See Debatepedia's Global Climate Change Debate Series with the UN Foundation's The People Speak. Press release.
Human rights
From Debatepedia
Since World War II human rights have emerged in global and national legal systems to become a powerful tool for change. Non-government organizations (NGOs), the United Nations, international organizations, citizen groups, and in some cases, even businesses use the language of human rights to secure what they perceive to be a better world. Although a world in which every right in the UN Declaration of Human Rights were respected would indeed be a peaceful one, it is still important to acknowledge and grapple with issues and controversies in the human rights discourse. Almost every country in the world claims to respect human rights in some form, yet we still live in a world with extreme poverty, slavery, oppression, genocide and all sorts of other human rights abuses.
]Types of rights
“Human rights” generally refer to ideas enshrined in a corpus of international legal documents promulgated since World War II. Although the philosophical history of human rights, as outlined in the next section, stretches back much farther than the 1940s, the outrages of World War II prompted the United Nations to incorporate human rights into its mandate, as Article 1, Section 3 of the UN Charter states one of the purposes of the organization as “promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms.” Subsequent documents articulated a robust, if complex, list of these rights. Important documents include:
- Charter of the United Nations, entered into force 24 Oct 1945
- Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by UN General Assembly without dissent on 10 Dec 1948
- Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, entered into force 12 January 1951
- International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, entered into force 23 March 1976
- International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, 3 January 1976
- International Covenant on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, entered into force 4 January 1969
- Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, entered into force on 3 September 1981
- Convention on the Rights of the Child, entered into force 2 September 1990
- ILO Convention No. 169 concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries, Adopted on 27 June 1989 by the General Conference of the International Labour Organisation, entry into force 5 September 1991
There are several rights enshrined in these documents, a few of which are life, freedom from slavery, recognition before the law, freedom of expression, freedom from arbitrary arrest, education, ect.
]Where do they come from?
There are several narratives for where human rights “come from.” Other certainly exist, but a few main lines of reasoning are:
]They do not exist
A common argument against human rights is that they do not in fact “exist.” Jeremy Bentham is the most famous exponent of this view and argued that "natural rights" (i.e. those that exist above a legal system) are “nonsense” and that natural and imprescriptible rights are “nonsense upon stilts.”[1] Other more contemporary thinkers, such as Alasdair MacIntyre, concur with Bentham’s argument that natural or human rights are artificially-elevated nonsense and claim that “there are no such rights, and belief in them is one with belief in witches or unicorns.”
For some commentators, the fact that human rights may lack a foundation is irrelevant. Even if they are convenient fictions, they are powerful ones with the potential to considerably improve the lot of large swathes of humanity. Even if we cannot agree that they “exist" in a metaphysical sense, argues this school, we should still use human rights as legal or political tools to give voice to the demands of the voiceless.
]Philosophical Roots
The most common narrative of where human rights “come from” has its roots in Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jean-Jaques Rousseau. These philosophical giants wrote thousands of pages of dense theory, but for our purposes, a crude “nutshell” summary will do. For Hobbbes, humans had natural rights by virtue of their humanity. The state of nature symbolized perfect freedom and right, but allowed perpetual war and rendered life “nasty, brutish and short.” Thus it was rational for humans to give up certain of those rights and freedoms in order to increase security. Locke modified this vision by agreeing that the state of nature entailed a perfect freedom and uncontrolled enjoyment of rights, but that humans created government to better protect those rights, not necessaritly to ensure order. Thus government ought not be a Leviathan, but rather a system subjugated by rights of the people. Rousseau also took the state of nature as his starting point and observed that “man is born free but everywhere finds himself in chains.” Thus we must subjugate government to the general will in order to recover remnants of our freedom. The common thread running through these thinkers for our purposes is that humans have rights and that those rights out to be taken seriously.
Subsequent documents put these theories to practice, most notably the 1776 American Declaration of Independence and the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. Thomas Jefferson’s claim that “all men are created equal…and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” was certainly a watershed moment in the history of human rights and liberation, even though the thick irony that Jefferson was a slave holder is not lost on contemporary society. In 1990 the Organization of the Islamic Conference made the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam, which is a powerful argument for a conception of human rights with Islam as its underpinning.
]They are Actor-Oriented
Notable scholar Mahmood Mamdani, among others, has argued that human rights are “actor-oriented.” From this perspective, human rights are developed and informed by the struggles of those struggling against the state or other powerful entities. Thus, as Mamdani argues, rights are borne out of oppression:
“Without the experience of sickness, there can be no idea of health. And without the fact of oppression, there can be no practice of resistance and no notion of rights…Wherever there was (and is) oppression – and Europe had no monopoly over oppression in history – there must come into being a conception of rights.”
For an overview of this perspective, see the Institute for Development Studies working paper at [2].
]Rights Have Always Been With Us
Others argue that some notion of human dignity or the inherent worth of the human being have always been with us. These scholars tend to look through historical or religious texts like the Bible, Koran, ancient Greek or Roman philosophy, or writings of figures such as Bartolome de las Casas to demonstrate that nearly every tradition of thought has some notion of human dignity. On this account, human rights then make perfect sense because they are a sort of amalgamation of the best that our respective traditions have to offer. See Micheline Ishay’s book "The Human Rights Reader."
]Generations or “Waves” of Rights
Briefly tracing the development of rights can show how they are subject to historical, social, political and economic forces. Scholars often break the development of rights into “generations” or “waves.” From the end of World War II until the end of the Cold War, human rights were the victim of politics as the Western Bloc refused to endorse many social, economic and cultural rights while the Soviet Bloc was equally dismissive of documents espousing civil and political rights. It should be noted that many scholars object to a schema dividing rights in this way because it undermines the inalienability and unity of all human rights.
]First Generation
In the first such generation come what we today call civil and political rights. These are essentially rights that guarantee protection vis-à-vis the state and its organs. The archetypical document in this category is the US Bill of Rights protecting freedom of speech, freedom from cruel and unusual punishment and other“classic”rights.
]Second Generation
The second generation is often said to be comprised of economic, social and cultural rights such as those enshrined in the ICESCR. These include obligations by the state to provide adequate standard of living, health care, housing and free primary education, along with a slew of other rights. These have led to a robust debate and body of research on the “justicibility” of these sorts of rights. In other words, how are they to be implemented within a rights-based framework? The General Comments of the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, along with some landmark apex court decisions, such as The Government of the Republic of South Africa vs. Irene Grootboom dealing with housing rights and Olga Tellis vs. Bombay Municipal Corporation ruling on the right to livelihood in India have wrestled with these questions in different ways.
]Third Generation
The third generation or wave of rights has largely, although not completely, come since the end of the Cold War. Although a less uniform group than either of the first two generations, these can encompass group rights, rights to a clean or nuclear-free environment, or rights vis-à-vis multi-national business. It remains to be seen how most of these nascent rights will develop and a trenchant critisism of them is that if we are to articulate every political demand in the framework of rights, then we devalue those human rights we already have. Since the "original" human rights are not even protected yet, this argument goes, then we should not be pushing the rights discourse further.
]Critiques
There are numerous critiques of human rights aside from the foundational argument that they do not exist. Although more certainly exist, some common critiques are as follows:
]Sovereignty
This critique has two different perspectives. First, many argue that sovereignty is the basis of the world political system and that any action that erodes sovereignty is ultimately damaging. Human rights, being inherently international and intimately tied with the United Nations, certainly fall into this category. Institutions like the International Criminal Court that are seen to be eroding sovereignty are especially opposed. Second, some argue that a historically constructed nation-state system actually stifles the protection and promotion of human rights, since governments can “hide behind” sovereignty after abusing human rights.
]Security
The inherent tension between freedom and security is the starting point for the security critique. Human rights grant rights to the accused criminal or terrorist that may make it more difficult to guarantee safety for the general citizenry. The oft-cited hypothetical question “is torture justified if there is a ticking time bomb in the middle of a crowded city and torture is the only way to extract the location” is designed to show that in some situations, torture or a denial of civil rights may be a worthwhile trade-off to ensure safety. Those universally against torture argue that it rarely extracts accurate information as a person will say anything to stop the pain or that it simply breeds more resentment against the government and society by disgruntled groups.
A timely take on the relationship between human rights and debate manifests itself in the form of terrorism versus civil liberties. What is an appropriate trade-off between security from terrorism and civil liberties? A security perspective may argue that there are certain times when it is valid to violate rights of the few for the safety of the majority. At least one human rights scholar, Conor Gearty of the London School of Economics, argues that terrorism ought to be dealt with in the "criminal justice" model, with all the civil liberties granted to terror suspects that we grant to other criminal suspects.[3]
]Relativism
From this perspective, human rights are a Western philosophical construction and thus a culturally particular set of ideas not universally applicable. The American Anthropological Association (AAA) made an extremely skeptical statement on the entrenchment of human rights in 1948, but in 1999 amended its stance.[4] The Asian values debate in the 1990s was an instructive microcosm of the more general debate. Proponents of Asian Values, such as former Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew[5] (although he seems to have recanted on this view),[6] argued that “Asian” culture is different from Western culture in its notions of hierarchy, gender roles, sense of duty and preference for order, thus rendering human rights not entirely applicable in an Asian context. Opponents, such as former South Korean President Kim Dae Jung or Nobel Prize winning economist and philosopher Amartya Sen argued that Asia itself is a diverse place rendering talk of overarching "Asian Values” overblown. [7] Furthermore, former South Korean president Kim Dae Jung argues that that “Asian Values” are a self-serving smokescreen used by Asian leaders to keep control over their societies.[8]
]Judicial Power
With human rights operationalized as a legal mechanism, some critics point out that they grant too much power to unelected and unaccountable judges. This debate was particularly well-developed in the United Kingdom leading up to the 1998 adoption of the UK Human Rights Act, which incorporated some sections of the European Convention on Human Rights into domestic law. Granting too much power to judges, on this account, subverts democracy because they are unelected and unaccountable. It is argued that this is particularly damaging to common people as those likely to have the resources to attend a law course and pursue a prestigious legal career are likely to be priviledged and out of touch with the masses.
]Marxist Critiques
There are several varieties of Marxist critiques of human rights. The most common argues that political emancipation is only valuable if accompanied by economic emancipation. In other words, what good is a right to vote if there is not enough food to eat or if I have no heat during a harsh winter? The emergence of economic, social and cultural rights has cut down on the power of this critique, but nevertheless Marxists argue that civil and political rights are still unjustly preferred in the status quo. Consider that humanitarian intervention or sanctions are usually only discussed when a nasty government is oppressing its people politically and not in cases of simple economic poverty. A more radical argument is that human rights are simply a cloak for Western business interest. Since business needs governments to enforce contracts and ensure a stable environment, the West pushes human rights to aid its own economic interests.
]Human Rights in debate
In debate, “X is a human right” is often used as a synonym for “X is good” or “X is just.” This is rarely convincing unless the other team is incredibly and obviously abusive of a thoroughly entrenched human right. It can be an especially flimsy argument if the other team has one of the aforementioned critiques of human rights ready to put doubt in the minds of the audience. More powerful arguments may revolve around the need to entrench the legitimacy of human rights in order to improve the lot of the world’s poor and oppressed or to demonstrate the unique need to uphold human rights in that particular framework. Demonstrating how human rights equate to an active citizenry able to challenge the authority of its government is powerful. In other words, if a government begins to do nasty things, then a human rights-conscious citizenry can act as a check against that power.
]External Links
- The University of Minnesota Human Rights Library has more than 85,000 documents
- Articles and transcripts from the London School of Economics Centre for the Study of Human Rights
- Working papers at the New York University Center for Human Rights and Global Justice