The late US President Jimmy Carter’s human rights legacy includes his role long after leaving office in 1981. His partnership with Human Rights Watch and many other nongovernmental organizations helped achieve important advances in international law, including treaties to hold war criminals to account, to prohibit landmines and cluster munitions, and to ban the use of children as soldiers.
Carter worked alongside Human Rights Watch and others as an early supporter of the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty and 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions. He called antipersonnel mines “morally repugnant” weapons, urging the US to support a total ban. In his 2002 Nobel Peace Prize speech, he cited landmines as an example of war’s inhumanity. In 1999, he urged the US to stop using cluster munitions in the NATO bombing campaign in the Balkans.
In 1998, as Human Rights Watch prepared to help launch the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers, he spoke out to support the new campaign for a United Nations treaty to ban the use of child soldiers, linking his peacebuilding efforts in Liberia to the use of child soldiers there. Later, he secured the support of dozens of former heads of state, including Nelson Mandela, Mikhail Gorbachev, Shimon Peres, and Helmut Schmidt, for the proposed treaty, which the UN ultimately adopted in 2000.
Carter and the Carter Center, which he and his late wife, Rosalynn, founded in 1982, also supported the establishment of a permanent international criminal court. During the 1998 UN diplomatic conference held in Rome, the Carter Center worked together with civil society from around the globe to build support for the treaty that – once it entered into force –established the International Criminal Court (ICC). After the UN conference, Carter reached out personally to dozens of world leaders urging them to ratify the treaty, called the Rome Statute.
Carter’s funeral on January 9 at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC, will take place the same day the US House of Representatives is dispiritingly expected to vote on a bill aiming to impose sanctions against ICC officials. Legislators pushed the bill forward after the court in November issued arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant.
The fight for justice and protection of civilians and children continues, but the international law and institutions Jimmy Carter helped create are a significant part of his legacy.
