept in international law. Claude argues that the states committed to the treaty, with the help of NGO scrutiny, have to be responsible for the steps “necessary for the conservation, the development and the diffusion of science and culture,” including maintaining scientific freedom. This is especially the case given the small staff and budget of the ESC Treaty Committee. In a refreshing departure from the broad treaty language, Claude provides examples of what states specifically should and should not do to ensure the ESC is implemented.

In Issues, Claude approaches the same territory from a complementary perspective and offers practical suggestions. In the chapter on health and medical ethics, Claude discusses the famous “Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial,” the event that precipitated modern bioethics. While rightly treating the UDHR as both a response to the horror of the Nazi medical experiments and an important influence on modern health practices, Claude argues that the document’s promises have still not been realized for those without access to medication, with privacy violated, or with limited freedom to experiment. In the chapter on information technology, Claude travels from Guttenberg to the internet, noting the double-edged sword that is modern technology: computers are the stuff of both hazardous intrusions into privacy and cheap access to information, of hatred-promotion and promising statistical analysis of human rights violations.

Finally, Politics offers intriguing case studies of the methods of a range of actors: scientists, nongovernmental organizations, citizens at the grassroots community level, and transnational organizations, including corporations and professional societies. All present interesting ways to overcome the “structural weakness” inherent in the international system. From Physicians for Human Rights using DNA fingerprinting to reunite families in El Salvador to the citizens of Woburn, Massachusetts, uniting in opposition to polluted water, these accounts are useful models for human rights practitioners, a group that, in Claude’s estimation, should absolutely encompass scientists.

Claude excels at storytelling, but his captivating and lucid descriptions of drafting and of politicking have more than mere interest value: they provide insight into the difficulty of capturing human rights standards in words and binding law while serving to clarify what human rights law and practice is and should be. The book falters, though, in its over-analysis. Between the main introduction, the section introductions, the individual chapter introductions, and conclusions, there is too much “telling-you-what-I’m-going-to-tell-you and how-I’m-going-to-do-it,” and the overlapping theses present in every segment are more confusing than helpful. It is of course true that there are a myriad of ways to analyze the connections between the huge fields of science and human rights. Because Claude tries to be explicit about all of them the reader ends up wading through too much “meta” in search of the important, inspiring, well-researched and truly original historical and sociological content.

—Ellen Lee Moskowitz

HLSHRJ@law.harvard.edu
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