On the face of it, it might appear that terrorism— the indiscriminate use of violence to achieve political ends—almost by definition involves human rights violations. This is especially clear in cases of state terrorism, in which governments employ terrorism against their own citizens.
The definition of terrorist, however, is often in dispute. German forces occupying conquered territories during World War II referred to partisan guerrillas as “terrorists.” The allies saw these guerrillas—quite rightly—as freedom fighters. Not all cases of mislabeling are so clear. Terrorist or freedom fighter, the lines are not always so easy to draw as they were in World War II. How different is the situation of World War II partisans from contemporary groups like Palestinian guerrillas (also labeled terrorists) struggling against Israeli occupation forces? This is not, of course, to equate these two struggles but, rather, to make the point that terrorism admits to a certain ambiguity— an ambiguity succinctly captured in the expression “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” Such ambiguity derives, at least partially, from a conflict between different sets of rights. This conflict, in turn, finds expression in different United Nations (UN) documents. On the one hand, the core documents of the International Bill of Rights stress the right of individuals to enjoy freedom from fear—the very hallmark of terrorism— and various UN bodies have issued formal resolutions condemning terrorism, such as the UN Commission on Human Rights in Resolution 1994/46; the Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities in Resolution 1994/18; and the General Assembly, in Resolutions 48/122 and 49/185. On the other hand, the United Nations has also strongly supported the right of peoples to self-determination (e.g., the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, adopted by the General Assembly in 1960), a right that appears to legitimate at least certain kinds of armed insurrections, particularly by clearly defined ethnic groups within a larger nationstate. Such insurgencies, however, almost inevitably involve terrorist acts. Because so many of the countries that joined the UN in the decades immediately following World War II had only recently thrown off the colonial yoke, there was little support for anti-terrorist resolutions that could be interpreted as condemning nationalist movements. This was still the situation in 1972, following the Munich Olympics massacre, when Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim asked the United Nations to respond to terrorism. Because the representatives of so many member states tended to view “terrorism” as a colonialist label for anti-colonialist struggles, the most the UN General Assembly was able to agree upon was the 1973 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Crimes Against Internationally Protected Persons, Including Diplomatic Agents. It is no coincidence that it was a different body, representing nations with a longer history of political independence, namely the Council of Europe, that was able to ratify a Convention on the Suppression of Terrorism in 1977.
The support for revolutionary struggles diminished, however, as the emergent nations became established and began to experience their own internal insurgencies. As a consequence, international opinion shifted so that by the final decade of the twentieth century, the UN began issuing strong condemnations of terrorism—condemnations such as those contained in the resolutions mentioned earlier. However, this new consensus merely obscures, rather than resolves, the tensions between competing sets of human rights. One suggestion for addressing terrorism is to use actions that would be regarded as war crimes in an international armed conflict as criteria for distinguishing terrorism from legitimate insurgencies. In other words, groups that confined their attacks to military targets would be freedom fighters, while groups that attacked civilians would be terrorists. This criterion, however, ignores the fact that the very nature of an insurgency consists in the fact that most insurgents simply do not have the equipment, training, or manpower to face a conventional military force. This criterion also ignores the fact that in modern warfare, civilian populations are routinely targeted—such as in the massive bombing campaigns associated with World War II and the Vietnam War—as a way of demoralizing the enemy. How different is this reasoning from the rationale behind a terrorist attack? To apply the terrorist label to small, contemporary insurgencies but not to the bombings of Dresden and suburban Tokyo during World War II, and to the bombing of North Vietnamese villages during the Vietnam War, can seem to some to be hypocritical and self-serving.
Hence, the effort to apply war crimes criteria to this issue ultimately breaks down, and it is likely that any other attempt to formulate objectivist criteria would be frustrated as well. Perhaps the paradox of terrorism is merely part of the paradox of war in general. Terrorism may be a human rights violation to the same extent that all wars are human rights violations.