Building Anew 403tion of wounded and sick soldiers in land and maritime warfare and of pris-
oners of war. Th e fourth convention, however, was an innovation. It was
devoted to the protection of civilian victims of war, chiefl y to civilian popu-
lations of occupied territories (eff ectively replacing and expanding the
Hague Rules on that subject).
Action in favor of refugees followed shortly aft er this. In 1951, under UN
auspices, a Convention on the Status of Refugees was concluded, which re-
mains one of the foremost legal initiatives in the human- rights sphere. It
provided a legal defi nition of refugee— basically, a person who is in a foreign
country, and who has a “well- founded fear of persecution” by his home coun-
try. What the convention pointedly did not grant was an actual right of refu-
gees to admission to any country. It merely provided for their humane treat-
ment (including nonreturn to the home country) once they were actually in
a foreign state.
In large part, the hopes of the early postwar period went unfulfi lled. Con-
sider, for example, the fate of the plan to establish an international criminal
court. Although, as noted, a draft code of crimes was adopted by the I.L.C.
in 1954, the project lost momentum, largely because of the diffi culty of
craft ing a legal defi nition of the crime of aggression. Th at same year, the UN
General Assembly decided to discontinue further work in the area until that
gap was fi lled. Th at did not occur until 1974— and even then, the crimi-
nal court project continued to languish.
Th ere was also a worrying absence of urgency on the human- rights front.
Some human- rights activists had been disappointed at the legally second-
rate—that is, nonbinding— status of the Universal Declaration. Lauterpacht
was one of them. He expressed a fear that a nonbinding declaration “would
probably constitute a retrogressive event.” Human rights, in his opinion, ur-
gently needed to be fi rmly placed on “the plane of positive law,” where it
could be backed by eff ective legal sanctions. Work shortly began on the
draft ing of a legally binding treaty on human rights, but it proved to be an
agonizingly slow pro cess, not completed until 1966.
Th ere were worrying indications, too, of a lack of commitment to human
rights on the part of the major powers. It was not surprising that the Soviet
government, with its Stalinist heritage, was less than energetic in either the
promotion or the protection of human rights— even as it ardently champi-
oned the rights of states. More surprising was the loss of interest in the