Happy belated Halloween 🎃
How did you spend the day??
I just stayed at home and watch some movies and ordered some good food 😄
Today’s topic is about human rights.
The U.N. Declaration has been used as the standard to develop actual human rights treaties. But the declaration itself has its limitations.
The declaration, however, is just that: it’s a declaration. It’s not a binding treaty. It is not law.
Despite clear human rights standards, why do governments routinely discriminate against and often torture and imprison their citizens without trial? How should the international community respond when human rights are violated?
Generally, social and economic rights, such as the right to education and health care, are expensive and are not universally respected. Will these rights be achieved in the future?
Equal Protection of the Law
Probably the most basic right is simply the right to be who you are and not to be penalized for your race, color, sex, ancestry, or birth. The U.N. Declaration states, “all are equal before the law and entitled to equal protection of the law.
But similar to George Orwell’s “Animal Farm,” it seems that some people are more equal than others.Women make up more than half the world’s population, but in many places today, they are still second-class citizens who suffer severe forms of discrimination from birth.
Millions of girls around the world receive little or no education. In China, infant girls are sometimes drowned, starved, or abandoned by parents who would prefer a boy under the government’s policy of one child per family. In Saudi Arabia, women have long been denied basic rights that are afforded to men.
First of all, I think that throughout the Middle East, there’s no doubt that the repression of women has been a major source of their economic underdevelopment. If you’re preventing half of your population from becoming educated, they can’t participate in the workforce.
Hillary Clinton, at the Beijing women’s conference, said...”Human rights are women’s rights, and women’s rights are human rights once and for all.”
It seems like a simple concept. Men have to be incredibly interested in making sure that half of the people in the world are not repressed or enslaved. It’s not just good for women. It’s good for everybody.
In India, more than 160 million people suffer severe discrimination because they were born at the bottom of the Hindu caste system a rigid social hierarchy that defines what a person is allowed to do.
America’s response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, sparked international concerns about possible human rights violations. The United States government pushed through new laws that allowed terrorist suspects to be imprisoned indefinitely with no legal rights.
More than a thousand people were jailed, mostly Arab and Muslim men. Hundreds were held without formal charges or trial at the U.S. Naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, including children as young as 13, prompting harsh criticism from human rights organizations.
Freedom from Torture
The United Nations Human Rights Declaration says clearly, “no one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.” The ban on torture has been written into international treaties, and no country publicly supports torture.
Still, police in many countries routinely inflict pain on criminal suspects and political dissidents with the aim of extracting confessions or delivering punishment. Methods range from “stress and duress” techniques, such as being bound in painful positions, blindfolded, or deprived of sleep, to beatings, electric shocks, near drowning or suffocation, mutilation, and rape.
Freedom of Thought and Expression
The United Nations Declaration says that everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression. But many who have tried to express unpopular views have wound up in prison or worse.
One of the most famous violations of the right of people to express their political beliefs took place inBeijing, China, in June of 1989 at a place called Tiananmen Square. Over a million people, including students, workers, and intellectuals, filled the square, pressuring the hard-line communist government for democratic reforms.
Instead, the Chinese government responded with tanks and troops. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, were killed, and many suspected of taking part in the democracy movement were arrested and sentenced without trial to prison, with many reportedly tortured.
I think that what our Declaration of Independence says is true, that there are certain inalienable rights and among them are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And people pursue it whether it’s convenient or not, whether the government permits it or not.
Social and Economic Freedoms
The United Nations Declaration sets out the right to an adequate standard of living and the right to just and favorable conditions of work, but exactly what those standards should be has never been agreed upon, and they’re now at the center of a global debate over low-paid workers in poor countries, many of them children.
The next time you shop for clothes, take a look at the labels. Chances are many of them will say “made in Vietnam,” “Bangladesh,” or “Indonesia,” poorAsian countries where child labor is widespread.
Around the world, millions of children are working long hours in dangerous and unhealthy conditions for little pay.
One such worker was Iqbal Masih of Pakistan. When Iqbal was 4 years old, his family was given a loan in return for putting him to work in the village carpet factory. There, he was chained to a loan and forced to work for up to 14 hours a day, 6 days a week.
At age 10, he escaped from the factory and joined a campaign to protest the exploitation of child workers. For his courage, Iqbal won an international human rights award and a future scholarship to an American university. Sadly, in 1995, at the age of 12, he was murdered in his home village, gunned down while riding his bike.
Iqbal’s case sparked a reform movement in the West, which imports most of the products made by child labor. Manufacturers have since agreed to some reforms, but many argue that child labor should be abolished worldwide.
The issue of child labor is only part of the global debate over low-wage factory workers toiling in sweatshops around the world. The workers earn very little, are often treated harshly, and are punished or fired if they try to join unions.
This issue gathered public attention in 1996 when TV personality Kathie Lee Gifford was criticized for promoting clothes made by children in Honduras who worked 13-hour shifts and got paid the local minimum wage of 31 cents an hour.
Some economists argue that many workers are eager to take these so-called “sweatshop” jobs that for many can be a first step out of poverty.
In many cases, it’s a terrible thing to say, but in Bangladesh, a 50-cents-an-hour wage is actually a huge improvement over what’s available to a lot of people. The general rule is, if a poor country becomes as productive as a rich country, guess what. The wage also rise.
I think that there is a long history of not paying people for their work or not giving them adequate conditions to work, and one reason to do it is that there’s an economic advantage. You know, if one company has slave labor to whom they’re paying nothing, and another has highly trained labor to whom they’re paying a large amount, the first company can sell their product cheaper, and that’s where the sweatshop labor movement is basically saying people should be rewarded for their perspiration, not for exploitation, and I think that that’s an incredibly important concept.
Freedom from Slavery
The United Nations Declaration says “ slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their form,”but it still exists in some parts of the world, often referred to as “bonded labor “ or “human trafficking.” There are millions of forced laborers all over the world, mostly women and children.
One center of the present-day slave trade is west Africa, where children, many of them orphans whose parents died of AIDS, are recruited by traffickers with false promises of education and paid employment. Boys wind up doing back-breaking labor African coffee and cocoa plantations, while girls are forced into domestic slavery in other people’s homes.
Nearly two centuries after the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade and more than a century after slavery was officially ended in its last strongholds, the trade in human beings for any purpose must not be allowed to thrive in our time.
Protection of Human Rights
While the world generally recognizes human rights, it has yet to come up with a good system for protecting and ensuring them. The U.N. has limited powers to enforce its own treaties. In the end, it depends on the willingness of member states to observe human rights and to put international pressure on states where those rights are violated.
It also depends on world public opinion and monitoring ability of groups known as nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs. Often, nongovernmental organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International take the lead in defending human rights.
Amnesty International calls on its million and a half members to protest abuses through petitions and letters to government officials. Most members are ordinary citizens of all backgrounds, from students to senior citizens.
20 years ago, there were maybe 300 international NGOs that worked in many countries around the world. Today, there are tens of thousands of them. And they have just had an amazing effect in bringing attention to human rights abuse.
Probably the most powerful example of this is in south Africa. 10 years ago, South Africa had an apartheid government that segregated blacks and whites and that kept the races in totally different worlds, and all of the NGOs saw this as horrific and brought our attention to it. They arranged boycotts of campaigns that were working there. They made sports events that excluded South Africa to try to make that change. And if we look at South Africa today, it is a totally different country.
Part of the healing process for South Africa and a number of other countries that have emerged from periods of serious human rights violations, including Argentina, Chile, and El Salvador, has been the establishment of a truth commission.
Essentially, these panels examine and analyze the past in hopes of healing old wounds and preventing such abuses in the future. Truth commissions have limited powers but are sometimes able to bring violators to justice and provide compensation for victims.
If human rights are important and worth protecting,which human rights should come first? Political freedom or food for the hungry? Or do we have to choose?
Some Asian and African leaders have challenged the idea that human rights are the same everywhere. They say illiterate people in poor countries have less need for rights like freedom of the press and that economic development should come first.
As borders shrink and the world economy becomes increasingly globalized, there’s also the problem of how countries that claim to value human rights deal with those that do not.
Oftentimes, we will say, particularly after 9/11, that we need Russia to be a partner to stop terrorism, so we’ll ignore what’s happening in Chechnya, or we need China to be a trade partner, so we’ll ignore what’s happening in Tibet.
We have to ask ourselves whether that’s the value choice we want to make or whether it might be better to put some pressure on these countries and really pay attention to human rights abuses.
Each individual nation certainly bears the responsibility for its own actions, but what international body should be responsible for ensuring human rights around the world? The obvious answer is the U.N., but since not all of its members agree, it’s often unable to take action.
Nongovernmental organizations have been highly effective in prompting human rights, but in the end, they have no troops or weapons to enforce that.
That brings us to the ultimate question: is force ever justified in the name of human rights? And if so, who has the authority to authorize military intervention? The United States is the dominant military power in the world today. In the past, it has intervened with military force in such countries as Somalia, the former Yugoslavia, Kuwait, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
In most cases, it had support from the U.N. Or at least a broad coalition of allies, but in 2003 in Iraq, it did not. Some argue that the U.S. was justified in the use of force based solely on documented human rights violations of the Saddam Hussein regime. Others argue that only an international consensus can justify such intervention and that unilateral action is itself a violation of international law.
So, what’s the answer? And what can you do? How much of an impact can individuals really have in protecting and promoting human rights?
One of my favorite quotes is from Robert Kenned. He said... “ Each time a man stands up for an ideal or acts to improve the lot of others or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
One person really does matter in the human rights global movement.