THE TRIUMPHS AND CHALLENGES OF HUMAN RIGHTS
The 75th anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a cause for celebration. In these times we need to recall and reclaim its progressive vision for humankind.
This Sunday marks the 75th anniversary of the proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It is an anniversary worthy of our attention. The Declaration is one of the great civilizing achievements of the modern era.
The birth of the Declaration came at a propitious moment. It was part of the effort to rebuild the world after the unprecedented horrors of World War II. It is an expression of the aspiration that human intelligence could be employed to construct the frameworks needed to ensure that the human family would live in peace and that cooperation would replace conflict. The United Nations, of which the Declaration was a creation, was the most elaborate expression of the global optimism of the post-war era.
The world again confronts a dark moment. People in the United States and abroad are despairing of democracy and are tiring of the burdens of freedom. In a manner that inspires dread, authoritarianism and the power-craving despots promoting it, are gaining the allegiance of masses of people. It is therefore timely to reflect on the creation of the Universal Declaration and the context out of which it emerged.
In my view, it provides hope. While I am not a historical determinist, and believe in an open future, my reading of the human career suggests that history ebbs and flows. In short, there is what we might refer to as a “soft dialectic” threading its way through historical events. Human failings often give rise to better, more constructive times. Problems propel solutions. In the short window between the end of World War II and before the Cold War took hold, the nadir of human experience was answered by an era of optimism. Europe was at peace and was rebuilt. Japan became democratic and was poised for economic growth. The United States experienced the unprecedented growth of a solid middle class. Science and technology, which enabled us to win the War, augured a future of greater comfort and progress, from the creation of the interstate highway system to suburban homes outfitted with labor-saving devices and the blandishments of television.
This reality should save us from despair in these hard times. Democracy hangs by a thread and social dislocations abound. But standing at the precipice may inspire us and people elsewhere to rally their spirits and determination to do the right thing to restore democratic practices and values for the sake of recreating solid and benign political conditions as we move ahead. It is a hope. But it is not an idle hope, and, as I suggest, not without precedent.
I was a professor of human rights for twenty years, teaching in the graduate program at Columbia University and at Hunter College. I also traveled to Costa Rica four times to teach at the United Nations University for Peace, outside of San Jose. Prior to becoming an academic in the field, I was, and continue to be, a human rights activist. I believe in human rights, and I aver that the articulation of the human rights idea has significantly aided in the improvement of the human condition. Human rights, though encoded in international law, remains, for the most part, aspirational. As a moral ideal, it is a lodestar pointing the way to a world in which the dignity of all persons will be upheld, and it sets a baseline that opens opportunities for human flourishing. During the Cold War, those striving to free themselves from the yolk of oppression often undergirded their struggles by invoking some variant of socialism. As socialism has waned, very often those seeking freedom and equality will do so in the name of human rights. Human rights does the heavy lifting of social justice.
The Universal Declaration, as the United Nations itself, was born in response to the unprecedented bloodletting of World War II. The primary purpose of the United Nations was and is to find ways to prevent acts of national aggression, that is, war. It was recognized that a component of that aspiration is to provide ways to protect the rights and fundamental freedoms of individuals, given that individuals had suffered greatly from the utter violation of their rights. The Declaration makes explicit that there is a causative connection between protecting fundamental rights and securing peace.
The Declaration states in its preamble “Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice, and peace in the world.” As noted, respect for individual rights is linked to freedom, justice, and peace. In an oblique reference to the Holocaust, it states, “Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people.” Some will no doubt recognize that the last phrase was lifted from Franklin Roosevelt's Four Freedoms, State of the Union Address of 1941, in which he put forward a vision for the post-war world.
In 1946, one of the major arms of the UN, the Economic and Social Council, created a Human Rights Commission, its first charge being to draft what was then called an International Bill of Rights. The Commission brought together 18 scholars, selected by their countries to engage in the drafting process. Noting that the document needed to be reflective of diverse cultures and not exclusively Western, those involved in the process included Charles Malik, a Lebanese philosopher, Peng Chun Chang, a Chinese philosopher and diplomat, Rene Cassin, a French lawyer, Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize winner, and John Humphrey, a Canadian diplomat. The chairperson who led the drafting effort was Eleanor Roosevelt, the widow of America's beloved president and herself a life-long social justice advocate.
The universal character of the Declaration is subject to continuous debate, and how its origins and content are assessed is consequential. Not surprisingly, human rights has become inevitably politicized. Among the main authors cited, despite their nationalities, Malik was educated at Harvard and Peng- Chun Chang at Columbia University. Virtually every nation has signed on to the Declaration, (there are now 193 member states in the United Nations) but we need to conclude that in many cases the motivation did not relate to a coincidence of values as much as political expediency. Nevertheless, subscribe to the Declaration they did, and human rights has become a mainstay of global discourse within disparate societies and among nations. It sets norms as to how nations need to treat their citizens, and it holds them accountable for that treatment.
It took two years to complete the Declaration as the drafting process went through seven stages of review and revision. On December 10th, 1948, the final version was presented to the General Assembly. It passed, with 48 nations voting in favor, none opposed, and eight abstentions. Those abstentions included members of the Soviet block, South Africa, and Saudi Arabia. The reasons why apartheid South Africa abstained are obvious. Saudi Arabia abstained because of the article relating to marital freedom and Article 18 which allows for the changing of one's religion. Eleanor Roosevelt, who had an esteemed career in the arenas of public service and justice, considered her role as chairperson of the drafting committee of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to have been her most important public achievement.
The Universal Declaration lays out in 30 brief articles the fundamental rights that all persons, without exception, possess. These include political rights, such as the right to be free of slavery and torture, and rights very familiar to Americans, such as the right to free speech, association, freedom of religion and conscience, a fair trial, and the right to seek asylum from persecution. In a statement that put the Declaration ahead of its time, it proclaims a flat-footed and unqualified equality between men and women. The Declaration makes clear that it is in line with a democratic form of government.
The Declaration also includes so-called economic and social rights, or entitlements, such as the right to employment, and the right to food, housing, and social support by government if one cannot support himself or herself. As such, it implicitly conforms with the requirements of the social welfare state. It guarantees the right to form labor unions. It proclaims the right to education and the right to periodic holidays with pay.
This last right, specified in Article 24, may seem perhaps too tangential to find its way into a document proclaiming fundamental freedoms. But as I like to clarify to my students, human rights did not descend from the heavens in the form of Platonic ideals. They were forged out of the concrete struggles of men and women who were severely deprived of their freedom, equality, and dignity. One may surmise that Article 24 emerged out of the labor movement of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in which people sought freedom from the crushing tedium of work and the oppression wrought by the Industrial Revolution. People gave their lives in those struggles. One can also see in the article a modern resonance of the Hebrew Sabbath, suggesting that one's humanity is not commensurate with his or her labor and turning profits for the bosses and owners.
While we find that the rights articulated in the Declaration are almost self-evident, the reality is that the human rights idea is both very new, and I contend, very radical.
I think we underestimate how radical the human rights idea is. It reflects a categorical change in our understanding of the status of the human person and his and her relation to his and her political and social environment. Throughout history, people had certain rights, but the rights they had were tagged to contingent or secondary properties such as their race, religion, sex, gender, wealth, and social status. So men had rights that women did not have. Christians had rights that Jews and pagans did not have. Whites had rights that Black and brown-skinned people did not have. People who owned property had rights that the landless did not have. The rich had rights that the poor lacked. People who were high-born had rights that the low-born did not. In the Middle Ages, princes, aristocrats, and knights had rights that serfs and vassals could not claim.
With the coming of the human rights idea, all these contingent, secondary factors, which differentiated and limited people's rights, were completely abolished. They were thrown out the window, and in principle don't count any longer. This idea is a radical departure from 10,000 years of human history, and its effects have been monumental and continue to be.
The sole attribute required to possess human rights is that the being in question is a human being. Rather than rights emerging from one race, religion, sex, or class, human rights are based on one's humanity alone, pure and simple.
There are a few basic properties that human rights possess. The first is that they are universal. If there are eight billion people who walk the face of the earth, not a single one is devoid of human rights. If there were, the very idea of human rights would suffer the demise of self-contradiction.
A political ramification of the human rights program, which is quite modern, is that its universality is such that the enforcement of human rights transcends international boundaries. What's meant is that since the mid-seventeenth century and the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, when the world was divided into nation states, it was agreed that each country was sovereign, and had the right to maintain sovereignty over its own citizens. So, for example, if I am a French citizen and am unjustly imprisoned by the French government, I can petition for my freedom to the French government, but no further than the French government. The Nuremberg Trials after World War II perforated the constraints of national sovereignty. When the Nazi leaders were tried for their horrid crimes by an international court, the idea of national sovereignty began to break down. The world had an interest to ensure that the Nazis, who claimed to have been obedient to their own national laws, nevertheless were guilty of violating international laws and standards, among them so-called “crimes against humanity,” which entails the killing of individuals in very large numbers.
So it is with human rights in general. In other words, your interest and mine in protecting internationally recognized human rights pierces the wall of national sovereignty. In short, the protection of human rights anywhere is the legitimate concern of everyone everywhere.
A second property of human rights is that they are inalienable. They are inalienable in the way in which a person's shadow is inalienable. In this sense, a person may not sell himself or herself into slavery, even if the person wishes to do so and could find a buyer. Such an act would be a denial of one's intrinsic humanity. Most human rights are not absolute, and as such can be qualified when they collide with other rights. But they cannot be erased, just as one cannot be done out of his or her humanity. A third characteristic of human rights implies that human beings are autonomous agents. This attribute, it needs to be mentioned, does engender disagreement with some holding conservative religious views, and serves as the basis for dispute as to the application of human rights in particular cultural venues. A fourth characteristic of human rights is that they all possess a heavy moral content.
The human rights idea has proven to be an extraordinarily powerful one. The Universal Declaration has spawned over a hundred additional human rights declarations, covenants, and conventions that expand the range of human rights and focus on various problems and populations, and elaborate the rights they possess. Some of the major documents are the Convention Against Torture, The Convention Prohibiting Racial Discrimination, The Convention on the Rights of the Child, The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), The Refugee Convention, and the Convention of the Rights of People with Disabilities.
Almost 20 after the Universal Declaration was adopted, the United Nations produced two covenants, the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Covenant on Economic, Social and Culture Rights. These documents respectively take the political and economic articles of the Declaration and expand them. The two Covenants are the pillars of the international law of human rights. I should mention that the United States, though it has ratified the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, has yet to ratify the Economic Covenant. The US government does not recognize economic rights as truly rights, as do the nations of Western Europe, for example.
The human rights program is addressed to all humankind, but it is the nation states that are primarily responsible for ensuring that the human rights of the people within them are respected. There is a fateful irony in this, in that governments, which are required to uphold and protect the human rights of their citizens, are often the very abusers and violators of human rights.
It is this reality that has spawned a vast international network of non-governmental organizations, which work to ensure that governments live up to the human rights commitments they have pledged to uphold. There are more than 10,000 of these non-governmental organizations. Some, like Amnesty International, with three million members, are very large. Others, like my Northern New Jersey Sanctuary Coalition, which I founded several decades ago, are small. Some are religiously based, and many are secular. Many concentrate on political violations, such as political imprisonment and torture, or the plight of refugees. Others deal with issues of economic development. Many focus on specific violations or regional issues. Others such as Human Rights Watch, like Amnesty, have a broader agenda. Having gone from an unknown concept, human rights is now everywhere.
The last few decades have seen a human rights revolution. The human rights idea stands at the center of the movement for the inclusion of people who have historically been marginalized and have been the objects of inequality and injustice. In the name of human rights, the circle of inclusion has widened to include women, racial minorities, religious minorities, gays and lesbians, indigenous peoples, and people with disabilities. From a historical standpoint, this change has occurred in an astonishingly brief period of time.
I think we tend to under-appreciate how transformative these achievements have been. I remain mindful that we still have far to go (we always do), but the comparison between now and then is remarkable. When my mother graduated from college in 1933, with few exceptions, she could have aspired to a career as a nurse, a school teacher, or a secretary. Today the field is wide open for women, and in the United States, the number of women in medical and law schools exceeds the number of men. Internationally, women's issues have also been put on the agenda. There have been a series of international women's conferences, the most notable in 1995 in Beijing, where my late wife had been a delegate, and where Hillary Clinton famously proclaimed that women's rights are
human rights. We in the United States may not take documents such as the CEDAW very seriously, but in the developing world, where national laws may not provide protection and patriarchy remains deeply entrenched, the international human rights program, and such documents, leapfrog over national neglect and are employed to leverage the empowerment of women. They inspire political movements, often of a global scope.
It is probably not a coincidence that the civil rights movement in the American South was unfolding at the same time as decolonization was taking place in Africa and Asia. Self-determination of peoples is a salient human rights principle, and some have maintained that our civil rights movement was in its own way the American analog to decolonization, and may have helped to inspire it.
Before the 1970s, being gay was an evil that dared not speak its name. Gays were deeply closeted. To be gay was a crime, and the psychiatric establishment defined homosexuality as a mental illness. Yet in just a few decades, gay marriage has gone mainstream in the West and is given protection. However, there remains far to go. There is not yet an international human rights convention defining being gay as a human right, given the large resistance in other parts of the world. But discussion of gay rights as human rights is pervasive in the West, and eventually it may bear influence in other parts of the world.
It was not so long ago that people with physical and mental disabilities remained cloistered in their homes. It was a cause for shame. But no longer. There have been great strides internationally to fully integrate people with disabilities into mainstream society. This is one area in which the United States has been ahead of much of the world.
Human rights has also played a huge role in spurring economic development. In the spirit of human rights, at the turn of the century, the United Nations developed its millennium goals. They have met with considerable success. Extreme poverty has dramatically decreased worldwide. Maternal health has improved and diseases, such as guinea worm, which killed millions of people have been eradicated. Jimmy Carter's work has had much to do with that.
We can also identify two major world-changing events in which human rights was a driving factor. In 1975,the United States and the Soviet Union entered into what was known as the Helsinki Accords. Its third provision stipulated that the US would recognize Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe. In return, the USSR agreed to abide by the provisions of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The presumption was that the Soviet Union got the better of the deal in that the USSR would never liberalize and recognize human rights. And then an unpredictable phenomenon occurred. These agreements spurred an internal dissident movement in the Soviet Union itself. Mostly scientists, artists, and writers, - Andrei Sakharov, the great nuclear physicist best known among them-, began to protest Soviet totalitarianism in the name of human rights. These dissidents or “refuseniks” were very courageous. They were jailed, exiled, and some were injected with psychotropic drugs and put into mental hospitals. The Soviet Union fell for several reasons. But among them was undoubtedly this human rights movement which weakened the system from within, leading to its collapse. One thinks of Vraclav Havel in Czechoslovakia and the Solidarity movement in Poland as carried on in the name of human rights.
We can also look at the international movement to end apartheid in South Africa as a human rights movement. Opposition to that brutal system was often phrased in the language of human rights, and “apartheid” entered the lexicon as a major human rights abuse.
The 1970s marked the high-water mark for human rights. Of all people, Jimmy Carter probably was most responsible for enabling the human rights culture to come into its own and flourish. When Carter declared in his inauguration speech on January 20th, 1977, that human rights would become the centerpiece of American foreign policy, most Americans probably did not know what he was talking about. The Cold War and containing the power, influence, and expansion of the Soviet Union framed American foreign policy. However, Carter believed that American values were America's greatest strength, and promoting human rights was the international expression of those values. It was a potent exposition of what has come to be called “soft power.” Needless to say, those values inevitably had to conflict with America's strategic and policy interests. As a result, Carter's human rights aspirations were applied inconsistently. His human rights program was probably stronger in defending individuals who were persecuted, such as the Soviet dissidents, than it was in implementing broader policies. But Carter was totally sincere in his human rights commitment, and he spoke about human rights continuously. That rhetoric was powerful in raising the spirits of people in prison who would otherwise be forgotten. And as mentioned, Carter's position on human rights spurred a global movement that caught the imagination of activists everywhere.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the flourishing of the human rights culture have been a great triumph of humankind. The values that lie behind it, and the world that it implicitly envisions, speak to what is best in human beings. But human rights also faces problems and challenges, some endemic to what human rights are, and some related to the current moment.
I would like to discuss three challenges to human rights and then comment on what the protection of human rights looks like moving ahead in the future.
The major challenge to human rights pertains to their enforcement. Rights and human rights are, in the most basic sense, claims. They are claims that reciprocally set into motion obligations by the parties to which they are directed that these claims are recognized, respected, and realized by those parties. In short if I have a right against you, you have a duty to uphold that right. When it comes to human rights, it is primarily governments, as noted, that have the duty to recognize and fulfill them. Individuals are the rights holders and governments are the duty bearers.
Yet, as is very clear, governments, when it comes to rights, too often fail to meet their required duties. It then falls on the citizens and the human rights community to petition, persuade and cajole governments into meeting those obligations. As noted, human rights have become a normative part of the international conversation. While every country falls short of meeting their human rights obligations, some egregiously so, no country wants to admit it. When violating human rights, no country wants to be caught with their pants down. Countries when accused of violating human rights, will readily deny it, which is a way of respecting human rights in its breach, so powerful is the idea.
The human rights community finds that it can be useful to take advantage of this reality. A common approach to get countries to meet their human rights obligations is to accurately document those abuses and expose them to the broader public. The approach is commonly referred to as “naming and shaming” and it is often effective in getting nations to improve their human rights performance.
Another approach, which the United States has used since the 1970s, is to employ an escalating series of sanctions on countries that are gross abusers of human rights. It can start with conversations between diplomats and climb up the ladder to withhold economic and military assistance, to encourage nations to improve their human rights performance.
As noted, human rights are codified in international documents which nations ratify, and they thus become international law. International law differs from domestic law in several ways. In the first instance, international law is not legislated. It comes into being by way of treaties between nations. But more importantly, international law is very hard to enforce. If I break a domestic law, I will be apprehended by the police. But there is no international policing agency to enforce international law. Since international law, including the law of human rights, is sustained by treaties, it is enforceable primarily through the mutual self-interest of the consenting nations. When that interest no longer abides, the law that the treaties created breaks down.
It is for this reason that some people believe that international law, in the final analysis, is virtually toothless, and therefore of little use. I think this is not so for several reasons.
First, international law is a legitimate body of law and sometimes domestic courts, even in the United States, will invoke international law to make decisions in American courts.
Secondly, in conversation with an international lawyer, I noted to her that international human rights laws, though difficult to enforce, were similar to “no smoking” signs. She concurred with the analogy. In other words, the human rights regime sends a common message and initiates conversation as to what is prohibited. International law likewise raises awareness. It puts human rights on the agenda. It inspires political movements that change the environment and can spur governments to take action in the service of their protection. It is by no means an empty exercise.
And lastly, there are enforcement mechanisms that the international community is developing to prevent and punish the most egregiously human rights crimes. The most dramatic action occurs when the United Nations raises a peacekeeping force to intervene to prevent or curtail a genocide that is in formation. So-called humanitarian intervention is extremely difficult to pull off and often fails, as it did in Somalia, Congo, and, most dramatically, Rwanda. But sometimes it succeeds, as it did in ending a vicious civil war in Sierra Leone and genocide in East Timor, most often by franchising the intervention to a single country.
But after the fact, the UN has set up special temporary courts to try the perpetrators of the worst crimes. It put on trial the leaders of the genocides in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and much later in Cambodia. It also established a temporary court to try the perpetrators of the civil war in Sierra Leone. In 2002, with the Treaty of Rome, the UN created a permanent International Criminal Court, (ICC) to try the perpetrators of genocide, crimes against humanity, the crime of international aggression, and various war crimes. Some see it as a fulfillment of a process that began at Nuremberg after the War. The ICC had many growing pains, and it is limited in scope. Several major powers are not party to it, including the United States, though the US since Obama does cooperate with it. Currently, the Biden Justice Department has conferred with the ICC with regard to pending war crimes in Ukraine.
Finally, there is a revised judicial approach called Universal Jurisdiction. It is a doctrine that goes back to the 18th century and the prosecution of pirates who were detained on the high seas. Universal jurisdiction asserts that perpetrators of major crimes can be tried in any competent court anywhere. Recently, Germany had put on trial Syrian operatives involved in crimes that took place in Syria during the civil war.
These approaches of enforcing accountability for major human rights crimes are fledgling and episodic events that I believe are steps along the way to international human rights enforcement. They are interesting and admittedly piecemeal. They thereby raise the question of whether partial justice is better than no justice at all. My view is that it is.
A second major challenge to human rights is theoretical and did not exist when the Universal Declaration was adopted in 1948. And that is the issue that has been raised mostly by East Asian and Muslim countries as to whether universal human rights are truly universal, or whether they are specifically an expression of Western values and as such are a renewed expression of Western imperialism foisted on non-Western societies. The West no longer politically colonizes the nations of Asia and Africa, but it can point a critical finger at them and accuse them of human rights abuses. An argument coming from East Asia is that the human rights canon overly values the place of the individual, whereas Eastern peoples are culturally more communal wherein the rights of the group are more salient than those of individuals. It's argued that different cultures give rise to different rights.
For example, for decades the prevailing debate was over female circumcision or female genital mutilation. This is not a fringe phenomenon. It is estimated by the World Health Organization that over two million women and girls alive today have been subjected to genital circumcision. From the normative human rights standard, it is a form of torture and needs to be prohibited. The response of those peoples who have long practiced it is that such criticism reflects an arrogant foreign intrusion on a culture not their own, and it is none of their concern. The debate is usually framed as the contestation between universalism and cultural relativism. The details of the issue will need to await another essay.
Raising the cultural relativism argument makes the application of human rights more difficult. However, through decades of discussion and dialogue, the argument seems, at least for the moment, to have quelled somewhat. Though debate goes on to the extent to which human rights can be applied in an unqualified manner and to what degree they can bend to meet cultural differences, which assuredly exist. Very often these debates pertain to the treatment of women in non-western cultures, which is often informed by religion.
A third challenge to human rights brings us up to the moment and the current world situation. The human rights program is commensurate with democracy and thrives best in a democratic environment. But as we fretfully know, many nations on the planet are despairing of democracy, and authoritarianism is on the rise. Most ominously, here in the United States. Recently in The Atlantic magazine, the historian Anne Applebaum wrote on the changing world order in an article entitled “There Are No Rules.” Her thesis is two-fold. She acknowledges that human rights have very often been violated. But she also notes that they have not been ignored. And it this recognition, I contend, that has been a very significant source of improving the political, economic, and social conditions of many millions of people.
She said as follows:
"The 'rules-based world order' is a system of norms and values that describe how the world ought to work, not how it actually works. This aspirational order is rooted in the idealistic aftermath of the Second World War, when it was transcribed into a series of documents: the United Nations Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN Genocide Convention, and the Geneva Conventions on the laws of war, among others. In the more than seven decades since they were written, these documents have frequently been ignored. The UN Genocide Convention did not prevent genocide in Rwanda. The Geneva Conventions did not stop the Vietnamese from torturing American prisoners of war, did not prevent Americans at Abu Ghraib from torturing Iraqi prisoners of war, and do not prevent Russians from torturing Ukrainian prisoners of war today. Signatories of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights include known violators of human rights, among them China, Cuba, Iran, and Venezuela. The UN Commission on Human Rights deteriorated into parody long ago.
Nevertheless, these documents have influenced real behavior in the real world. Soviet dissidents used to embarrass their government by pointing to human-rights language in treaties the Kremlin had signed and did not respect. Even when fighting brutal or colonial wars, countries that had signed treaties on the laws of war either tried to abide by them—avoiding civilian casualties, for example—or at least felt remorseful when they failed to do so. Americans who mistreated Iraqi prisoners of war were court-martialed, convicted, and sentenced to time in military prisons. The British still agonize over the past behavior of their soldiers in Northern Ireland and the French over theirs in Algeria."
The rule-based order, she notes, has been eroding for some time. She cites China and the genocide against the Uighurs, Putin and Russia's war in Ukraine, Iran and its support of terrorism, and terrorist regimes such as Hamas, which have no use for the laws of war. The U.S., in the war on terror during the Bush regime, created black sites and employed torture as a matter of policy. Her point is, that whereas nations and political actors used to at least acknowledge the rule-based order, they now seem to glory in undoing it and undermining international norms of conduct.
Where this will go and what it says about the future of human rights we cannot know. One thing that seems assured is that when it comes to upholding international respect for human rights, the United States, despite its own sins and its hypocrisy, remains the global 800-pound gorilla. President Biden has pledged to restore a human rights factor to American foreign policy, especially after Trump was committed to destroying it.
The strength of the human rights program, whose 75th anniversary we celebrate this coming December 10th, may very greatly depend on the fate of American democracy. Whether it is established enough and has deep enough roots to survive a faltering democratic America, or political chaos in this country, is something we cannot know. But my personal belief is that human rights will weather the current storms and the autocratic moves we witness abroad and experience at home.
Human rights, as argued, is a powerful idea. It is also inspiring. There are those who believe that just as our humanity is inherent in who we are, so the basis of the human rights idea resides in the human heart, just as the yearning for dignity is inextricable from who we are. Now that it has seen the light of day and has rallied the conscience of countless people worldwide, I believe that human rights has become a permanent beacon that will motivate people to seek justice when justice is denied. The dark winds of political reaction may cause that light to temporarily fade, but it will not be extinguished. If for a time, the human rights idea grows dim, it will be for our children and future generations in another age to reclaim and rebuild it.
Simply your best one yet: informative and inspiring!
Great Summary of all the advances we have made in Human Rights and all the challenges we and humanity face