ARE WE WITNESSING THE DEATH OF HUMAN RIGHTS?

If we are to serve as a beacon for human rights, we must continue to perfect here at home the rights and values which we espouse around the world - Jimmy Carter

While I am not a historical determinist, I believe that history moves in ways that are broadly dialectical. Political currents that traverse one direction frequently change course and move in an opposite one, often eluding precise predictions. Mid-twentieth-century fascism reflected what was arguably the nadir of conduct in the entire career of humankind. Auschwitz was the centerpiece of unqualified evil.

Yet World War II, which caused the deaths of more than 60 million human beings, was followed by a period of unprecedented flourishing. Europe, which had experienced centuries of warfare was at peace. NATO was created to create cooperation and sustain mutual security. Japan, the victim of nuclear bombardment, after the war, generated one of the world's strongest economies. In the United States, the post-war decades saw the emergence of a flourishing middle class. Contemporaneously with the emergence of human rights, and beginning with India in 1947, the world underwent the process of decolonization bringing independence and commensurate self-respect to the peoples of Africa and Asia. While human rights did not directly foster the move toward national independence, the right of people toward self-determination has been factored into the human rights canon and is universally accepted as a collective human right.

Aspiring not to replicate the horrors of the 20th century, the victors of World War II joined together to create the United Nations. Its primary purpose was to offset international aggression. Yet recognizing that individual persons needed protection, one of the UN's early projects was the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which in 30 brief articles lays out the rights possessed by all persons based on their humanity alone. It is my view that the achievements of the Universal Declaration (UDHR) have been under-recognized. Since its creation, human rights have become a mainstay of international discourse and diplomacy. Its drafting has led to the creation of a human rights culture, promoted by thousands of non-governmental organizations, and inspiring the work of millions of people around the globe, overwhelmingly volunteers. While previously seldom mentioned, human rights are everywhere and now accepted globally, in theory, if not in practice. Human rights define how governments need to treat their citizens.

On a personal note, I have devoted much of my career to the promotion of human rights, both as an activist, and for more than 20 years as an academic, serving as a professor in the graduate school at Columbia University, at the UN's University for Peace in Costa Rica, and other universities. My devotion to human rights has not merely been a professional commitment; it has been a morally imbued passion. While human rights have been codified into international law, it is at its core a moral idea. At the center of human rights is the protection and promotion of human dignity. This is its primary purpose and its pursuit has been a source of inspiration and ethical fulfillment.

As I would often tell my students, despite its almost self-evidence, human rights is both a very new idea and a radical one. While the term has appeared sporadically since the 17th century, Franklin Roosevelt was the first American president to invoke its use with frequency. Human rights is a radical idea because it has universalized the concept of rights and as such has enabled the enfranchisement of multitudes of people who historically have been marginalized and oppressed.

While the values that inform human rights can be traced to the Bible, rights as a political concept had their original in the 17th century with the emergence of the modern state. Human rights emerge out of the concept of natural rights, elaborated by such thinkers as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, and others exponents of the Enlightenment. But it is only in my lifetime that the idea has come to complete fruition.

Historically the rights a person claimed were qualified by one's social status or accidental properties, such as race, sex, religion, ethnicity, and economic standing. Caucasians had rights that Blacks and indigenous persons did not. Men claimed rights that women lacked, and Christians enjoyed rights that Jews and others did not share. The propertied enjoyed rights that the landless lacked, and so forth. The human condition was marked by structural inequality enforced by law. With the emergence of human rights, all those qualifiers, which differentiated people for all history, were dispensed with; they are out the window and no longer count. The only thing that does is one's humanity. If an entity is a human being, he or she possesses human rights.

The effects of that development, as implied, have been monumental. It has stood behind and inspired the progressive enfranchisement and equality of widening circles of persons who, since the dawn of civilization, have been relegated to discrimination, degradation, and persecution. Since the adoption of the UDHR, now endorsed by almost all the world's nations, we have witnessed the civil rights movement, the increased equality of women, the recognition of the rights of Indigenous peoples, and more recently the attainment of rights by gays and the disabled. With the human rights idea hovering in the background, we have seen the dramatic move toward equality of multitudes of people who have relatively voiceless, if not politically unseen.

Human rights is a broad concept that politically at least plays two roles. The Universal Declaration has now spawned more than a hundred covenants and documents addressing categories of persons who have been historically disadvantaged. Many have been codified into international law. But human rights have also stood above social realities and, as such, point the way to a desired condition which, if enacted, would redress circumstances marked by inequality and oppression. In short, human rights express a driving aspiration, and in our current era do the heavy lifting of progressive social change. If people are the victims of injustice, very often they will protest their condition in the name of human rights.

Rights, including human rights, are of two types. There are rights as immunities, which describe what governments may not do to you. There are rights as entitlements, which describe what governments must do for you. We commonly associate the former with political rights that are well known to Americans, the right to speech, association, the right to marry and equality within marriage, religious belief, the right to movement, a fair trial, and the right to own property. The Declaration also prohibits slavery and the slave trade, torture as well as “...cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” The Declaration, in its preamble, proclaims the unqualified equality of men and women, a guarantee, which I contend was ahead of its time when the Universal Declaration was adopted in 1948.

Entitlements partake of economic rights, inclusive of the right to food, clothing, the right to work, limits to work, rest and leisure, and periodic holidays with pay, unemployment insurance, and support issuing from circumstances beyond the control of the individual. Also included in the UDHR is the right to education. It should be noted that the governments of the Western European nations take these rights seriously; for the United States, for the most part, they remain matters of political contestation.

Implied by the UDHR is the social welfare state, mandating that if the economy is insufficient to enable a person to live a life of dignity, then it is the role of the state to provide what is needed to meet that standard. The Declaration also makes explicit that democratic participation is also construed as a fundamental human right. Article 21, paragraph 3 states, “The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage, and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.”

It should be stated that the Universal Declaration is not a component of international law. It was enacted as a resolution of the UN General Assembly. It floats above the legal regime and as such can avoid detailed entanglements to which law is often subjected. Its strength emerges from its moral character and the growing sense in the post-war world that the world was moving in a direction that increasingly reflected national aspirations.

The 1970s was the decade in which human rights reached its high water mark. President Jimmy Carter, in his inaugural speech of 1977 proclaimed that human rights would be the centerpiece of American foreign policy. It was then that Amnesty International, which attracted millions of members, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Dictatorships in Latin America, and the Refusnik movement in the Soviet Union, brought human rights to the forefront of international concern. The Treaty of Rome, ratified in 2002, created the International Criminal Court, which many saw as the fulfillment of the Nuremberg trials. The scope of human rights has been growing, and as noted, has gained acceptance as to how human beings need to be treated. Nations that continue to violate human rights – and they all do – will always deny those violations. It is a manner of honoring human rights in their breach. The human rights movement has been a triumph of humanity.

The Trump administration has gone beyond the neglect of human rights. It is committed to their destruction. The attack on economic rights is the most pervasive. According to an article produced by the American Journal of Nursing:

“The Trump administration dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) abruptly in February, placing nearly all of its over 10,000 employees on administrative leave, freezing appropriated funds, and cancelling nearly 5,800 USAID-managed foreign assistance awards—effectively closing an agency that has led in global humanitarian assistance since it was created by President John F. Kennedy in 1961.

Shutting down the agency has dealt a devastating blow to low- and middle-income countries’ efforts to alleviate poverty, provide health care, and improve public health and education. USAID supported a wide variety of critical global programs, including family planning, disease prevention and treatment, immunizations, and famine relief. Nurses played a critical role in USAID, providing education and training to strengthen severely limited in-country nursing and midwifery workforces, delivering direct care, and leading immunization and other health programs.

An estimated 119,000 children and 57,000 adults have died as a result of USAID funding cuts, according to a real-time tracking tool developed by Boston University associate professor Brooke Nichols. Cases of malaria, pneumonia, malnutrition, diarrheal illness, tuberculosis, and HIV have increased dramatically. To date, funding termination has resulted in an estimated 2 million new cases of malaria in children and, if the cuts continue for a year, that number is expected to rise to nearly 12 million, with 168,000 deaths.

According to an analysis in Annals of Internal Medicine, with funding for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) cut, HIV-related deaths would increase by 600,000 in South Africa alone. Food and clean water sources have been cut off for many in countries in Africa, South America, and South Asia. According to the Associated Press (AP), Kenya has lost nutrition support for over 600,000 people living with drought and persistent malnutrition, Congo has lost nutrition support for tens of thousands of malnourished children, and Ethiopia has lost food assistance for more than 1 million people.”

On the political side, the destruction of human rights is taking place closer to home as our democracy is being dismantled. Fundamental rights and liberties are under attack. Most dramatic has been the violations of democratic processes commensurate with Trump's deportation of immigrants. A subset of Trump's heavy-handed maneuvers has been the virtual destruction of the asylum process. Concerning refugees and those seeking asylum, the United States has had an imperfect, but in many ways, admirable history.

It needs to be noted that asylum falls under a different legal regime than the laws governing immigration. Under the conventions of national sovereignty, nation states are at liberty to determine who can enter their respective countries. Asylum seekers, as with refugees, fall under international law and, as such, can claim more far-reaching protections.

In 1951, the United Nations created the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees to help resolve the condition of hundreds of thousands of people displaced by World War II. The Convention makes use of a practice that has been deeply entrenched in human history and can be traced back at least far as the bible. The Convention, which is a component of international law, defines a refugee as a person who has fled his or her country “...owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion...” The convention covers asylum seekers as well. A refugee has gone through an extensive vetting process, usually conducted by the United Nations. An asylum seeker is a person who seeks safety independently and comes on his or her own steam.

The Refugee Act of 1980, promoted by Senator Edward Kennedy, and signed into law by President Jimmy Carter, factored the provisions of the Convention on Refugees into federal law. It was a human rights initiative Americans could be proud of and was a source of our nation's soft power.

Upon his reelection, one of Trump's first initiatives was to suspend the acceptance of refugees and asylum seekers and cut off funding for refugee resettlement in the United States. He contended that refugees would take resources from Americans, though refugees have long proven to be hard-working and model residents, whose commitments have strengthened the American economy. Trump's shutting down the process has left approximately 600,000 people in limbo having endured great suffering and having waited long periods of time to enter. While the process has always been politicized, Trump's ending the refugee and asylum process is a violation of domestic and international law. It is a gross contravention of long-standing human rights, the defense of which the United States could be most proud.

Jimmy Carter created the Department of Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs as a sub-department of the State Department. It exemplified the assertive role Carter wanted the United States to play in fostering human rights around the world. The sub-department promoted democracy and defended rights in countries where democracy was gaining a foothold and the protection of rights was weak. Among the responsibilities of the sub-department was to compile an annual almanac of the human rights observance of each nation from A to Z. Starting in the 1970s, US foreign policy imposed an escalating framework of sanctions on nations that perpetrated gross violation of human rights to pressure them to improve their conduct. The text was produced to inform Congress of the facts in order to impose the appropriate sanctions. The department, more recently known as the sub-department on Democracy, Rights, and Labor, is being shut down by Donald Trump with the assistance of Marco Rubio.

Donald Trump has essentially declared war on the International Criminal Court. He has levied sanctions on the Court's chief prosecutor and on four of the ICC's judges. The United States has long had an ambivalent relationship with the Court. Bill Clinton signed the Treaty of Rome, the Court's enabling document, but then reneged on pushing it forward, and it was never ratified by Congress. George W. Bush attempted to destroy it by economically depriving nations that intended to ratify the Treaty. As noted, we can proudly assess the International Criminal Court as a fulfillment of a process begun with the Nuremberg Trials, which the United States ardently supported. Those who opposed our joining the Court argued that it would leave American soldiers, stationed around the globe, vulnerable to prosecution. The Court is designed to function only when nations are incapable of prosecuting their own malefactors; Americans being prosecuted by the Court is highly implausible.

Hillary Clinton regretted our not signing on to the Court, and President Barack Obama cooperated with it as did President Joe Biden.

It is clear that Donald Trump has no use for human rights., as he has little regard for civil liberties in the domestic context. As he has often demonstrated, he is admiring and supportive of dictators and autocrats for whom suppression of human rights is de rigueur.

The question confronts us: Are we witnessing the demise of international human rights?

It may all depend on the fate of liberal democracy in the United States. Since the emergence of the human rights culture, the United States has had a conflictual and contradictory history with human rights, which has arguably veered into hypocrisy. On the one hand, America has seen itself as the global champion of human rights. On the other, it has denied that the world has anything to tell us as to how to behave with regard to the treatment of our own citizens. The US has refrained from ratifying several major human rights documents. It is often pointed out that we are the only nation that has rejected ratification of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. We have failed to ratify the highly influential Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, sometimes referred to as the International Women's Bill of Rights. Nor has the US ratified the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Providing access to people with disabilities is one area in which the United States has been ahead of much of the world, and ratifying the Convention would help bring other nations up to US standards.

But beyond the legal framework, American conduct with regard to human rights has been mixed. As the 800 pound gorilla on the world scene, in domestically exemplifying democratic liberties, the United States has provided a major global foundation for human rights. Our internal constitutional and democratic framework leads by example. Through a multitude of foreign aid programs, the United States has internationally combated disease, promoted education, fostered democracy, and underwritten countless programs that have promoted and preserved human rights. However, despite American rhetoric, the US had supported the most vile and oppressive dictatorships. During the Cold War, we lent military and economic support to regimes no matter how brutal as long as they were anti-communist. One thinks of Pinochet's Chile in the 1970s, El Salvador and Guatemala in the 1980s, and numerous corrupt African dictatorships. The innocent lives lost in America's forever wars, inclusive of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, number in the millions. American support of Israel in its devastation of Gaza, is another example of the United States assistance to ally at the expense of human rights.

The overarching question is whether the international human rights program can survive the destruction wrought by the Trump administration. The issue appears to me to be analogous as to whether democracy can survive in the United States. It may arguably depend on the strength and endurance of America's institutions. Are they strong enough to support democracy in the long range as it is being dismantled by the administration from above?

As noted, the United States has been the major bulwark supporting human rights globally. But it is not the only one. The human rights phenomenon is a universal movement with centers, and countless organizations and individuals, beyond the boundaries of the United States. Human rights have also been long factored into the foreign policies of other nations. Do these other sources of human rights have enough staying power to weather the American storm? Will human rights endure, or will they fade away as a bright, but transient, moment in the annals of history?

From our present standpoint, we cannot confidently answer these questions. However, when it comes to human rights I believe that there is something perennial about them. They are lodged in the human heart as the yen for freedom and dignity are so preserved. As the political skies grow darker, human rights may fade from the global scene. If so, it will be for future generations to recreate them.