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The term “human
rights” refers to certain moral and legal entitlements which all human
beings are said to have.
These rights differ from others that individuals
have been recognized to have, such as the rights people enjoy through
citizenship, social class or blood lineage; the rights they claim through
affiliation with a religious community or political party; or the rights
they assert through any other of the ways and means human beings
distinguish themselves from each other.
Human rights are
the rights a person has simply because he or she is a human being. More
precisely, by being human one is said to have rights which are inherent,
i.e. rights that are an inseparable part of what it means to be human.
Human rights include civil and political entitlements – for example, the
right to life, liberty, security of person, equality before the law, the
right to privacy, thought, conscience and religion – as well as economic,
social and cultural rights, such as the right to food, health care,
housing, employment, education and participation in the cultural life of
the community.
Human rights have a
long history. Civilization’s major philosophies and world religions have
long articulated conceptions of justice, dignity, respect and the common
good. In secular society the antecedents for modern notions of human
rights stretch equally far back, at least to the code of Hammurabi several
thousand years before Christ, and proceed, in history’s typically crooked
line, to include such vital, kingly power-challenging documents as the
Magna Carta (1215), which provided guarantees against arbitrary action by
the English Crown; the Habeas Corpus Act (1670), the first attempt to
prevent illegal detention; and, in a late 18th century spurt of
freedom-fighting and rights-claiming, the French Declaration of the Rights
of Man and Citizen (1789), the American colonies’ Declaration of
Independence (1776) and United States Bill of Rights (1781).
But the
idea that humans universally possess a few basic powers which no
political order can remove has been long in the development stage. It was
not until the middle of the 20th century, after a world war
which exacted a horrifying toll not only on soldiers but on civilians,
that a broader vision of individual liberty was asserted, and it was
coupled with the determination that this liberty should be protected by an
international order which relied on law rather than diplomacy. The United
Nations was created as an organization to establish and maintain world
peace. With the atrocities of the Holocaust freshly in mind, an
international delegation chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt crafted what has
become the primary modern touchstone for human rights, a document called
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted by the United
Nations on December 10, 1948. (Read it in English or in any one of dozens
of other languages at www.unhchr.ch/udhr/index.htm .) The language and
concepts of the UDHR have been incorporated in many of the constitutions
of nations that have become independent since then.
William Schulz,
the Executive Director of Amnesty International USA, writes, “What the
Universal Declaration supplies all of us are rights in the form of norms
to which every person can appeal, rights that the international community
has derived from the human capacity to identify with others’ plight (what
the second ‘Whereas’ refers to as ‘conscience’) and that are designed to
depict the best way we know of at the moment to counter cruelty and build
a decent society. In this sense rights constitute a set of promises that
those with power make in recognition of their obligations to order our
collective lives in a way consistent with what we regard as humane” (26).
For most of
history, human rights have been claimed in the face of oppression and
abuse of political power, and so the focus was on protecting human liberty
and freedoms. But by the time the delegation which wrote the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights came to work, activists were making wider
claims about the interdependence of rights and arguing that a healthy
human rights environment promoted not only civil and political rights but
economic, social and cultural rights.
Then and now,
across the globe, from the powerful to the powerless, from politicians to
illiterate peasants, has come the declaration that that economic or social
power should not dispossess the less powerful of their ability to meet
their basic needs. At some point, then, the discussion of rights becomes a
discussion of power sharing. Americans cherish civil and political rights
and have shown discomfort, ambivalence or scorn for the idea of there
being “economic rights.”
Few would resist,
though, the claim that human rights are interdependent. The political
oppression of the Ogoni people in Nigeria is directly related to their
economic dispossession of their natural wealth (the land, in which oil is
located) and the despoiling of their environment. Ogoni rights have been
violated amid a complex set of circumstances regarding nonviolent
protests, ethnic division, Shell Oil, police and military misconduct and a
corrupt government. Richard Goldstone, a Justice of the Constitutional
Court of South Africa, emphasizes the need for a culture of law for there
to be a healthy human rights environment. “Some of these rights entail the
recognition and enforcement of other basic rights; for example, the right
to liberty requires recognition of certain fundamental safeguards against
the innocent being unfairly or improperly convicted and punished” (10).
A key word in the
discussion is enforcement. Four decades of a “cold war” between the
United States and the Soviet Union undercut the major powers’ interest in
an international means of enforcing human rights and putting on trial
human rights violators. In the wake of the breakup of the Soviet Union and
the persistence of genocide, in Cambodia, Bosnia and Rwanda, there was a
renewed drive for a mechanism beyond ad hoc tribunals to try individuals
accused of massive human rights abuse. The genocides of the last
generation have left unfulfilled the pledge one hears in Holocaust
commemorations of “never again” and have renewed vigor in the human rights
community for a meaningful, permanent (rather than ad hoc) menas of
enforcement. As English barrister Geoffrey Robertson writes, “It is
against such elemental evils that the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights was erected, in 1948, as a talismanic barricade, a pile of decent
principles to impede the onward march of tyrants and tanks and torturers.
The Declaration and its progeny, the good conventions, only serve this
purpose to the extent that they offer some prospect of Article 28,
‘Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the
rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.’
After a half-century of ineffectual treaties and diplomatic
thumb-twiddling, we had a fin de siecle stampede to put global justice
systems in place: an International Criminal Court, a ‘prosecute or
extradite’ regime for torturers, a claim to intervene in the internal
affairs of sovereign states out of humanitarian necessity” (437).
The subject of
human rights seems to be everywhere and nowhere. Looking at the hundreds
of titles at online booksellers such as amazon.com under the search term
“human rights,” one would think that the subject is all the rage. Yet the
mainstream broadcast media have been sporadic in their coverage of human
rights as such, rarely carving space in their programming for anything but
the most pedestrian use of the phrase “human rights.” A steady stream of
politicians, generals and think-tank analysts are interviewed by CNN’s
Anderson Cooper or Lou Dobbs, or by Nightline’s Ted Koppel. When was the
last time you saw an expert in human rights (or peace) on their programs?
Fortunately,
abundant resources exist not only in traditional book form but on the
Internet. The U.S. Department of State has an introduction to human rights
online www.state.gov/g/drl/hr/ , with links to its annual country reports.
The DOS provides another very good introductory reading at
http://usinfo.state.gov/products/pubs/hrintro/hrintro.htm
and a timeline of human rights in American history at
http://usinfo.state.gov/products/pubs/hrintro/timeline.htm .
Two important
non-governmental organizations which issue regularly updated news and
annual reports on the human rights climates of all the world’s nations are
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Click
www.amnestyusa.org/countries/usa/
to read Amnesty’s collection of fresh bulletins and annual reports on the
United States; Human Rights Watch’s USA material can be found at
www.hrw.org/doc/?t=usa . The number of non-governmental organizations
devoted to human rights in general, to a specific rights group (e.g.
women, Haitians, journalists) or to a topic (e.g. capital punishment) is
staggering. See the links pages cited below, and spend time exploring the
widening world of the Internet-connected human rights community and the
news and views on the issues.
Studying human
rights widens our vocabulary and challenges our intellect to operate in
increasingly interdisciplinary and holistic ways. It affords us the
opportunity to delve into the full range of human experience and puts us
in touch with cutting-edge events and topics. When we consider the best
means to defeat terrorism or the relationship of human rights and
democracy, we must at some point bring human rights in the discussion.
Americans properly regard respect for individual rights and fundamental
freedoms as part of what makes their way of life exceptional, and so it
seems equally appropriate to ponder the consequences of both the political
means of running America (democracy) and the economic system (capitalism),
a critical thinking problem which, again, eventually invokes human rights.
To study human rights, then, is in some respect to be for human rights.
As Professor Jack
Donnelly explains, “Human rights, being held by every person against the
state and society, provide a framework for political organization and a
standard of political legitimacy. Where they are systematically denied,
claims of human rights may be positively revolutionary. Even in societies
where human rights are generally well respected, they provide constant
pressure on governments to meet their standards.”
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an article by Michael Kuelker
SCC English
Sidebar:
Human Rights and the U.S. War on Terror
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