Human rights
Sunday November 30, 2008
The day the world’s nations re-drew international law
In hindsight, it was a watershed moment in human development. Sixty years ago, on December 10, 1958, the General Assembly of the United Nations, meeting in Paris, adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
I didn’t pay much attention at the time. I was 12. I took for granted that I was the centre of the universe. Even World War II, the incentive behind the Declaration, had not affected me in any way that I was aware of.
It hadn’t dawned on my consciousness that six million Jews had been exterminated in Nazi death camps. That 10 million Ukrainians had been starved to death by the Russians. That more than 20 million Russians died fighting Hitler’s armies…
I didn’t even realize yet that I was a member of a privileged minority—white, male, English speaking, literate…
I lived in a protected cocoon.
Equal rights for all
Since then, I’ve travelled widely. I’ve seen naked children playing in green sewage slime in Haiti. Families huddled under a tent made of plastic garbage bags, on a sidewalk in India. People living in caves dug out of a mud cliff in Brazil, and beggars in Ethiopia so deformed that at first I thought they were monkeys scampering across the pavement.
We are not all equal. We do not all share equal opportunity.
The Universal Declaration was not the first attempt to define human rights. That historic honour probably belongs to a clay cylinder inscribed in cuneiform characters, attributed to Cyrus the Great of Persia, around 539 BC.
During the 1700s, European philosophers developed concepts that shaped Bills of Rights in England, America, and France.
But these all focused on the rights and responsibilities of their own nationals. The UN Declaration broke new ground by asserting that rights belonged to all humans.
An ideal often ignored
The Declaration’s first two Articles set out its foundational principles: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights… They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood… without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.”
The balance of the Declaration expands those principles into social and justice contexts.
The UN General Assembly approved the Declaration with no dissenting votes—but with some significant abstentions.
Because the Soviet Union was still running its notorious gulags. South Africa maintained legally-authorized apartheid. Saudi Arabia was tyrannically patriarchal.
It still is.
Although much has changed, the concept of human rights too often remains a lofty ideal, more commonly violated than respected.
Within the last week, for example, heavily armed thugs bearing a religious and racial grudge singled out hostages in Mumbai solely because they carried western passports. It hardly qualifies as a spirit of brotherhood.
Personal experience
Marsel Ahmadzadegan knows religious discrimination personally. He comes from Iran, where the Baha’i faith has been ruthlessly persecuted.
“We have over 30,000 martyrs,” Ahmadzadegan states.
Ahmadzadegan himself was prohibited from attending university, although he had had the highest marks in his school. His father had been a highly ranked state official. When Ayatollah Khomeini came to power, Ahmadzadegan recalls, “My father went to work one morning, and another man was sitting at his desk.”
Relatives raised $10,000 to smuggle 20-year-old Marsel across the border into Pakistan. The escape took three nights, travelling by camel.
One night, the headlights of an armoured patrol car lurched across the desert towards them. The guides made the camels lie down among some scraggly bushes; the people huddled on the far side as searchlights swept past.
Ahmadzadegan made it to Pakistan, met the woman who would later become his wife, and eventually set up an optical business in Lake Country.
Because of Ahmadzadegan’s personal experience of discrimination, he has taken a lead role in organizing a celebration to mark the 60th3”> Anniversary of the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
“The Declaration,” says Ahmadzadegan, “offers people hope.”
Misery and oppression are no longer inevitable. People can make a difference.
Visible effects
Stephen Lewis tells audiences of visiting an Afghan refugee camp in western Pakistan. He and an Amnesty International worker met a recently released political prisoner.
“When letters first started arriving,” the man told Lewis, “my guards used them to taunt me: ‘Look, your stupid friends think they can get you out!’ Then more letters came, and they grew angry. Still more letters, and they fell silent. Finally, they released me.”
The Amnesty worker sitting with Lewis suddenly realized—she had been one of those writing letters on this man’s behalf.
The Guinness Book of Records describes the Declaration as the “most translated document” in the world.
Similarly, a statement from the Baha’i International Community called it “one of the first collective expressions of an international community… [that] affirmed the inherent dignity of the human being, the rule of law over the rule of force, and placed the well-being of the individual at the centre of international law.
“The moral terrain of international law was redrawn.”
I tend, by nature, to see flaws more readily than I recognize triumphs. So I find it easy to focus on instances of injustice, where the Universal Declaration has been flouted.
But even a pessimist can see that the world has been changed by that Declaration. There is now a code to which offenders can be held accountable, a set of principles for all nations, all races, all genders, to aim for.
Of course some will fall short of those ideals. Around the world, privileged minorities still cling to special status. But now they know that they have fallen short. They can no longer take their privileged positions for granted.
They can no longer act like 12-year-olds.
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Copyright © 2008 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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PROMOTION PLUGS
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