Bastiaan Bouwman is Assistant Professor of History of International Relations at Utrecht University, where he studies the history of human rights, humanitarianism, and refugees during the Cold War. He is the author of Liberalism and Liberation: The World Council of Churches and the Global Politics of Human Rights (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2026). Bastiaan is also the editor of the forthcoming special issue “Refugees and the Cold War,” with Cold War History. He has held postdoctoral fellowships at Princeton University, the Freie Universität Berlin, and the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC. Bastiaan’s current project is entitled “The Rise of Refugee Rights: The Movement to Make Asylum a Human Right, c. 1945-1995.” His work has been published in the Journal of Global History, Low Countries Historical Review, and Contemporary European History, which in 2021 awarded him 'Honorable Mention' for the Contemporary European History Prize. 

In the 1970s, thousands of Haitians arrived in the United States by boat, escaping the repression and immiseration of Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier’s Haiti. Their claims to asylum were met with hostility by US authorities, however, who considered them undesirable migrants. The ensuing political and legal struggle, which pitted a wide-ranging coalition against the US government, took on added significance against the background of Jimmy Carter’s presidency: Carter promised a moral revival of foreign policy, including the treatment of refugees. Ultimately, the Haitian case contributed to a shift from a refugee policy of Cold War selectivity to one based – at least in principle – on universal human rights. This paper focuses especially on Amnesty International's role as the standard-bearer of the 1970s “human rights movement.” It argues that Amnesty made vital contributions to litigation on Haitians’ behalf and thus helped reframe refugee affairs as a human rights issue.