Bartolomé de las Casas has come to be seen as an early advocate for a concept of universal human rights. He was among the first to develop a view of unity among humankind, stating that "All people of the world are humans," and that they had a natural right to liberty – a combination of Thomist rights philosophy with Augustinian political theology
Mary Ann Glendon writes:
"When Latin American nations gained independence in the 19th century, those two strains converged, and merged with an older, more universalist, natural law tradition. The result was a distinctively Latin American form of rights discourse. Paolo Carozza traces the roots of that discourse to a distinctive application, and extension, of Thomistic moral philosophy to the injustices of Spanish conquests in the New World. The key figure in that development seems to have been Bartolomé de Las Casas, a 16th-century Spanish bishop who condemned slavery and championed the cause of Indians on the basis of a natural right to liberty grounded in their membership in a single common humanity. 'All the peoples of the world are humans,' Las Casas wrote, and 'all the races of humankind are one.' According to Brian Tierney, Las Casas and other Spanish Dominican philosophers laid the groundwork for a doctrine of natural rights that was independent of religious revelation 'by drawing on a juridical tradition that derived natural rights and natural law from human rationality and free will, and by appealing to Aristotelian philosophy.'"
Glendon, Mary Ann (2003). "The Forgotten Crucible: The Latin American Influence on the Universal Human Rights Idea". Harvard Human Rights Journal. 16.
Larry Siedentop in his 2014 publication Inventing the Individual says:
Europeans - out of touch with the roots of their tradition - often seem to lack conviction, while Americans may be succumbing to a dangerously simplistic version of their faith.
On neither side of the Atlantic is there an adequate understanding of the relationship between liberal secularism and Christianity.
Failure to understand that relationship makes it easier to underestimate the moral content on liberal secularism. In the Western world today, it contributes to two temptations, to what might be called two ‘liberal heresies’. The first is the temptation to reduce liberalism to the endorsement of market economics, the satisfaction of current wants or preferences without worrying much about the formation of those wants or preferences. In doing so, it narrows the claims of justice. This temptation reduces liberalism to a crude form of utilitarianism. The second temptation is best described as ‘individualism’, the retreat into a private sphere of family and friends at the expense of civic spirit and political participation. This weakens the habit of association and eventually endangers the self-reliance which the claims of citizenship require. Both of these heresies focus on the second word of the core liberal value - ‘equal liberty’ - at the expense of the first word. They sacrifice the emphasis on reciprocity - on seeing ourselves in others and others in ourselves - which we have seen to be fundamental to inventing the individual and which gives liberalism its lasting moral value.
If we in the West do not understand the moral depth of our own tradition, how can we hope to shape the conversation of mankind?
Secularism versus religion?
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 ...This is the first sentence of the Preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.Article 1 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)
Like other cultures, Western Culture is founded on shared beliefs. but, in contrast to most others, Western beliefs privilege the idea of equality. and, it is this privileging of equality - of a premise that excludes permanent inequalities of status and ascriptions of authoritative opinion to any person or group -which underpins the secular state and the idea of fundamental or ‘natural’ rights. Thus, the only birthright recognised by the liberal tradition is individual freedom.These two paragraphs begin Larry Siedentop's Epilogue and final Chapter of his 2014 publication Inventing the Individual. See the Guardian review.
Christianity played a decisive part in this. yet the idea that liberalism and secularism have religious roots is by no means widely understood. Evidently, the separation of church and state - the first great objective of the liberal tradition - has itself drawn attention away from these roots of secularism. But so too has a ‘civil war’ that long raged in Europe, and now may be spreading to the United States. What is this civil war? It is a war in which religious belief and ‘godless’ secularism are understood as irreconcilable opponents, . . .
The Epilogue is titled Christianity and Secularism, where he discusses his main concluding theme and what he identifies and terms a 'civil war' between secularism and religious belief. This secularism he explains, in a detailed historical analysis that forms the body of the work, results from developments in canonical law in the context of the European Catholic church that, significantly, predate both the Renaissance and the Reformation. He continues . . .
Of course, the last two hundred years have overlaid the hostility between the two camps. The religious camp has come, by and large, to accept civil liberty and religious pluralism. The anti-clericals have - with the exception of hardline Marxists and writers such as Richard Dawkins - given up on the attempt to extirpate religious belief. But the old antagonism still lurks under the surface. the visceral reaction of the French left to the prospect of acknowledging the Christian roots of Europe has its counterpart in much church rhetoric deploring the growth of ‘Godless’ secularism. Even Benedict XVI, a most learned pope, was not free of this habit. he called for an understanding between religions in order to combat secularismChristianity and secularism continued . . .
Siedentop's take on an historical bias against seeing human rights as emerging from the Ecclesiastic Law of Church rather than the state runs as follows:
What is characteristic about historical writing in recent centuries? It is an inclination to minimise the moral and intellectual distance between the modern world and the ancient world, while at the same time maximising the moral and intellectual distance between modern Europe and the middle ages. that inclination first appeared, we have seen, in the Italian renaissance, with its admiration for antiquity and hostility to the ‘scholasticism’ of the universities and the church. But it was in the eighteenth century, especially among the French philosophers that this inclination developed into a passionate anti-clericalism, which reshaped the understanding of European history.
An overriding temptation for many eighteenth-century historians was to present the ancient world as ‘secular’, and in that way provide a point of contact with European states in which the role of the church and of the clergy was contested and being redefined. In Protestant countries this had long been under way, but by the eighteenth century even Catholic countries were involved, as the expulsion of the Jesuits from several of them reveals.
Understanding the ancient world as secular - with citizens ‘free’ from the oppression of priests and a privileged, dogmatic church - became an important weapon in the arsenal of political argument. in the same way, the conception of the medieval church as aspiring to, if not always achieving, a theocratic regime in which thought was titled by ’superstition’ and clerical self-interest provided another weapon. Neither of these conceptions was baseless. Yet both were, I think, more wrong than right. for each overlooked something fundamental, something radically inconsistent with their account of the past. so let us review what we have discovered.
So instead of an antiquity free of religion, priesthood and superstition - a ‘secular’ inspiration for modern Europe - we find on closer examination that the family, tribe and city were each a kind of church. Each had its own rites, a worship with very elaborate requirements. ‘Faith and purity of intention counted for very little, and the religion consisted entirely in the minute practice of innumerable rules . . . ‘ Because of that, the constant fear in each association was that some detail of ritual requirement might be neglected and the god of the association offended. hence the need for frequent rites of purification and expiation. these became the duties of the civic magistrates in both Greece and Rome.
Altogether, the most distinctive thing about Greek and Roman antiquity is what might be called ‘moral enclosure’, in which the limits of personal identity were established by the limits of physical association and inherited, unequal social roles. This moral enclosure is illustrated by the Greek term describing anyone who sought to live outside such associations and such roles: such a person was called an ‘idiot’.
More than anything else, I think, Christianity changed the ground of human identity. It was able to do that because of the way it combined Jewish monotheism with an abstract universalism that had roots in later Greek philosophy. By emphasising the moral equality of humans, quite apart from any social roles they might occupy, Christianity changed ‘the name of the game’. Social rules became secondary. they followed and, in a crucial sense, had to be understood as subordinate to a God-given human identity, something all humans share equally. Thus, humans were to live in ‘two cities’ at the same time.
We can see this breaking out of moral enclosure everywhere in the New Testament. In particular, we can glimpse the merger of Judaism and Greek philosophy in St Paul's conception of the Christ, a conception remarkable for its universalism. For Paul, the love of God revealed in Christ imposes opportunities and obligations on the individual as such, that is, on conscience. The Christ thus becomes the medium of a new and transformed humanity. In one sense, Paul’s conception of the Christ introduces the individual, by giving conscience a universal dimension. Was Paul the greatest revolutionary in human history?
In contrast to some later Hellenic philosophy, the New Testament assertion of a basic human equality ceased to be a speculative stripping away of social conventions, an exercise which had at times served chiefly to demonstrate the superiority of the philosopher to local prejudice. Instead, this stripping away revealed the need for a moral response to the individual freedom implied by equal standing in the eyes of God. Jesus’ insistence that ‘the kingdom of God is within you’ (as the early church often proclaimed) was designed to invoke such a response, to create an individual will. Thus, to earlier speculations about equality, the New testament added the duty of reciprocity - the obligation ’to love thy neighbour as thyself’.
That is why I argued in an earlier book, Democracy in Europe (2000), that the Christian conception of God provided an ontological foundation for the individual, first as a moral status, and then, centuries later, as the primary social role. ‘the interiority of Christian belief - its insistence that the quality of personal intentions is more important than any fixed social rules - was a reflection of this. Rule following - the Hebraic “law” - was downgraded in favour of action governed by conscience. In that way, the Christian conception of God provided the foundation for what became an unprecedented form of human society.’ Christian moral beliefs emerge as the ultimate source of the social revolution that has made the West what it is.
The Enlightenment is NOT a sleepover!
Samir Amin writes in his seminal work Eurocentrism: Modernity, Religion, and Democracy: A Critique of Eurocentrism and Culturalism of Enlightenment reason and the promise of emancipation.Enlightenment thought offers us a concept of reason that is inextricably associated with that of emancipation. Yet, the emancipation in question is defined and limited by what capitalism requires and allows. The view expressed by the Enlightenment, nevertheless, proposes a concept of emancipating reason that claims to be transhistorical, whereas an examination of what is, in fact, is will demonstrate its strongly historical nature.So, three become two!
Adam Smith offers the most systematic fundamental expression of this view. Unfortunately he describes it as "utilitarianism", a questionable term, but understandable within the tradition of British empiricism. in this view of the human world, society is conceived as a collection of individuals, a view that breaks with the tradition of the estates of the Ancien Régime.
It is, therefore, indisputably an ideology that liberates the individual, again one of the dimensions of modernity. This individual, moreover, is naturally endowed with reason. The social order which must guarantee the triumph of this emancipating reason, and thus the happiness of human beings, is pictured as a system of "good institutions", to use the term in use up to now in American social thought. this system, in turn, is based on the separation of the political domain from the economic domain in social life. The "good institutions," which must ensure the management of political life through reason, are those of a democracy that guarantees the liberty and legal equality of individuals. In the management of economic life, reason demands that contractual freedom (in other words the market) be the basis of the relations of exchange and of organization of the division of labour between the individuals of which society is formed. The healthy working of the economy requires, in turn, the protection of property, henceforth considered a sacrosanct value in a "good society."
Emancipating reason is is expressed in the classical triplet: liberty, equality, and property. This slogan was adopted in the early revolutions of the United Provinces and the English Glorious Revolution of 1688, before being adopted more systematically by the American Revolution and then by the French Revolution in its first phase.
The constituent elements of this triplet are considered to be naturally and harmoniously complementary to each other. Up until now, the claim that the "market" equals "democracy" has remained a cornerstone of bourgeois ideology. The continual conflict between those in favor of extending democratic rights to all citizens, men and women, bourgeois and proletarians, propertied or propertyless, and the unconditional defenders of the market is straight away excluded from the debate.
(pages 13-15)
The second decisive period opens with Marx's criticism of the Enlightenment's bourgeois emancipating reason. this criticism begins a new chapter of modernity, which I call modernity critical of modernity.
"modernity critical of modernity"
Emancipating reason cannot ignore this second moment of its development, or more accurately the beginning of its reconstruction. After Marx, social thinking can no longer be what it was before.
Emancipating reason can no longer include its analyses and propositions under the triplet of liberty, equality and property. having sized up the insoluble conflict between the possession of capitalist property and the development of equality between human beings, emancipating reason can only delete the third term of the triplet and substitute for it the term fraternity (which is stronger than "solidarity," a term proposed by some today).
Fraternity, obviously, implies the abolition of capitalist property which is necessarily that of the few, a minority, the real dominating and exploiting bourgeois class, and which deprives the others, the majority, of access to the conditions of an equality worthy of the name. Fraternity implies, then, substituting a form of social property, exercised by, and on behalf of the whole social body, for the exclusive and excluding form of capitalist property. Integration through democracy would be substituted for the partial and naturally unequal integration carried out within the limits of respect for capitalist property relations.
As everyone knows well, Marx did not invent the slogan "liberty, equality, fraternity." the French Revolution, like all great revolutions, was ahead of its time and projected itself far ahead of its immediate demands. It was both a bourgeois revolution (and it later achieved stability on this basis) and a more advanced breakthrough, a popular revolution, and can be interpreted today as starting the socialist criticism of the bourgeois system. In a similar fashion, the two other great revolutions of modern times - the Russian and Chinese - envisaged a communist society far ahead of the immediate demands and possibilities of their societies.
(pages 17-18)
But if falsely egalitarian liberalism is offered insistently as an ideological alternative to the the disarray of present day society, it is because the front of the stage is no longer occupied by utilitarianism (from which so-called egalitarian liberalism is scarcely distinguishable), but by the excess represented by right-wing libertarian ideology (the extreme Right in fact). This ideology substitutes the couplet of liberty and property for the Enlightenment's triplet, definitively abandoning the idea of giving equality the status of a fundamental value. Friedrich von Hayek's version of this new extreme right-wing ideological formula revives that of its inventors, the nineteenth-century liberals (Claude Frédéric Bastiat and others) who are at the root of this excess, starting as they did from a clear aversion to the Enlightenment.
(pages 16-17)
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity becomes:
Liberty & Property!
Universal human rights
Where does the history of human rights originate?
In Western values? In European values? In the intuitions of Christianity? In political revolutions? If these rights originate in European values in what ways are they understood as being universal?
Three years before the founding of the United Nations in 1945, and in heat of war, the Allies held a conference in Washington called, subject to an appropriate coded term, the Arcadia Conference.
Arcadia was the first meeting on military strategy between Britain and the United States; it came two weeks after the American entry into World War II. The Arcadia Conference also had a wider international diplomatic and political aspect concerning the terms of the post-war world, which followed from the Atlantic Charter, agreed between Churchill and Roosevelt in August 1941. On January 1, 1942, 26 governments attending the conference agreed to the Declaration by United Nations
The countries that were involved included the Allied "Big Four" (the US, the UK, the USSR, and China), nine other American countries in North and Central America and the Caribbean, the four British Dominions, British India, eight Allied governments-in-exile, a total of twenty-six.
The term "United Nations" became synonymous during the war with the Allies and was considered to be the formal name that they were fighting under.
The text of the declaration affirmed the signatories' perspective "that complete victory over their enemies is essential to defend life, liberty, independence and religious freedom, and to preserve human rights and justice in their own lands as well as in other lands, and that they are now engaged in a common struggle against savage and brutal forces seeking to subjugate the world". The principle of "complete victory" established an early precedent for the Allied policy of obtaining the Axis' powers' "unconditional surrender". The defeat of "Hitlerism" constituted the overarching objective, and represented a common Allied perspective that the totalitarian militarist regimes ruling Germany, Italy, and Japan were indistinguishable. The declaration, furthermore, "upheld the Wilsonian principles of self determination," thus linking U.S. war aims in both world wars.
By the end of the war, 21 other states had acceded to the declaration, including the Philippines, France, every Latin American state except Argentina, and the various independent states of the Middle East and Africa. Although most of the minor Axis powers had switched sides and joined the United Nations as co-belligerents against Germany by the end of the war, they were not allowed to accede to the declaration. Occupied Denmark did not sign the declaration, but because of the vigorous resistance after 1943, and because the Danish ambassador Henrik Kauffmann had expressed the adherence to the declaration of all free Danes, Denmark was nonetheless invited among the allies in the San Francisco Conference in March 1945.
The Declaration became the basis of the United Nations (UN) founded in 1945.
A key propaganda concept in the mobilisation of ideas as part of the Allies war effort during World War II, was the adoption of the so-called Four Freedoms;
freedom of speech,- as their basic war aims.
freedom of religion,
freedom from fear,
and freedom from want
The United Nations Charter "reaffirmed faith in fundamental human rights, and dignity and worth of the human person" and committed all member states to promote "universal respect for, and observance of, human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion".
This agenda has a universalist tendency, a tendency that reflects the values of the Anglo-phone world and was to be amplified by a set of particular and Eurocentric ideologies, that has resulted in complex ethical questions being addressed in a disunited world.
When the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany became fully apparent after World War II, the consensus within the world community was that the United Nations Charter did not sufficiently define the rights to which it referred. A universal declaration that specified the rights of individuals was necessary to give effect to the Charter's provisions on human rights.
In June 1946, the UN Economic and Social Council established the Commission on Human Rights, comprising 18 members from various nationalities and political backgrounds. The Commission, a standing body of the United Nations, was constituted to undertake the work of preparing what was initially conceived as an International Bill of Rights.
The Commission established a special Universal Declaration of Human Rights Drafting Committee, chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, to write the articles of the Declaration. The Committee met in two sessions over the course of two years.
Who were these committee members and what were the core values held by these individuals that informed the process of drafting the Declaration?
John Peters Humphrey, a Canadian legal scholar, jurist, and human rights advocate, was newly appointed as Director of the Division of Human Rights within the United Nations Secretariat. In this role, he produced the first draft of a list of rights that were to form the basis of the Declaration.
The revolutionary backstory
The underlying structure of the Universal Declaration was introduced in its second draft which was prepared by René Cassin, a French jurist, law professor and judge, working from the Humphrey draft.
The process developed mainly out of the various customs, but was inspired by Justinian’s sixth-century codification of Roman law, the Corpus Iuris Civilis and, within that, Justinian's Code (Codex). The Napoleonic Code, however, differed from Justinian’s in important ways: it incorporated all kinds of earlier rules, not only legislation; it was not a collection of edited extracts, but a comprehensive rewrite; its structure was much more rational; it had no religious content; and it was written in the vernacular.
Whereas the Code Napoleon was to some sense inspired by Classical precedent, it retained the French revolutionary attitude to the religious in reinforcing its secular purpose and therefore was in keeping with the revolutions strident anti-clericalism.
It came into force on 21 March 1804 and, with its stress on clearly written and accessible law, was a major step in replacing the previous patchwork of feudal laws.
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen
Some fifteen years before, on the 27th August of the year of revolution 1789, The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was adopted by the National Constituent Assembly.
This declaration too, is a significant moment in the history of human civil rights, and shares with those drafting the UDHR values and ideas that emerge in the European “Enlightenment” of the eighteenth century.
The Declaration was drafted by General Lafayette (sometimes with Thomas Jefferson) and Honoré Mirabeau. Influenced by the doctrine of "natural right", the rights of males are held to be universal: valid at all times and in every place, pertaining to human nature itself. It became the basis for a nation of free individuals protected equally by the law. Inspired by the Enlightenment philosophers, the Declaration was a core statement of the values of the French Revolution and had a major impact on the development of freedom and democracy in Europe and worldwide.
The Enlightenment historical context included the 17th-century English philosopher John Locke had discussed natural rights in his work, identifying them as being;
"life, liberty, and estate (property)".Locke argued that such fundamental rights could not be surrendered in the social contract. In Britain in 1689, the English Bill of Rights and the Scottish Claim of Right each made illegal a range of oppressive governmental actions.
The two major revolutions that had occurred during the 18th century, first in the United States (1776) and then in France (1789), were significant precedents, especially with the first leading to the United States Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.— United States Declaration of Independence, 1776
And the second the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen respectively, which also articulated certain human rights.
These were followed by developments in the philosophy of human rights by figures such as Thomas Paine, John Stuart Mill and G.W.F. Hegel during the 18th and 19th centuries.
The term human rights probably came into use some time between Paine's The Rights of Man and William Lloyd Garrison's 1831 writings in The Liberator, in which he stated that he was trying to enlist his readers in "the great cause of human rights".
These two “Declarations”, together with Magna Carta, the English Bill of Rights, and the United States Bill of Rights, inspired in large part the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The philosophy of human rights
So it was in the drafting of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights that the committee was informed by these precedents and a history of the philosophy of human rights, that tended to reference models from European Classical Antiquity, so much prized by the Renaissance humanists as an alternative source to the perceived religious dogma of medieval scholasticism.
Articles 1 and 2 are the foundation blocks, with their principles of dignity, liberty, equality and brotherhood.
The seven paragraphs of the preamble, setting out the reasons for the Declaration, are represented by the steps.
The main body of the Declaration forms the four columns. The first column (articles 3-11) constitutes rights of the individual, such as the right to life and the prohibition of slavery. The second column (articles 12-17) constitutes the rights of the individual in civil and political society. The third column (articles 18-21) is concerned with spiritual, public and political freedoms such as freedom of religion and freedom of association. The fourth column (articles 22-27) sets out social, economic and cultural rights.
In Cassin's model, the last three articles of the Declaration provide the pediment which binds the structure together. These articles are concerned with the duty of the individual to society and the prohibition of use of rights in contravention of the purposes of the United Nations.
Once the Committee finished its work in May 1948, the draft was further discussed by the Commission on Human Rights, the Economic and Social Council, the Third Committee of the General Assembly before being put to vote in December 1948. During these discussions many amendments and propositions were made by UN Member States.
The British representatives were extremely frustrated that the proposal had moral but no legal obligation.
A Western paradigm?
The American Anthropological Association criticized the UDHR while it was in its drafting process. The AAA warned that the document would be defining universal rights from a Western paradigm which would be unfair to countries outside of that scope.
They further argued that the West's history of colonialism and evangelism made them a problematic moral representative for the rest of the world. They proposed three notes for consideration with underlying themes of cultural relativism:
"1. The individual realizes his personality through his culture, hence respect for individual differences entails a respect for cultural differences",
"2. Respect for differences between cultures is validated by the scientific fact that no technique of qualitatively evaluating cultures has been discovered", and
"3. Standards and values are relative to the culture from which they derive so that any attempt to formulate postulates that grow out of the beliefs or moral codes of one culture must to that extent detract from the applicability of any Declaration of Human Rights to mankind as a whole."
The "drafting group" and their philosophical backgrounds
Peng Chun Chang (1892–1957) was one of the members of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights drafting committee, he served both as an effective Asian delegate and also as a mediator when the negotiations reached a stalemate.
As a Chinese academic, philosopher, playwright, human rights activist, and diplomat, and someone who knew both Western and Islamic culture, he was well placed as “a renaissance man’ in this role. His philosophy was strongly based on the teachings of Confucius. At the first meeting of United Nations Economic and Social Council he quoted Mencius stating that ECOSOC's highest aim should be to "subdue people with goodness." He also argued that many influential western thinkers on rights were guided by Chinese ideas. "In the 18th century, when progressive ideas with respect to human rights had been first put forward in Europe, translations of Chinese philosophers had been known to, and had inspired, such thinkers as Voltaire, Quesnay and Diderot in their humanistic revolt against feudalism," he told the UN General Assembly in 1948.
It is relevant to compare this internationalist and universalist understanding of philosophy and philosophies with the comments made by the former Prime Ministers of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, and of Malaysia, Mahathir bin Mohamad, both of whom claimed in the 1990s that Asian values were significantly different from Western values and included a sense of loyalty and the foregoing of personal freedoms for the sake of a wider social stability and prosperity, and therefore authoritarian government is more appropriate in Asia than democracy. Lee Kuan Yew argued that:
What Asians value may not necessarily be what Americans or Europeans value. Westerners value the freedoms and liberties of the individual. As an Asian of Chinese cultural background, my values are for a government which is honest, effective, and efficient.— Lee Kuan Yew, Democracy, Human Rights and the Realities, Tokyo, Nov 10, 1992
Peng Chun Chang had experienced a different kind of modernity in his life and education. He earned his Bachelor of Arts at Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts in 1913, and a PhD from Columbia University, where he studied with the eminent philosopher and educator, John Dewey.
As an American philosopher, psychologist, Georgist, and educational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform, Dewey is one of the primary figures associated with the philosophy of pragmatism and is considered one of the fathers of functional psychology.
The overriding theme of Dewey's works was his profound belief in democracy, be it in politics, education or communication and journalism. As Dewey himself stated in 1888, while still at the University of Michigan;
"Democracy and the one, ultimate, ethical ideal of humanity are to my mind synonymous."Known for his advocacy of democracy, Dewey considered two fundamental elements—schools and civil society—to be major topics needing attention and reconstruction to encourage experimental intelligence and plurality. Dewey asserted that complete democracy was to be obtained not just by extending voting rights but also by ensuring that there exists a fully formed public opinion, accomplished by communication among citizens, experts, and politicians, with the latter being accountable for the policies they adopt.
Dewey was an atheist and a secular humanist in his later life; being one of the original 34 signatories of the first Humanist Manifesto (1933) and being elected an honorary member of the Humanist Press Association (1936).
His opinion of humanism is summarized in his own words from an article titled "What Humanism Means to Me", published in the June 1930 edition of Thinker 2:
What Humanism means to me is an expansion, not a contraction, of human life, an expansion in which nature and the science of nature are made the willing servants of human good.Peng Chun Chang served as Vice-Chairman of the original UN Commission on Human Rights and Republic of China delegate to committee and played a pivotal role in its drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) of 1948. He and fellow delegate Charles Malik, the Lebanese philosopher-diplomat, shared ideals of universal human rights, but debated what they were and how they could be described in an international document. By most accounts, Chang and Malik were the philosophical leaders of the deliberations. Chang argued that the modern world should pay heed to Chinese philosophers such as Mencius not because they were Chinese, but because their ideas had universal validity. Malik was informed by his Christian, as well as his philosophic insights and intuitions.
The matter of philosophy or philosophies is a question that needs raising. Western philosophy, like so many European practices, seems to have a ‘universalist’ impetus and a universalist imperative, as well as providing the basis for a critique of those culturally and socially based ways of explaining, describing and understanding the world.
Malik was educated at the American Mission School for Boys, now Tripoli Evangelical School for Girls and Boys in Tripoli and the American University of Beirut, where he graduated with a degree in mathematics and physics. He moved on to Cairo in 1929, where he developed an interest in philosophy, which he proceeded to study at Harvard under, no less than, Alfred North Whitehead, and in Freiburg, Germany under, no less than, Martin Heidegger in 1932. His stay in Germany, however, was short-lived. He found the policies of the Nazis unfavorable, and left soon after they came to power in 1933. In 1937, he received his Ph.D. in philosophy (based on metaphysics in the philosophies of Whitehead and Heidegger) from Harvard University. He taught there as well as at other universities in the United States. After returning to Lebanon, Malik founded the Philosophy Department at the American University of Beirut, as well as a cultural studies program (the 'civilization sequence program', now 'Civilization Studies Program'). He remained in this capacity until 1945 when he was appointed to be the Lebanese Ambassador to the United States and the United Nations.
What was the influence of Whitehead on Malik’s practice as well as his metaphysical philosophy? In his early career Whitehead wrote primarily on mathematics, logic, and physics. His most notable work in these fields is the three-volume Principia Mathematica (1910–13), which he wrote with former student Bertrand Russell. Principia Mathematica is considered one of the twentieth century's most important works in mathematical logic, and placed 23rd in a list of the top 100 English-language nonfiction books of the twentieth century by Modern Library.
However, beginning in the late 1910s and early 1920s, Whitehead gradually turned his attention from mathematics to the philosophy of science, and finally to metaphysics. He developed a comprehensive metaphysical system which radically departed from most of western philosophy. Whitehead argued that reality consists of processes rather than material objects, and that processes are best defined by their relations with other processes, thus rejecting the theory that reality is fundamentally constructed by bits of matter that exist independently of one another. Today Whitehead's philosophical works – particularly Process and Reality – are regarded as the foundational texts of process philosophy.
Whitehead's process philosophy argues that "there is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have consequences for the world around us." For this reason, one of the most promising applications of Whitehead's thought in recent years has been in the area of ecological civilization and environmental ethics pioneered by John B. Cobb, Jr.
Interestingly, the place where Whitehead's thought currently seems to be growing the most quickly is in China. In order to address the challenges of modernization and industrialization, China has begun to blend traditions of Taoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism with Whitehead's "constructive post-modern" philosophy in order to create an "ecological civilization." To date, the Chinese government has encouraged the building of twenty-three university-based centers for the study of Whitehead's philosophy, and books by process philosophers John Cobb and David Ray Griffin are becoming required reading for Chinese graduate students. Cobb has attributed China's interest in process philosophy partly to Whitehead's stress on the mutual interdependence of humanity and nature, as well as his emphasis on an educational system that includes the teaching of values rather than simply bare facts.
Metaphysics, and Whitehead’s philosophy, together with Heidegger’s thinking and historically critical approach to all Western philosophy, must for Malik connect to his own Christian identity, an identity that was able to create connections within the development of ecumenical efforts in the twentieth century. Malik was a theologian who successfully reached across confessional lines, appealing to his fellow Eastern Orthodox Christians, Roman Catholics, and Evangelicals alike. The author of numerous commentaries on the Bible and on the writings of the early Church Fathers, Malik was one of the few Orthodox theologians of his time to be widely known in Evangelical circles.
What was the impact of Heidegger’s thought and critique? Heidegger claimed philosophy and science since ancient Greece had reduced things to their presence, which was a superficial way of understanding them. One crucial source of this insight was Heidegger's reading of Franz Brentano's treatise on Aristotle's manifold uses of the word "being", a work which provoked Heidegger to ask what kind of unity underlies this multiplicity of uses. Heidegger opens his magnum opus, Being and Time, with a citation from Plato's Sophist indicating that Western philosophy has neglected Being because it was considered obvious, rather than as worthy of question. Heidegger's intuition about the question of Being is thus a historical argument, which in his later work becomes his concern with the "history of Being", that is, the history of the forgetting of Being, which according to Heidegger requires that philosophy retrace its footsteps through a productive destruction of the history of philosophy.
Whatever the impact of the philosophical and academic backgrounds for Peng Chun Chang and Malik it appears that they were prime movers in the drafting process, especially when he succeeded Mrs. Roosevelt as the Human Rights Commission's Chair.
Is it fair to observe that these two committee members, even though they were not European by birth, engaged with modern European ideas and values, and in this context, promoted these values as potentially universal.
The first controversy to resolve was related to the very origin of the human rights, basically the discussion between the supporters of the concepts of natural rights (which humans are endowed by God or Nature) and positive rights (which humans acquire as a result of a rational agreement).
The second controversy was basically between the positions of the Marxist theory of the Soviet Bloc and the liberal theory of the Western World. In philosophical terms, the Soviet Bloc criticized the individualist stance of the issue, arguing in favour of the collectivism approach, where the rights of the collective dominate that of an individual. In political terms, the Soviet Union and its satellites, facing mounting accusations of human rights violations, argued that the declaration is a mere formality if it would not consider guarantees of economic and social rights. However these objections were of surprisingly little consequence, because the Soviet Block had not been very active during the drafting process of the Commission, perhaps indicating there was perhaps a pre-established decision not to sign the Declaration.
The Universal Declaration was adopted by the General Assembly as Resolution 217 on 10 December 1948. Of the then 58 members of the United Nations, 48 voted in favor, none against, eight abstained and Honduras and Yemen failed to vote or abstain.
The meeting record provides firsthand insight into the debate. South Africa's position can be seen as an attempt to protect its system of apartheid, which clearly violated several articles in the Declaration. The Saudi Arabian delegation's abstention was prompted primarily by two of the Declaration's articles: Article 18, which states that everyone has the right "to change his religion or belief"; and Article 16, on equal marriage rights. The six communist countries abstentions centred around the view that the Declaration did not go far enough in condemning fascism and Nazism.
So, the Byelorussian SSR, Czechoslovakia, Poland , the Soviet Union, the Ukrainian SSR and Yugoslavia abstained. Eleanor Roosevelt attributed the abstention of Soviet bloc countries to Article 13, which provided the right of citizens to leave their countries
In 1948, a UN Resolution adopted the Declaration on a bilingual document in English and French, and official translations in Chinese, Russian and Spanish.
In 2009, the Guinness Book of Records described the Declaration as the world's "Most Translated Document" (370 different languages and dialects).
In its preamble, governments commit themselves and their people to progressive measures which secure the universal and effective recognition and observance of the human rights set out in the Declaration.
Eleanor Roosevelt supported the adoption of the Declaration as a declaration rather than as a treaty because she believed that it would have the same kind of influence on global society as the United States Declaration of Independence had within the United States. In this, she proved to be correct.
Even though it is not legally binding, the Declaration has been adopted in or has influenced most national constitutions since 1948. It has also served as the foundation for a growing number of national laws, international laws, and treaties, as well as for a growing number of regional, sub national, and national institutions protecting and promoting human rights.
For the first time in international law, the term “the rule of law” was used in the preamble of the Declaration.
The third paragraph of the preamble of the Declaration reads as follows:
"Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law."
While not a treaty itself, the Declaration was explicitly adopted for the purpose of defining the meaning of the words "fundamental freedoms" and "human rights" appearing in the United Nations Charter, which is binding on all member states.
For this reason, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a fundamental constitutive document of the United Nations. In addition, many international lawyers believe that the Declaration forms part of customary international law and is a powerful tool in applying diplomatic and moral pressure to governments that violate any of its articles.
The 1968 United Nations International Conference on Human Rights advised that the Declaration;
"constitutes an obligation for the members of the international community" to all persons.
The Declaration has served as the foundation for two binding UN human rights covenants;
the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights;
and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
The principles of the Declaration are elaborated in international treaties such as;
the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination;
the International Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women;
the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child;
the United Nations Convention Against Torture;
and many more.
The Declaration continues to be widely cited by governments, academics, advocates, and constitutional courts, and by individuals who appeal to its principles for the protection of their recognised human rights.
End of the Cold War - a new hope?
Building on this protocol significantly the UN proposed and adopted on 25 June 1993 the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action, also known as VDPA. This was a human rights declaration adopted by consensus at the World Conference on Human Rights that took place in Vienna, Austria. The position of United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights was recommended by this Declaration and subsequently created by General Assembly Resolution 48/121.
The VDPA reaffirmed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the United Nations Charter. Its Preamble states "The World Conference on Human Rights, Considering that the promotion and protection of human rights is a matter of priority for the international community, and that the Conference affords a unique opportunity to carry out a comprehensive analysis of the international human rights system and of the machinery for the protection of human rights, in order to enhance and thus promote a fuller observance of those rights, in a just and balanced manner."
The Preamble also states:
"Invoking the spirit of our age and the realities of our time which call upon the peoples of the world and all States Members of the United Nations to rededicate themselves to the global task of promoting and protecting all human rights and fundamental freedoms so as to secure full and universal enjoyment of these rights ..."The VDPA reflects the fact that the World Conference on Human Rights marked a turning point for human rights, as the Cold War had ended. The VDPA looks back, with the Preamble stating:
Recalling also the determination expressed in the Preamble of the Charter of the United Nations to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, to establish conditions under which justice and respect for obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom, to practice tolerance and good neighbourliness, and to employ international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples.
Human rights as the relevant universal standard
The VDPA seeks to reaffirm human rights as the universal and relevant standard. The Preamble states: "Emphasizing that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which constitutes a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations, is the source of inspiration and has been the basis for the United Nations in making advances in standard setting as contained in the existing international human rights instruments, in particular the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights."
The VDPA urges Governments, United Nations, and other international organizations to increase the resources allocated to programmes to strengthen human rights awareness through training, teaching and education, popular participation and civil society (para. 34).
Human rights as indivisible, interdependent and interrelated
The VDPA emphasizes that all human rights are of equal importance, seeking to end the qualitative division between civil and political rights and economic, social and cultural rights, which was pronounced during the Cold War era. Part I, para 5 states that "All human rights are universal, indivisible and interdependent and interrelated. The international community must treat human rights globally in a fair and equal manner, on the same footing, and with the same emphasis. While the significance of national and regional particularities and various historical, cultural and religious backgrounds must be borne in mind, it is the duty of States, regardless of their political, economic and cultural systems, to promote and protect all human rights and fundamental freedoms." This phrase is also cited by the Declaration of Montreal as well as The Yogyakarta Principles and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. To this end, Part II, para 75 also encourages the Commission on Human Rights, in accordance with the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, to continue the examination of Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights on equal basis of the Optional Protocols to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
Democracy, development and human rights against terrorism
The VDPA also draws a direct connection between respect for human rights, democracy and international development, stating in Part I, para 8: "8. Democracy, development and respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms are interdependent and mutually reinforcing. Democracy is based on the freely expressed will of the people to determine their own political, economic, social and cultural systems and their full participation in all aspects of their lives. In the context of the above, the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms at the national and international levels should be universal and conducted without conditions attached. The international community should support the strengthening and promoting of democracy, development and respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms in the entire world." In Part I, para 17: "The act, methods and practices of terrorism in all its form" as well as drug trafficking "are activities aimed at the destruction of human rights, fundamental freedom and democracy" and that "the international community should take necessary steps to enhance cooperation to prevent and combat terrorism".
Poverty and social exclusion
The VDPA makes a direct link between poverty and the realisation of human rights. Part I, para 14 states: "The existence of widespread extreme poverty inhibits the full and effective enjoyment of human rights; its immediate alleviation and eventual elimination must remain a high priority for the international community." The VDPA stops short of declaring poverty a human rights violation in itself, but states in Part I, para 25 that: "25. The World Conference on Human Rights affirms that extreme poverty and social exclusion constitute a violation of human dignity and that urgent steps are necessary to achieve better knowledge of extreme poverty and its causes, including those related to the problem of development, in order to promote the human rights of the poorest, and to put an end to extreme poverty and social exclusion and to promote the enjoyment of the fruits of social progress. It is essential for States to foster participation by the poorest people in the decision making process by the community in which they live, the promotion of human rights and efforts to combat extreme poverty."
The right to development
The VDPA reaffirms the right to development, which is regarded as controversial by some human rights scholars and UN member states. Part I, para 9 reaffirms that least developed countries committed to the process of democratization and economic reforms, many of which are in Africa, should be supported by the international community in order to succeed in their transition to democracy and economic development. And Part I, para 10 states: "The World Conference on Human Rights reaffirms the right to development, as established in the Declaration on the Right to Development, as a universal and inalienable right and an integral part of fundamental human rights. As stated in the Declaration on the Right to Development, the human person is the central subject of development. While development facilitates the enjoyment of all human rights, the lack of development may not be invoked to justify the abridgement of internationally recognized human rights. States should cooperate with each other in ensuring development and eliminating obstacles to development. The international community should promote an effective international cooperation for the realization of the right to development and the elimination of obstacles to development. Lasting progress towards the implementation of the right to development requires effective development policies at the national level, as well as equitable economic relations and a favourable economic environment at the international level."
Part I, para 11 goes on to state: "The right to development should be fulfilled so as to meet equitably the developmental and environmental needs of present and future generations. The World Conference on Human Rights recognizes that illicit dumping of toxic and dangerous substances and waste potentially constitutes a serious threat to the human rights to life and health of everyone. Consequently, the World Conference on Human Rights calls on all States to adopt and vigorously implement existing conventions relating to the dumping of toxic and dangerous products and waste and to cooperate in the prevention of illicit dumping. Everyone has the right to enjoy the benefits of scientific progress and its applications. The World Conference on Human Rights notes that certain advances, notably in the biomedical and life sciences as well as in information technology, may have potentially adverse consequences for the integrity, dignity and human rights of the individual, and calls for international cooperation to ensure that human rights and dignity are fully respected in this area of universal concern."
Right to seek asylum and humanitarian aid
In Part I, para 23, the VDPA reaffirms that everyone, without distinction of any kind, is entitled to the right to seek and enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution, as well as the right to return to one's own country. In this respect it stresses the importance of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, its 1967 Protocol and regional instruments. It expresses its appreciation to States that continue to admit and host large numbers of refugees in their territories, and to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees for its dedication to its task. It also expresses its appreciation to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. The VDPA recognises that, in view of the complexities of the global refugee crisis and in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations, relevant international instruments and international solidarity and in the spirit of burden-sharing, a comprehensive approach by the international community is needed in coordination and cooperation with the countries concerned and relevant organisations, bearing in mind the mandate of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. This should include the development of strategies to address the root causes and effects of movements of refugees and other displaced persons, the strengthening of emergency preparedness and response mechanisms, the provision of effective protection and assistance, bearing in mind the special needs of women and children, as well as the achievement of durable solutions, primarily through the preferred solution of dignified and safe voluntary repatriations, including solutions such as those adopted by the international refugee conferences. And underlines the responsibilities of States, particularly as they relate to the countries of origin. Regarding disasters, in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations and the principles of humanitarian law, VDPA emphasizes the importance of and the need for humanitarian aid to victims of all natural disaster and man-made disaster.
Against racism, xenophobia and intolerance
In Part II, para 20, the VDPA urges all governments to take immediate measure and to develop strong policies to prevent and combat all forms and manifestations of racism, xenophobia or related intolerance, where necessary by enactment of appropriate legislation, including penal measure. And also appeals to all States parties to the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination to consider making the declaration under article 14 of the Convention.
Persons belonging to minority groups
In Part II, para 25, the VDPA calls on the Commission on Human Rights to examine ways and means to promote and protect effectively the rights of persons belonging to minorities as set out in the Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities. In this context, VDPA calls upon the Centre for Human Rights to provide, at the request of Governments concerned and as part of its programme of advisory services and technical assistance, qualified expertise on minority issues and human rights, as well as on the prevention and resolution of disputes, to assist in existing or potential situations involving minorities. At para 26, the VDPA urges States and the international community to promote and protect the rights of persons belonging to national or ethnic, religious and linguistic minorities in accordance with the Declaration on the Rights of Persons belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities. Further at para 95, VDPA underlines the importance of preserving and strengthening the system of special procedures, rapporteurs, representatives, experts and working groups of the Commission on Human Rights and the Sub-Commission on the Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, in order to enable them to carry out their mandates in all countries throughout the world, providing them with the necessary human and financial resources. The procedures and mechanisms should be enabled to harmonize and rationalize their work through periodic meeting. All States are asked to cooperate fully with these procedures and mechanisms.
Indigenous peoples
In Part II, para 29, the VDPA recommends that the Commission on Human Rights consider the renewal and updating of the mandate of the Working Group on Indigenous Populations upon complement of the drafting of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Further at para 32, it recommends that the General Assembly proclaim an international decade of the world's indigenous people, to begin from January 1994, including action oriented programmes, to be decided upon in partnership with indigenous people. An appropriate voluntary trust fund should be set up for this purpose. In the framework of such a decade, the establishment of a permanent forum for indigenous peoples in the United Nations system should be considered.
Rights of migrant workers
In Part II, para 34, the VDPA invites States to consider the possibility of signing and ratifying on the earliest possible time, the United Nations Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families.
Women's rights and domestic violence
The VDPA draws attention to the importance of women's rights and the rights of the "girl-child", Part I, para 18 stating: "The human rights of women and of the girl-child are an inalienable, integral and indivisible part of universal human rights. The full and equal participation of women in political, civil, economic, social and cultural life, at the national, regional and international levels, and the eradication of all forms of discrimination on grounds of sex are priority objectives of the international community."
The VDPA also explicitly recognises gender-based violence, sexual harassment and exploitation, with Part I, para 18 going on to state: "Gender-based violence and all forms of sexual harassment and exploitation, including those resulting from cultural prejudice and international trafficking, are incompatible with the dignity and worth of the human person, and must be eliminated. This can be achieved by legal measures and through national action and international cooperation in such fields as economic and social development, education, safe maternity and health care, and social support."
The VDPA concludes by proclaiming women's rights and gender-based exploitation as legitimate issues for the international community. Part I, para 19 concluding that: "The human rights of women should form an integral part of the United Nations human rights activities, including the promotion of all human rights instruments relating to women. The World Conference on Human Rights urges Governments, institutions, intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations to intensify their efforts for the protection and promotion of human rights of women and the girl-child."
The VDPA, at Part II, para 38, also calls upon the General Assembly to adopt the draft Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women and urges States to combat violence against women in accordance with its provisions, and that "violations of the human rights of women in situations of armed conflict are violations of the fundamental principles of international human rights and humanitarian law. All violations of this kind, including in particular murder, systematic rape, sexual slavery, and forced pregnancy, require a particular effective response."
The rights of the child
In Part II, para 45, the VDPA reiterates the principle of "First Call for Children" and, in this respect, underlines the importance of major national and international efforts, especially those of the United Nations Children's Fund, for promoting respect for the rights of the child to survival, protection, development and participation. At para 46, VDPA affirms that measures should be taken to achieve universal ratification of the Convention on the Rights of the Child by 1995 and the universal signing of the "World Declaration on the Survival, Protection and Development of Children and Plan of Action" adopted by the World Summit for Children. At para 47, the VDPA urges all nations to undertake measures to the maximum extent of their available resources, with the support of international cooperation, to achieve the goals in the World Summit Plan of Action, and calls on States to integrate the Convention on the Rights of the Child into their national action plans. By means of those national action plans and through international efforts, particular priority should be places on reducing infant mortality and maternal mortality rates, reducing malnutrition and illiteracy rates and providing access to safe drinking water and to basic education. Whenever so called for, national plans of action should be devised to combat devastating emergencies resulting from natural disasters and armed conflicts and the equally grave problem of children in extreme poverty. At para 48, the VDPA urges all States, to address the acute program of children under difficult circumstance. Exploitation and abuse of children should be actively combated, including by addressing their root causes. Effective measure are required against female infanticide, harmful child labour, sale of children and organ, child prostitution, child pornography, as well as other forms of sexual abuse. At para 50, the VDPA strongly supports the proposal that the Secretary General initiate a study into means of improving the protection of children in armed conflicts, and that humanitarian norms should be implemented and measures taken in order to protect and facilitate assistance to children in war zone. Measures should include protection for children against indiscriminate use of all weapon of war, especially anti-personnel mines. The need for aftercare and rehabilitation of children traumatized by war must be addressed urgently.
Freedom from torture
In Part II, para 54, the VDAP welcomes the ratification by many Member States of the United Nations Convention Against Torture and at para 61, also reaffirm that effort to eradicate torture should, first and foremost, be concentrated on prevention and, therefore, calls for early adoption of an Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture, which is intended to establish a preventive system of regular visits to places of detention.
Enforced disappearances
In Part II, para 62, the VDAP welcoming the adoption by the General Assembly of the Declaration on the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, calls upon all States to take effective legislative, administrative, judicial on other measure to prevent, terminate and punish acts of enforced disappearance. This is the origin of the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance.
The rights of the disabled person
In Part II, para 63, the VDAP reaffirms that all human rights and fundamental freedoms are universal and thus unreservedly include persons with disabilities. Every person is born equal and has the same rights to life and welfare, education and work, living independently and active participation in all aspects of society. Any direct discrimination or other negative discriminatory treatment of a disabled person is therefore a violation of his or her rights. At para 64, the VDAP affirms that the place of disabled person is everywhere. Persons with disabilities should be guaranteed equal opportunity through the elimination of all socially determined barriers, be they physical, financial, social or psychological, which exclude or restrict full participation in society.
Human rights, the responsibility of the State
Part I, para 1 of the VDPA starts: "The World Conference on Human Rights reaffirms the solemn commitment of all States to fulfill their obligations to promote universal respect for, and observance and protection of, all human rights and fundamental freedoms for all in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations, other instruments relating to human rights, and international law. The universal nature of these rights and freedoms is beyond question."
The VDPA acknowledges that international cooperation to realise human rights is vital, Part I, para 1 going on to state: "In this framework, enhancement of international cooperation in the field of human rights is essential for the full achievement of the purposes of the United Nations." However, the VDPA firmly places the ultimate responsibility for realizing human rights with the State, or the respective governments, Part I, para 1 concluding that: "Human rights and fundamental freedoms are the birthright of all human beings; their protection and promotion is the first responsibility of Governments." Recognising the rising importance of NGOs, the VDPA states in Part I, para 13: "There is a need for States and international organizations, in cooperation with non-governmental organizations, to create favourable conditions at the national, regional and international levels to ensure the full and effective enjoyment of human rights. States should eliminate all violations of human rights and their causes, as well as obstacles to the enjoyment of these rights."
On ratification of international treaties on human rights, the VDPA states in Part I, para 26 that it "welcomes the progress made in the codification of human rights instruments, which is a dynamic and evolving process, and urges the universal ratification of human rights treaties. All States are encouraged to accede to these international instruments; all States are encouraged to avoid, as far as possible, the resort to reservations." On remedy and redress of human rights violation, VDPA states in Part I, para 27 that "Every State should provide an effective framework of remedies and redress human rights grievances or violations. The administration of justice, including law enforcement and prosecutorial agencies and, especially, an independent judiciary and legal profession in full conformity with applicable standards contained in international human rights instruments, are essential to the full and non-discriminatory realization of human rights and indispensable to the processes of democracy and sustainable development."
Human rights education
In Part II, para 78, the VDPA considers human rights education, training and public information essential for the promotion and achievement of stable and harmonious relations among communities and for fostering mutual understanding, tolerance and peace. At para 79 it states that States should strive to eradicate illiteracy and should direct education towards the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. The VDPA calls on all States and institutions to include international human rights law, international humanitarian law, democracy and rule of law as subjects in the curricula of all learning institutions in formal and non-formal settings, and, at para 80, that human rights education should include peace, democracy, development and social justice, as set forth in international and regional human rights instruments, in order to achieve common understanding and awareness with a view to strengthening universal commitment to human rights. Further at para 81, the VDPA states that taking into account the World Plan of Action on Education for Human Rights and Democracy, adopted in March 1993 by the International Congress on Education for Human Rights and Democracy of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, and other human rights instruments, the VDPA recommends that States develop specific programs and strategies for ensuring the widest human rights education and the dissemination of public information, taking particular account of the human rights needs of women.
Implementation and monitoring methods
In Part II, para 83, the VDPA urges Governments to incorporate standard as contained in international human rights instruments in domestic legislation and to strengthen national structures, institutions and organs of society which play a role in protecting and safeguarding human rights. Para 84 recommends the strengthening of United Nations activities and programmes to meet requests for assistance by States which want to establish or strengthen their own national human rights institutions for promotion and protection of human rights.
At Part II, para 92, the VDPA recommends that the Commission on Human Rights examine the possibility for better implementation of existing human rights instruments at the international and regional levels and encourages the International Law Commission to continue its work on an International Criminal Court. Para 93 appeals to states which have not yet done so that accede to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949 and the Protocols thereto, and to take all appropriate national measures, including legislative ones, for their full implementation. Para 96 recommends that the United Nations assume a more active role in the promotion and protection of human rights in ensuring full respect for international humanitarian law in all situations of armed conflict, in accordance with the purposes and principles of Charter of the United Nations. At para 97, the VDPA, recognizing the important role of human rights components in specific arrangements concerning some Peacekeeping Operations by United Nations, recommends that the Secretary-General take into account the reporting, experience and capabilities of the Centre for Human Rights and human rights mechanisms, in conformity with the Charter of the United Nations.
70 years on - Updates 2018-19
On 70th anniversary of Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Nils Melzer says global community has failed to learn lessons of second world war
Speaking exclusively to the Guardian, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on torture, Nils Melzer, said the global community had become “complacent” in the face of injustice because the world no longer understood why human rights should be protected or what the world would look like without them.
“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that 70 years after world war two, when the last witnesses of past atrocities are dying away, we start to see human rights being questioned on a broad scale,” said Melzer, a Swiss law professor who assumed the UN post in 2016.
“The generation that had the answer is almost gone. They left behind the Universal Declaration of Human Rights for us, but it is as if its message is no longer understood, and it looks like we will have to learn the same lesson the hard way again.”
Ai Weiwei Creates Flag To Mark 70th Anniversary Universal Human Rights Declaration
The dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has created a flag to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This is a significant new project announced to raise awareness of human rights across the UK and for generations to come. The new flag was commissioned in response to the real and present dangers of a world changing at break-neck speed, to offer hope and to educate generations to come about the absolute importance of universal human rights. This grassroots moment of creative awareness and activism will be led – jointly and uniquely – by arts organisations and human rights charities.
IN JUNE 2019, THE FLAG
WILL BE FLOWN FOR 7
DAYS MARKING 70 YEARS
ACROSS THE COUNTRY
The flag will be available to schools and care homes, town halls and office blocks, hospitals and libraries across the UK, with everyone invited to Fly The Flag for Human Rights six months from now between 24 – 30 June 2019 in events across the country, more information on which will be released in due course. Wherever flown, both physically and digitally, by groups or individuals, big or small, the flag will mark the value of human rights in everyone’s daily lives in the UK.
Mr Ai says this flag is just the start. He encourages everyone to make this flag their own to represent the shared ideal of human rights.
Fly The Flag is co-produced by Fuel (Lead Producer), Amnesty International, Donmar Warehouse, Human Rights Watch, Liberty, National Theatre, Sadler’s Wells and Tate Art Galleries. Additional co-commissioners include the Coventry City of Culture Trust.
The original Universal Declaration of Human Rights was created by women and men who witnessed first-hand the horror and inhumanity of the Second World War and were determined that it should never be repeated. And today, through the UK Human Rights Act, this powerful idea protects the rights of everyone in this country. Human rights inspire a vision of a world free from abuse and cruelty and empower by protecting people from state abuse and curbing the reach of society’s most potent, ensuring that a minimum standard of safety and dignity is guaranteed to every human being.
The artist has battled surveillance, underground exile and even irate Berlin taxi drivers. He thinks the world has forgotten what human rights mean, which is why he has designed a new flag
"I don’t recall any kind of symbol for human rights,” he says, sitting at a long wooden table in his studio in Berlin, where he has lived in exile since 2015. “So it was time we gave it one.”
He lays out a series of photographs. They show the muddy footprints of Rohingya refugees who have been forced to flee attacks by Myanmarese soldiers and take refuge in neighbouring Bangladesh.
“These are the footprints of some of the barefooted children, women and young people who we met, who had no shoes,” he says. “Of course it’s very difficult to design something to illustrate such a large, abstract concept. But I thought a footprint relates to everybody who has been forced to flee, whether in Africa, Afghanistan or Bangladesh. There is nothing more human than a footprint.”
The mud-prints have morphed into several versions of a white footprint on a blue background, which form the basis of Ai’s flag. The design is set to be released on 10 December, and UK schools, police forces, faith groups and hospitals will be invited to fly it from their buildings during a seven-day campaign in June.
Ai believes that the effects of globalisation have eroded a common understanding of human rights. “Less and less people now talk about human rights since the end of the cold war. They use words like common values instead, so as not to offend the Chinese authorities with whom they want to do business. Increasingly, people are even viewing human rights in a negative way.”
“People in Britain and elsewhere in the better-off world fail to grasp that the way they live can affect the way people elsewhere in the world live,” he continues. “iPhones are made in China because that country joined the capitalism game and plays it very well. But those who make the phones have no basic rights and are modern slaves who end up jumping out of factory windows. People who buy the phones have to have more of a sense of responsibility and engagement.”
Ai took his nine-year-old son with him on a recent trip to Bangladesh – about which he is making a film – just as he has to other investigations, such as to Mexico, to investigate the 43 students who disappeared in a single day in 2014.
“He’s been with me to visit most refugee camps I’ve been to, as well as the poorest ghettos in Mexico, and cartel areas, the island of Lesbos in Greece. I don’t want to teach him anything, but by being exposed to this kind of information he has developed a basic sensitivity of what’s right or wrong. And he sees me arguing a lot with people.”
That morning, the argument was with a Berlin taxi driver on the way to taking his son to school, who told Ai to shut off his mobile phone – he was listening to a message from his mother – because it interfered with the music he was playing on his radio. “He told me to get out of the car, and when I said I wouldn’t he slammed on the brakes and we all fell forward. My son hit his head. He used his vehicle on a public street to express his anger”.
“So you see I am fighting battles wherever I go – including with German people who say I should be grateful to them because I am a refugee, and they paid for my life. This is the mood in Germany right now, the posters I see in the streets saying: ‘We can make our own babies, we don’t need foreigners.’ It’s the mood in much of Europe, including the UK. It’s very scary because this kind of moment is a reflection of the 1930s.”
He is angry and confused about experiencing this sort of hostility in Germany, the country that gave him refuge. He took the first available opportunity to thank its chancellor, Angela Merkel, for her involvement in his release.
The author of - Superior: The Return of Race Science - Angela Saini explains -
Why race science is on the rise again
After the second world war, the belief that differences between so-called ‘races’ are genetic became taboo. Now, with the far right resurgent, it’s back
In 1985, historian Barry Mehler had a dream. His research was taking him deep into the murky territory of academia’s extreme right wing. As he worked, he found his waking life beginning to soak into his subconscious, colouring his sleep. In his dream, his son, then two years old, was trapped in a runaway car hurtling down a hill. “The traffic is going in both directions, and I am in the middle of the road desperately waving my hands trying to stop the flow, in order to save the life of my son,” he tells me. “It’s a metaphor for how I felt.”
Mehler had been looking into what happened after the second world war to scientists who, during the conflict, had collaborated with the Nazis, were eugenicists or shared their racial worldview. “I was really focused on the ideological continuity between the old and the new,” he says. He learned that the fear of some kind of threat to the “white race” was still alive in some intellectual circles, and that there was a well-coordinated network of people who were attempting to bring these ideologies back into mainstream academia and politics.
Mehler, who is Jewish, understandably found all this disturbing. He immediately saw parallels between the far-right network of intellectuals and the rapid, devastating way in which eugenics research had been used in Nazi Germany, terrifying him with the possibility that the brutal atrocities of the past could happen once more. It was impossible not to imagine that the ideological heart behind them was still beating. “I felt like I was desperately trying to prevent this from happening again,” he says. “I thought that we were headed for more genocide.” His voice betrays an anxiety that political stability in even the strongest democracies sits on a precipice.
His fear is something I have begun to share. Mehler said of his relatives who survived the Holocaust: “They are prepared for things to cease to be normal very quickly.” His words ring in my ears. I never imagined I might live through times that could also make me feel this way, that could leave me so anxious for the future. Yet, here I am.
Far-right and anti-immigrant groups have once more become visible and powerful across Europe and the US. In Poland, nationalists march under the slogan “Pure Poland, white Poland”. In Italy, a rightwing leader rises to popularity on the promise to deport illegal immigrants and turn his back on refugees. White nationalists look to Russia under Vladimir Putin as a defender of “traditional” values.
In the German federal elections in 2017, Alternative für Deutschland won more than 12% of the vote. Last year, whistleblower Chris Wylie claimed that Cambridge Analytica, known to be closely linked to Donald Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon, was using ideas of racial difference targeting African Americans to figure out how to stir up support among white conservatives in the 2014 mid-term elections. Since leaving the White House in 2017, Bannon has become a key figure for European far-right movements, and is now hoping to open an “alt-right” academy in an Italian monastery. This echoes “scientific racists” after the second world war, who, when they failed to find avenues in mainstream academia, simply created their own spaces and publications. The difference now is that, partly because of the internet, it’s so much easier for them to attract funding and support. In France in 2018, Bannon told far-right nationalists: “Let them call you racist, let them call you xenophobes, let them call you nativists. Wear it as a badge of honour.”
I have spent the last few years investigating the tumorous growth of this brand of intellectual racism. Not the racist thugs who confront us in plain sight, but the well-educated ones in smart suits, the ones with power. And like Mehler, I’ve encountered tight networks, including academics at the world’s leading universities, who have sought to shape public debates around race and immigration, gently nudging into acceptability the view that “foreigners” are by their very nature a threat because we are fundamentally different.
Within this cabal are those who look to science to shore up their political views. Some describe themselves as “race realists”, reflecting how they see the scientific truth as being on their side (and because calling yourself a racist is still unpalatable, even to most racists). For them, there are innate biological differences between population groups, making entire nations, for instance, naturally smarter than others. These “biological facts” neatly explain the course of history and modern day inequality.
These so-called scholars are slippery – they use euphemisms, scientific-looking charts and arcane arguments. Riding the wave of populism around the world and harnessing the internet to communicate and publish, they have also become bolder. But as Mehler reminds me, they are not new.
This is a story that goes back to the birth of modern science. Race feels so tangible to us now, we have forgotten that racial classification was always quite arbitrary. In the 18th century, European scientists sifted people into human types, inventing such categories as Caucasian, but with scarce knowledge of how others lived. This is why, in the centuries that followed, nobody could ever quite pin down the thing we now call “race”. Some said there were three types, others four, five or more, even hundreds.
It was only towards the end of the 20th century that genetic data revealed that the human variation we see is not a matter of hard types but small and subtle gradations, each local community blending into the next. As much as 95% of the genetic difference in our species sits within the major population groups, not between them. Statistically, this means that, although I look nothing like the white British woman who lives upstairs, it’s possible for me to have more in common genetically with her than with my Indian-born neighbour.
We can’t pin down race biologically because it exists like an image in the clouds. When we define ourselves by colour, our eyes don’t consider that the genetic variants for light skin are found not only in Europe and east Asia, but also in some of the oldest human societies in Africa. Early hunter-gatherers in Europe had dark skin and blue eyes. There is no gene that exists in all the members of one racial group and not another. We are all, every one of us, a product of ancient and recent migration. We have always been in the melting pot together.
Race is the counter-proposition. In the history of race science, lines have been drawn across the world in many different ways. And what the lines meant changed in different eras. In the 19th century, a European scientist was unexceptional in thinking that white people were biologically superior to everyone else, just as he might assume that women were intellectually inferior. The power hierarchy had white men of European descent sitting at the top, and they conveniently wrote the scientific story of the human species around this assumption.
Because race science has always been innately political, it shouldn’t surprise us that prominent thinkers used science to defend slavery, colonialism, segregation and genocide. They imagined only Europe could have been the birthplace of modern science, that only the British could have built a railway in India. Some still imagine that white Europeans have a unique set of genetic qualities that propelled them to economic domination. They believe, as French president Nicolas Sarkozy said in 2007, that “the tragedy of Africa is that the African has not fully entered into history … there is neither room for human endeavour nor the idea of progress”.
We have not left the past behind. There is a direct line from old ideologies to the rhetoric of the new. Mehler was one person who understood this because this was the line that he was carefully tracing.
After the second world war, race science gradually became taboo. But one of the key people to have kept his racial worldview intact, Mehler learned, was a shadowy figure called Roger Pearson, who is in his 90s today (he declined to speak to me). Pearson had been an officer in the British Indian army and then, in the 1950s, worked as managing director of a group of tea gardens in what was then known as East Pakistan, now Bangladesh. It was around this time that he began publishing newsletters, printed in India, exploring issues of race, science and immigration.
Very quickly, Mehler says, Pearson connected with like-minded thinkers all over the world. “He was beginning to institutionally organise the remnants of the prewar academic scholars who were doing work on eugenics and race. The war had disrupted all of their careers, and after the war they were trying to re‑establish themselves.” They included Nazi race scientist Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, who before the war ended had run experiments on the body parts of murdered children sent to him from Auschwitz.
One of Pearson’s publications, the Northlander, described itself as a monthly review of “pan-Nordic affairs”, by which it meant matters of interest to white northern Europeans. Its first edition in 1958 complained about the illegitimate children born due to the stationing of “Negro” troops in Germany after the war, and about immigrants arriving in Britain from the West Indies. “Britain resounds to the sound and sight of primitive peoples and of jungle rhythms,” Pearson warned. “Why cannot we see the rot that is taking place in Britain herself?”
Investigating race scientists at the same time was Keith Hurt, a softly spoken civil servant also in Washington, who was astonished to find “networks and associations of people that were attempting to keep alive a body of ideas that I had associated with at the very least the pre-civil rights movement” in the US, “and going back to the eugenics movement early in the last century. These ideas were still being developed and promulgated and promoted in discreet ways.”
“They had their own journals, their own publishing houses. They could review and comment upon each other’s work,” Mehler tells me. “It was almost like discovering this whole little world inside academia.” These were the people keeping scientific racism alive.
In May 1988, Mehler and Hurt published an article in the Nation, a progressive US weekly, about a professor of educational psychology at the University of Northern Iowa called Ralph Scott. Their report claimed that Scott had used funds provided by a wealthy segregationist under a pseudonym in 1976 and 1977 to organise a national anti-busing campaign (busing was a means of desegregating schools by transporting children from one area to another). Yet in 1985 the Reagan administration appointed Scott to the chair of the Iowa Advisory Committee to the US Commission on Civil Rights, a body tasked with enforcing antidiscrimination legislation. Even after taking up his influential post, Scott was writing for Pearson’s journal.
For Hurt, it’s clear that the race science that thrived in Europe and the US at the start of the 20th century, manifesting itself most devastatingly in Nazi “racial hygiene”, had survived by the end of it and beyond. “The election of Trump made it impossible for many people to any longer overlook this stuff,” he says.
Once there was the backdrop of slavery and colonialism, then it was immigration and segregation, and now it is the rightwing agenda of this age. Nativism remains an issue, but there is also a backlash against greater efforts to promote racial equality in multicultural societies. For those with a political ideology, the “science” is simply a way to project themselves as scholarly and objective.
“Why do we still have race science, given everything that happened in the 20th century?” asks US anthropologist Jonathan Marks, who has worked to combat racism within academia. He answers his own question: “Because it is an important political issue. And there are powerful forces on the right that fund research into studying human differences with the goal of establishing those differences as a basis of inequalities.”
A common theme among today’s “race realists” is their belief that because biological race differences exist, diversity and equal opportunity programmes – designed to make society fairer – are doomed to fail. If an equal world isn’t being forged fast enough, it is due to a permanent natural roadblock created by the fact that, deep down, we’re not the same. “We have two nested fallacies here,” Marks continues. The first is that the human species comes packaged up in a small number of discrete races, each with their own different traits. “Second is the idea that there are innate explanations for political and economic inequality. What you’re saying is, inequality exists, but it doesn’t represent historical injustice. These guys are trying to manipulate science to construct imaginary boundaries to social progress.”
Until his death in 2012, one of the most prominent figures in this “race realist” network was Canadian psychologist John Philippe Rushton, whose name is still cited regularly in publications such as Mankind Quarterly. He earned a fawning obituary in the Globe and Mail, one of Canada’s most widely read papers, despite being notorious for his claim that brain and genital size were inversely related, making black people, he argued, better endowed but less intelligent than white people. Rushton felt “The Bell Curve didn’t go far enough”; his work has featured on Stefan Molyneux’s show.
When Rushton’s book Race, Evolution and Behaviour was published in 1995, psychologist David Barash was stirred to write in a review: “Bad science and virulent racial prejudice drip like pus from nearly every page of this despicable book.” Rushton had collected scraps of unreliable evidence in “the pious hope that by combining numerous little turds of variously tainted data, one can obtain a valuable result”. In reality, Barash wrote, “the outcome is merely a larger than average pile of shit”. In 2019, Rushton remains an intellectual icon for “race realists” and for members of the “alt-right”.
The right to live offline, to self-define, to choose, to a healthy planet ... as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights turns 70, leading authors reimagine it for today
By Alex Green, Press Association
In HOME UK/Spain news, UK/Spain news
June 24, 2019
Press Association
Sir Michael Morpurgo has warned that Britons risk losing their human rights if they continue to take them for granted.
The 75-year-old author said many had forgotten how flouting European people’s basic freedoms had directly led to the “barbarity” of the Second World War and the Holocaust.
Sir Michael, a former Children’s Laureate, spoke during an event to launch Fly The Flag week at London’s Somerset House.
The performance, celebrating 70 years since the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, featured a flag designed by Chinese artist Ai Weiwei.
Sir Michael told the Press Association that Britain’s pursuit of the “capitalistic dream” had thrown the future of its people’s human rights into doubt.
He said:
“We have become, as a people, so used to our human rights that we forget we have them.
“There is even a spirit in the country where they don’t really matter, they say we’ve got too many of them and they interfere with our capitalistic dream.
“That’s the real worry – that we take the thing too much for granted now.
“And when you think, for hundreds of years people have gone to the stake and been imprisoned and tortured and abused in order that we can speak our minds and have freedoms and rights that in previous generations were just to be dreamed of.”
Sir Michael, who wrote new words to the early 20th century US protest song Bread And Roses for the event, said he was “worried” by calls for the UK to abandon the European Convention on Human Rights.
He said:
“(The Second World War), that’s when the barbarity of not having human rights, not respecting other people’s freedoms of worship and whatever, that’s what it leads to.
“What’s important is to remind us now that this matters. It really does matter. We live in a world that is full of dangers and we have to stand up for what it is we believe in.”
He also urged people to remember the “wonderful” suffragettes who secured women the vote, warning that their “brave” sacrifice should not be forgotten.
“At each stage people have suffered and suffered. Most recently, a century or so ago, women got up and said ‘That’s enough. We are not going to put up with this any more.’Some 150 organisations are involved in the week-long event, including advocacy group Liberty, Amnesty International, the National Theatre, Tate, Sadler’s Wells and Fuel.
“And what happened to them? Into prison, force-fed, all this sort of stuff. These were brave, brave people. Wonderful people.”
Weiwei, an activist and frequent government critic, and other participants visited 40 refugee camps globally where they collected the footprints of displaced men, women and children for the flag.
The performance was hosted by theatre director Sam West, Irish actress Kate McGrath and Egyptian actor Khalid Abdalla.
Fly The Flag week runs from June 24 to 30 around the UK.
Pic by David Parry/PA Wire
