1. The nature of human rights

Before moving to a detailed discussion of human rights, it is important to explain the broad concept of human rights used here. We are used to thinking about human rights in terms of individual human rights, that is, freedom from specific abuses or restrictions, especially by governments. The U.S. Bill of Rights, for example, prohibits (except in extreme cases) the government from abridging individual Americans’ right to exercise their religion or free speech, from discriminating against citizens based on race and other demographic traits, from long-imprisoning citizens without a trial, and from committing a variety of other abuses. Gradually, these constitutional prohibitions have been extended to restrict actions by U.S. state and local governments and even, in some cases, by individuals.

There is a more comprehensive concept of rights. This broader view holds that people and groups riot only have the right not to be specifically abused, but that they also have collective human rights to a quality of life that, at minimum, does not detract from their human dignity. One scholar suggests that the most fruitful way to think about human rights is to begin with the idea that "ultimately they are supposed to serve basic human needs." These basic human needs, which generate corresponding rights, include, among others:

• "Survival needs—to avoid violence": The requisite to avoid and the right to be free from individual and collective violence.

• "Well-being needs—to avoid misery": The right to adequate nutrition and water; to movement, sleep, sex, and other biological wants; to protection from diseases and from adverse climatological and environmental impacts.

• "Identity needs—to avoid alienation": The right to self-expression; to realize your potential, to establish and maintain emotional bonds with others; to preserve cultural heritage and association; to contribute through work and other activity; and to receive information about and maintain contact with nature, global humanity, and other aspects of the biosphere.

• "Freedom needs—to avoid repression": The right to receive and express opinions, to assemble with others, to have a say in common policy; and to choose in such wide-ranging matters as jobs, spouses, where to live, and lifestyle.

Few, if any, people would argue that these rights are absolute. As the classic formulation about free speech goes, for example, freedom of speech does not include the right to shout "fire!" in a crowded theater. It is also the case that the legal rights granted and recognized by countries largely include only protections from specific abuses of individuals and groups and do not include the right to certain qualitative standards of life. But it is also arguable that the very nature of being human means that people have the right to exist in at least tolerable conditions as well as the right to be merely free from specific abuses. It is also appropriate to say a bit about the origins of human rights. Recall from chapter 11 that there is an ancient debate about the basis of human rights. Universalists represent one school of thought, relativists represent the other.

Universalists believe that human rights are derived from sources external to society. Depending on the universalist, the source may be one or another theological or ideological doctrine or it may be natural rights. This last concept holds that the fact of being human carries with it certain rights that cannot be violated or can only be violated in extremis. Universalists therefore believe that there is a single, prevailing set of standards of moral behavior on which human rights are based.

Relativists argue from a positivist point of view and claim that rights are the product of a society’s contemporary values. Positivists therefore contend that in a world of diverse cultures, no single standard of human rights exists or is likely to exist short of the world becoming completely homogenized culturally. Those who believe in the cultural relativism of rights also tend to view attempts to impose standards of rights by one culture on another as cultural imperialism.

It is not uncommon to hear those in the non-Western world argue that many of the rights asserted in such international documents as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted in 1948 by an overwhelming vote of the UN General Assembly, are based on the values of the politically dominant West. Positivists contend that many of these Western values, such as individualism and democracy, are not held as strongly in other cultures, and that no matter how high-minded the intent, Western attempts to impose them are imperialist. There are, however, leaders in non-Western cultures who reject these assertions of cultural relativism. Burmese political activist and 1991 Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi writes that claims about "the national culture can become a bizarre graft of carefully selected historical incidents and distorted social values intended to justify the policies and actions of those in power." She goes on to argue that, "It is precisely, because of the cultural diversity of the world that it is necessary for different nations and peoples to agree on those basic human values which will act as a unifying factor." As for the cultural imperialism argument, Suu Kyi contends that "when democracy and human rights are said to run counter to non-Western culture, such culture is usually defined narrowly and presented as monolithic." To avoid this, she counsels, it is possible to conceive of rights "which place human worth above power and liberation above control". The power and control she wishes to subordinate are not just those of government, but also those of one ethnic group, race, religion, sex, or other societal faction over another.

It must be said that differences over what constitutes a human right are not only matters of Western and non-Western philosophies. There are also vigorous disputes between countries of similar cultural heritage. For example, many countries have taken the same position and will not extradite people accused of capital crimes unless assured that the death penalty will not be invoked. In one case, Italy’s Constitutional Court cited the alleged barbarity of executions and blocked the extradition of an Italian wanted for first-degree murder in Florida, which has a death penalty. A U.S. Department of Justice official called the Italian court’s decision "a bad omen"; Giovanni Leone, a former president of Italy, called the decision "one of historic character that does honor to Italy."

Such views have increased worldwide as the number of executions in the United States has risen. A total of 85 inmates were put to death in U.S. prisons in 2000, and 3,527 other prisoners were under sentence of death. Of these, 85 had been sentenced to death for crimes they had committed as children (under the age of 18). The U.S. record stands in sharp contrast to the trend worldwide, where the number of countries that prohibit the execution of prisoners increased from 8 in 1948 to 90 in 2000. This difference was one factor that led the UN in late 1997 to name a monitor to report on potential human rights violations by the United States in light of:

- its relatively high rate of executions (third in the world in 2000 after China and Saudi Arabia);

- the execution of individuals for crimes they committed as children;

- the high percentage of those executed who are from minority groups (42 percent of all those executed in 2000 were African Americans; adding Latinos, for whom separate data is not compiled, would certainly push the minority rate over 50 percent).

2. DEFINING HUMAN RIGHTS

International politics has traditionally been thought of in terms of collective groups, socially states. Individual needs and interests have therefore generally been subsumed within the larger notion of the ‘national interest’ As a result international politics largely amounted to a struggle for power between and amongst states with little consideration being given to the implications of this for the individuals concerned. People, and therefore morality were factored out of the picture. However, this divorce between state policy and the individual, and thus between power and morality, has gradually become more difficult to sustain.

Many cultures and civilizations have developed ideas about the worth and dignity of individual human beings. However these theories were traditionally rooted in religious belief, meaning that the moral worth of the individual was grounded in divine authority, human beings usually being seen as creatures of God. The prototype for the modern idea of human rights was devel¬oped in early modern Europe in the form of ‘natural rights’. Advanced by polit¬ical philosophers such as Hugo Grotius, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, such rights were described as ‘natural’, in that they were thought to be God-given and therefore to be part of the very core of human nature. Natural rights did not exist simply as moral claims but were, rather, considered to reflect the most fundamental inner human drives; they were the basic conditions for leading a truly human existence. By the late eighteenth century, such ideas were expressed in the notion of the ‘rights of a man’, which was used as a means of constraining government power by defining a sphere of autonomy that belongs the citizen. The US Declaration of Independence (1776), which declared life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to be inalienable rights, gave expression to such ideas, as did the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789).

Such thinking gradually acquired an international dimension during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through attempts to set standards for international conduct, usually based on humanitarianism. For example, the grow of humanitarian ethics helped to inspire attempts to abolish the slave trade, a cause endorsed by the Congress of Vienna (l815) and was eventually achieved by the Brussels Convention (1890), with slavery itself being formally outlawed by the Slavery Convention (1926) (even though forms of slavery continue to exist in practices such as bonded labour, forced marriage, child labour and the trafficking of women). The Anti-Slavery Society, formed in 1837, can perhaps be seen as the world’s first human rights NGO. Other humanitarian causes that were translated into a form of international standard setting included the regulation of the conduct of war, through the Hague Conventions (1907) and the Geneva Conventions (1926), and attempts to improve working conditions, spearheaded by the International Labour Office, formed in 1901, and its successor, the International Labour Organization, which was established in 1919 as part of the Treaty of Versailles and became, in 1946, the first specialized agency of the United Nations.

Such developments nevertheless remained piecemeal and largely marginal to the general thrust of international politics until the end of WWII. The adop¬tion by the UN General Assembly of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), later supplemented by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (both in 1966), established the modern human rights agenda by outlining a comprehensive code for the internal government of its member states, which has arguably acquired the status of customary international law. Reflecting a major change in the general climate of thought, deeply influenced by the horrors of WWII, the Declaration led to a burst of law-making and standard setting that sought to establish international protection for the full range of human rights. 1948 thus brought to an end a period of exactly 300 years since the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), during which state sovereignty had stood unchallenged as the dominant norm of international politics. However, although the Declaration established the rival norm of human rights, tensions between states’ rights and human rights were by no means resolved in 1948.