THE CONCISE GUIDE TO GLOBAL HUMAN RIGHTS
Introduction
All humanity is one undivided and indivisible family, and each one of us is responsible for the misdeeds of all the others. I cannot detach myself from the wickedest soul. --Mahatma Gandhi
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere…Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. --Martin Luther King Jr.
I have often asked myself why human beings have any rights at all. I always come to the conclusion that human rights, human freedoms, and human dignity have their deepest roots somewhere outside the perceptible world. These values are as powerful as they are because, under certain circumstances, people accept them without compulsion and are willing to die for them. --Václav Havel
The assault on vulnerable, fragile sections of society is so complete, so cruel and so clever that its sheer audacity has eroded our definition of justice. It has forced us to lower our sights, and curtail our expectations. Even among the well-intentioned, the magnificent concept of justice is gradually being substituted with the reduced, far more fragile discourse of 'human rights.' --Arundhati Roy
Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. were two of the most visible and effective human rights activists of the twentieth century. Gandhi led a movement that culminated in the independence of India and the eventual creation of the world's largest democracy. King led and inspired the American civil rights movement, arguably the source of some of the most significant and radical ideas about human rights in the most powerful and influential democracy in the world. Both saw the need, as evidenced in the first two epigraphs to this chapter, to articulate the relatedness of all human life, however radically disparate the divide between good and the 'wickedest soul.' And both saw the impossibility of dissociating the injustice of one from the pursuit of justice for all. Their vision of shared human responsibility is intrinsically unitary, based on reciprocal respect for life in its diversity and its inter-connectedness.
Both Gandhi's and King's ideas inexorably link rights with community--with the relations that define and make meaningful human interaction, and with the fundamental questions posed to that community by injustice, evil, detachment, and alienation. At the core of any understanding of rights, then, lies the notion of what it means to participate in community: What kinds of community best allow for justice and equity? What kinds of community take precedence over these principles? For some, like English philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), fundamental rights were dangerous nonsense: 'natural and imprescriptable rights' were the 'mortal enemies of law, the subverters of government and the assassins of security' (from Bentham's essay 'Anarchichal Fallacies,' cited in Arslan 197). And for conservative eighteenth-century Irish statesman and political thinker Edmund Burke, the rights of man led to 'inexpiable war with all establishments.' Burke further argued that the 'pretended rights of men' are 'metaphysical abstraction,' arguing that 'Against these their rights of men…let no government look for security in the length of its continuance or in the justice and lenity of its administration' (from Reflections on the Revolution in France, cited in Arslan 198). Where Bentham and Burke might see a threat to the foundations of legal and governmental institutions and metaphysical trumpery, Václav Havel, President of the Czech Republic, internationally renowned writer, political dissident, and one of the leading rights figures in contemporary Europe, suggests that rights 'have their deepest roots somewhere outside the perceptible world,' representing a transcendent force that people are prepared to die for.
This force, which Indian author Arundhati Roy links with a deeply rooted, historical sense of justice, is under attack as a concept and as a lived reality--this in spite of the enormous growth in rights instruments, organizations, and awareness over the last fifty years. We begin with this diverse opining on rights to show not only the distance that rights discourses have traversed in a very short while but also to demonstrate the fundamental fissures at work in any thinking about rights. In fact, however naturalized rights may seem to citizens of the twenty-first century, formidable pressures have aligned and continue to align against rights and their promulgation. Paradoxically, these pressures often reside in the sovereign and absolutist assumptions of state laws and conventions. Rights ideas that imagine communities beyond those shaped only by law or state challenge such conventions.
Furthermore, as can be seen from the epigraphs to this chapter, complex notions of human responsibility, agency, justice, vulnerability, self-criticism, and disempowerment come together under the concept of rights. We openly acknowledge that no short book can possibly do justice to the full range of the topic since rights apply to virtually all aspects of human activity across all geographies, ethnicities, cultural differences, and ideologies. Nonetheless, in this book we lay the groundwork for understanding key issues relating to global rights across a wide range of topics. To do so, we have necessarily had to focus on specific areas of concern within the framework of a concise guide. Hence, we have written chapters that overview 'big picture' ideas related to emergent trends that have characterized rights discourses in the last half-century.
The signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (hereinafter the UDHR) in 1948 signaled, in part, a global response to the horrors of the Second World War and to the growing targeting of civilians in times of conflict, exemplified in the appalling genocide of European Jews in the Holocaust. That global response has led to the proliferation of rights instruments, agreements, and actions even as the proliferation of violations and abuses has escalated. Rather than covering all possible rights groups fighting for particular and important issues (such as the right to linguistic diversity, various forms of cultural survival, reproductive rights, prisoners' rights, and the like), we integrate these in more general discussions of major issues. These pertain to globalization, minority and majority world rights, the threat to rights as a function of terrorism post 9/11, issues around communicating rights, and the future of rights--all of which try to take into account the larger contexts for a host of subsidiary issues.
Our approach to rights is based on a number of key premises. First, rights depend in part on legal, constitutional covenants between states and individuals such that all peoples are guaranteed a viable means of addressing oppressive, inequitable, and unjust treatment measured against a global standard. All too often, focus on rights is reduced to focus on these covenants. And we acknowledge, with qualifications that we outline throughout this book, the significance of these instruments and covenants as one of the means for achieving widespread social justice. The importance of the UDHR, first drafted by Canadian (McGill University) law professor John Peters Humphrey, cannot be underestimated as a major shift in establishing the basis for change in how rights are conceived and enacted at a global level.
In addition to this legalistic view of rights contained in covenants, there is another view of rights as a process of education and of access to alternative forms of social (in)formation that are deeply embedded in all human cultures, but need to be activated at a level of basic human interaction from the ground up. Constitutional and legal recourses to rights tend to be reactive and occur belatedly in response to a problem that frequently cannot be resolved meaningfully via only legal means. Rights organizations are often limited to making recommendations that have no legal implication (that are not backed by force of law), further underscoring the problem of rights thought of only as legal or political structures.
At a deeper level then, rights imply an approach to human identity and agency grounded in principles that are applicable across national and cultural divides. Neither a secular religion nor an ideology that caters to selective, single-state sovereign self-interests, human rights cut across all possible human relations. Rights are based on reciprocal respect, the valuing of all life, the integrity and dignity of all human beings (regardless of, among others, religious belief, class status, ethnicity, sexual orientation), and the desire to extend those basic values into all areas of human activity. Chandra Muzaffar, Director of the Centre for Civilizational Dialogue at the Science University Malaysia, argues that 'an integrated approach to human rights is in fact related to a holistic vision of the human being--a vision which lies at the root of philosophies of almost all the major religious and cultural traditions…' (6).
Not idealist or utopian, the human rights understanding we advocate in this book is intensely pragmatic. If true and meaningful social change is to occur it will have to do so at a deep human level across all national borders. Not via gunpoint. Not via cultures of fear and misunderstanding. Not via intensifying the indefinite consumption of limited resources. Not via outmoded concepts of progress (the infinite growth model) tied only to the economic bottom line for shareholders of multinational companies. Not via disregard for the environmental conditions without which human beings could not exist. Not via recourse to apocalyptic scenarios that derive from religious fundamentalisms. Not via civil structures of impunity and lack of accountability. Not via decreased civil liberties. Not via ignorance and disinformation. Not via economic structures based on historic inequalities and exploitation.
This partial listing of obstacles to global rights recognizes the pragmatics of the challenge. But the list is also based on recognition of critical change and a purposeful sense of human potential linked to transnational and transcultural values rooted in an all-encompassing respect for life. We hasten to point out that such a view already exists across multiple cultures worldwide, from indigenous cultures through to local, national, and transnational cultures in which social justice is a preeminent value.
The challenge posed by internalizing and activating meaningful rights and social justice values globally may well be the single most important guarantee of long-term human existence. That challenge will require a massive reallocation of resources away from, among others, military spending toward investment in education, access to potable water, clean air, non genetically modified and uncontaminated food, not to mention an ongoing critical awareness of the ways in which rights can be used both to promote and diminish social justice.
We take Indian writer and activist Arundhati Roy's cautionary distinction between 'human rights' and 'justice' seriously. Roy states that 'Almost unconsciously, we…think of justice for the rich and human rights for the poor. Justice for the corporate world, human rights for its victims. Justice for Americans, human rights for Afghans and Iraqis…It is…clear that violating human rights is an inherent and necessary part of the process of implementing a coercive and unjust political and economic structure on the world…Many resistance movements in poor countries which are fighting huge injustice and questioning the underlying principles of what constitutes "liberation" and "development" view human rights non-governmental organizations as modern-day missionaries who have come to take the ugly edge off imperialism--to defuse political anger and to maintain the status quo' ('What We Call Peace').
Roy's words raise important questions: At what point does 'humanitarian intervention' begin to sound like what might once have been called 'a civilizing mission'? When is humanitarian intervention justified, and when does it interfere with the rights of national cultures to define their own laws and customs? On what basis are such judgments made? Adamantia Pollis and Peter Schwab, in an influential essay published in 1979, 'Human Rights: A Western Construct With Limited Applicability,' argue that 'cultural and ideological ethnocentrism' lie at the heart of the UDHR and that 'there is no universal concurrence as to the meaning of human rights, human dignity, and human freedom (1). But even as states have issued restraints in the name of their sovereign self-interest, making rights a relative concept dependent on specific social, cultural, historical, and economic factors (and thus confirming in part Pollis's and Schwab's initial thesis), it is clear that other forces are at work in the striving toward global understandings of social justice and the equitable distribution of rights. Not the least of these forces are those ideas, some of them cited at the beginning of this chapter, that advocate thinking of rights in terms of global communities of inter-connection and reciprocal responsibilities.
In these global imaginings, the dynamic interplay between universalist ideas of social justice and the local contextual features that define their local application are evolving into what Pollis in a later essay has described as 'reconstructed universalism' ('A New Universalism' 27). Movement towards international structures of justice that address genocide, war crimes (including crimes related to how wars are initiated), environmental disasters, and so forth represent important steps in the creation of a reconstructed universalist approach--or what the Indian activist lawyer and rights advocate Upendra Baxi might call a pluriversalist conception of global rights issues. Notwithstanding these positive developments at the level of theorizing rights, great care has to be exercised in critically appraising the uses and foundations of rights talk--even as constructive critique must be balanced against advancing and achieving meaningful, lived social justice outcomes.
As we argue throughout, human rights need to be reclaimed, rethought, embodied, and reactivated with even greater energy, intensity, commitment, and passion. This book, then, examines crucial rights issues in concise form and offers itself as part of a much larger, necessary, and difficult conversation that bears directly on the most important choices 'we' as humans must confront in defining and living our shared humanity.
We grappled with the use of terms designating geo-political regions and decided to use both conventional language reflective of existent mindsets, as well as visionary language that strives to free us from these mindsets. Hence in those instances where the old prejudices seem to rule in material terms we succumb to using such oppositions as 'First World/Third World,' 'Developed/Developing,' 'Western/non-Western' (when in fact the division is most often North/South or East/West). This said, we need to clarify up front that we do not think that 'developed' is a critically accurate term; while countries referred to this way do tend to enjoy more freedoms, rights, and prosperity, for many other reasons that we explore throughout, it is not always a positive label. If anything, we argue that words like 'developing' and its cognate 'development' must be regarded with some degree of critical suspicion and questioned as to what concept of 'progress' they invoke. In accordance with non-Western thinkers and activists, we prefer to conceive of global inequity in terms of the Majority World versus the Over-developed nations. This preference is based not only on population numbers, but also on the fact that the environmental impact of the Over-developed countries on the rest of the world is murderous and suicidal, and clearly unsustainable.1 The 'majority' in the grassroots sense is a very different kind of moral majority from the exclusionary right wing meaning that prevails, especially in the U.S. Argentine philosopher, Enrique Dussel draws an important distinction between 'morality,' seen as a set of social conventions operative within specific cultural perimeters, and 'ethics,' which is rooted in the individual person's spirit but connects persons within and across both localized and diverse communities of shared concerns globally.2 In this sense, the concept of the Majority World invokes the asymmetrical relationship between the many impoverished and the affluent few (majority in numbers), while restoring the notion that the Majority World has a key ethical (and not only moral) role to play in a global struggle for rights.
A final authorial note: we co-wrote this book from our positions as engaged literary critics who have been led to consider wider issues of rights informing emergent literatures and other compelling forms of artistic expression that address social justice issues. Our own grounding in literary and critical discourses and our direct experiences in various rights actions and communities, particularly in relation to Latin America and Africa, have inevitably played a major role in shaping this book.
Notes
1. For further discussion of the implications of these terms, see Chapter 3 'Globalization and Development,' especially the section on 'The Racist Foundations of Developmentalism.'
2. For Dussel's discussion of this distinction, see Chapter 10 'Relative Morality, Absolute Ethics' in Ethics and Community.