Human Rights!

Lily finally added me as a contributor.  Yay!  

So today, boys and girls, I'm going to talk to y'all about human rights. I know you're excited.

This year, me and Romana attended the national Model United Nations (something you should all do next year).   The theme of the conference was Human Rights, as this year is the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.   As Guinea-Bissau and Cambodia, me and Romana were not the world's biggest advocates of human rights.  However, as people, we were both very interested in the topic and learnt some interesting things - most importantly, that the issue of human rights is not as simple as it seems.

You are probably all familiar with the UDHR to some degree, as we all would have studied it in yr 10 Social Studies. However, I'll recap.   The UDHR was adopted by the United Nations on December 10th, 1948.  It sets forth 30 fundamental Human Rights to which everybody is entitled to, without distinction of any kind,  whether it be 'race, colour, sex, langauge, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status'.  These rights include the right to freedom from slavery, the right to a fair trial, the right to education and many other things.  Furthermore, all governments have a responsibility to promote and protect these rights.

However, although it is 60 years since this these rights were declared, they are still not available to everybody.   Throughout the world human rights abuses occur all too regularly.   The question is, how do we stop it?  

The United Nations works hard to make sure human rights are protected by the law, however, any action taken by the United Nations must pass a vote, and may of those voting do not want to protect human rights.  And so we come to the first interesting point I discovered.   Human Rights are bad for governments.  Human Rights make things a lot more difficult for those in power, and not just the corrupt and power mad Robert Mugabes of the world, but also the Helen Clarks.   Human Rights protect individuals: they stop us from being held prisoner without a reason, they protect our privacy, they give us the right to seek asylum in another country.  Even a government with the best interests of its people at heart can find all these rights a nuisance - it is hard to protect the country from terrrorists, for example, if you cannot search people for bombs. Democratic and developed nations usually have better human rights records, as people vote for those who will protect their civil liberties.  However, as we learn in history, when countries feel threatened internal suppression increases.  So, in a post 9/11 world, we increasingly see developed nations, who usually have very good human rights records, taking actions which put the security of the country above individual human rights.  Most will be aware that the UK recently increased the amount of time you can be held without charge to 28 days and are considering increasing it to 42 days.  As for the USA, well, Guantanamo Bay just speaks for itself. 

Despite this, most governments of developed nations still support UN resolutions that aim to protect human rights.   But many of the UN members do not.  You can see the problem - in the United Nations every state has an equal vote, regardless of their human rights record.  They can, and many do, vote against the protection of Human Rights, fearing threats to their personal and national security.  This means that it is very hard to get resolutions passed which aim to counteract human rights abuses.  The United Nations is flawed, in the sense that it gives an equal vote to those who seem to working against what it stands for.  

Because of this flaw, many western political scientists have come up with an idea for an alternative to the United Nations, a "liberty league" or a "league of democracies".  They call for the foundation of a new international organisation, separate from the UN,  made up of western democratic nations.  Together they would be able to help those suffering from human rights abuses and take action to solve other problems, for which the presence of less principled and more corrupt nations has led to stalemate in the UN.   Sounds good doesn't it?

Maybe not.   As me and Romana discovered (in an excellent talk by Vic lecturer Robbie Shilliam), to solve human rights issues we may need to steer away from a victim and saviour model.  I'll elaborate.  In the west, we tend to see the development of human rights in a certain way, known as the 'Grand Western Narrative of Human Rights'.  It goes something like this:

The idea of human rights was first thought of by the ancient Greeks when they came up with the concept of democracy.  The idea continues to develop slowly with a few key events through out Europe - the Magna Carta is one, I have to admit I've forgotten the rest - until the French revolution in 1789.  Liberty, Equality and Fraternity!  Then there is the abolition of slavery, the fight against fascism, and a few other things.  

The point is, they are all examples of western nations saving themselves and others from being victims of human rights.  This narrative leaves out some key historical events.  One of these is the Haitian Slave Rebellion of 1791.  Inspired by the events in France,  the slaves of Haiti rose up against their white masters and took control of the island.  They wrote their own constitution, which not only abolished slavery, but gave universal rights to all Haitians.   The French declaration made no mention of slavery and only declared freedom and equality for all French men.  Futhermore, the narrative ignores the fact that many of the most advanced developments and ideas on human rights of the last century have come from the non-western world in response to western actions.  Mahatma Ghandi developed the idea of non-violent protest in order to fight British oppression in India, and his idea were adapted by Martin Luther King Jr. to fight for black civil rights in the USA.  Today their tactics are considered the most effective methods of protest.

The western human rights narrative suggests that we in the west came up with the concept of human rights and spread it to less developed nations; that the west has a duty to save the rest of the world from human rights abuses, and that those who suffer are merely powerless victims. However, perhaps what people who are suffering need most is not, in fact to be saved, but to be supported as they try to save themselves.   If we just simplify the problem into one of victims and saviours, we may prevent ourselves from hearing the contributions of those who we are trying to save. 

The idea of a 'Liberty League' does just that.  By saying that countries who have poor human rights records cannot take part in human rights discussions, we deny them the opportunity to do something about it themselves, and perpetuate the western image of ourselves as the saviors. Furthermore, (and this is where it gets complicated) it raises some interesting questions about the UDHR and who has the authority to decide what is and what isn't a fundamental human right.  The reasons that human rights abuses take place in some parts of the world has nothing to do with totalitarianism or even national security.  Many have more to do with tradition and religion than anything else.  Now, I'm not suggesting that we should just sit back and allow people to explain away mistreatment of others simply due to religion or culture, but we need to be aware that the UDHR contains very western ideas about what are human rights, which people in other countries may disagree with.  We cannot simply decide that we in the western world know better than everybody else, that we are more developed and so we alone can make decisions about what is right and what is wrong. That would be bad.  However, to me, and I'm sure to you, human rights abuses that are justified on the grounds of religion or culture do simply seem wrong.  So what do we do?  This is a question for which I do not have the answer, though it seems that we cannot force human rights on people who do not want them.  I guess we can only encourage others to claim their own rights, and offer them all our support when they do.

Read the UDHR here