The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: A Flawed First Step

Human rights. What images do those two words bring to mind? One may be tempted to entertain images of universal justice, gender equality and the abolishment of poverty. In truth, human rights encompass the seedy worlds of dark sweatshops, race discrimination and wide earnings gaps between those two elements of society, men and women. These issues have, arguably, been the driving factor behind innumerable international conflicts, such as the genocide in Rwanda and the war in Darfur. Besides these stand-out conflicts, human rights have also been at the heart of many high-profile scandals and issues, such as Nike employing child labour and China’s reluctance to end it’s support and continued use of sweatshops. Women and children around the world continue to face issues such as human trafficking and prostitution, while journalists and bloggers in China are repressed and silenced. Human rights violations have been, and will continue to be a big issue in the twenty-first century, and society has devised various different ways to deal with the problem. Non-governmental organizations – NGOs – such as Amnesty International and Oxfam International work to find lasting solutions to poverty and injustice by purchasing and funding emergency food and medicine, and by collecting used clothing and shoes. Governments, too, have a responsibility to protect their denizens from human rights violations, such as gender and race discrimination. In order to enable and foster continued international support for human rights, intergovernmental agencies such as the United Nations have created commissions and drafted documents encouraging countries to oppose those who violate human rights, and to take steps to protect their citizens from said violations. One of these documents is the International Declaration of Human Rights, a declaration adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 10, 1948. Although this document was created in good faith, there have been situations in which this document has failed to yield the expected results. For example, the Universal Declaration (from here on in referred to be referred to as the UDHR) states in Article 5 that “No one shall be subject to torture, or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment”, yet Amnesty International reported in 2000 that torture is widely used in more than 125 countries. The UDHR has failed to live up to it’s expectations for two main reasons. Firstly, the Declaration is just that; a declaration. It is nothing close to an internationally binding agreement or treaty that could be legally enforced, signatory states are still free to commit human rights violations without too much fear of economic sanctions or reprisals. Secondly, the UDHR fails to specifically set targets that must be met in order to protect human rights – it only outlines idealistic goals. The UDHR, though a noble first step towards human rights protection, was insufficient, and only by changing existing attitudes, creating local awareness and setting realistic goals can countries such as Canada hope to effectively support and promote human rights.

Studies have shown that powerful countries – like the United States – are rarely willing to employ sanctions against less-powerful countries who commit human rights violations. Although this might seem to be but a trivial problem – after all, developed nations don’t commit nearly as many human rights violations as their third-world counterparts – it is not, when we realize that the West holds much of the power that can be used to keep awry governments in line. The United States, with it’s own shady human rights record, is perhaps the world’s great hope for enforcing human rights. Wealthy nations such as Britain, the United States and Canada should actively promote human rights in other countries who may find violating said rights natural, or even necessary in the context of the economy. In fact, some experts on the issue feel that “without powerful countries taking a strong interest in the effectiveness of international human rights regimes, there is little cost for parties with a poor human rights record to ratify the treaty (the UDHR) as a symbolic gesture of good will, instead maintaining its poor record in actually reality. From this we see that countries with power and influence do have the capacity to change how human rights are approached on a global scale. However, many nations such as the United States, though signers of the UDHR, are apathetic when it comes to actually taking action. “Indeed, for the most part, countries take relatively little interest in the extent of human rights violations in other countries, unless one of their own citizens are affected.” This attitude of “only extending a hand when I have something to gain” needs to be fixed. This is, truly, the first and foremost reason why the UDHR has failed to create the drastic changes in human rights protection that its drafters envisioned. Canada might be considered somewhat of an exception to this trend of apathetic, self-serving modern countries. As can be seen from the ongoing mission in Haiti to foster education, health and development, Canada does in fact have the right attitude – that, as a developed Western nation, the government should take efforts to aid and help less-developed nations support human rights inside their countries. Only by adopting this attitude can we hope to improve the status of human rights all around the world.

Another serious flaw of the UDHR is its inability to take into account local and cultural factors that may have an effect on the human rights situation in a particular locale or geographic area. Such factors may come in the form of local traditions, economic necessities and religious backgrounds. For example, the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam is a declaration that was adopted by the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, an Islamic international organization whose members include Iran, Afghanistan, Jordan and Palestine. It is widely held that this declaration arose as a direct response to the predominantly Westernized UDHR. The UDHR, then, was criticized for not taking into account the special requirements and regulations of Islamic Shari’a law. As a result, this specialized document was created – not out of spite or needless want, but out of a necessity to create something that could be fitted specifically to the multitude of Islamic states who still wanted to recognize human rights in their own way. In countries such as El Salvador and Bangladesh, teams or workers labouring in unregulated factories work long hours with few breaks and little pay. Situations such as these do not arise most often out of governments’ unwillingness to ratify the UDHR, but rather they arise from embedded cultural, social and economic practices that cannot so easily be changed to fit into the mould of human rights. Canada is a good example of this: Canada is a country of immigrants, and is becoming more culturally diverse every year. The Canadian government, as is its duty, has taken many steps to accommodate thus, such as when it enacted the Canadian Human Rights Act in 1977. It is clear that the UDHR has and will continue to have problems reconciling itself with various different cultural, religious and economic communities around the world; if the UDHR were to be modified, grassroots initiatives tied linked in purpose to those outlined in the UDHR would be a good way to approach the problem. Grassroots organizations “are [...] central to efforts to promote human rights because they work at the local level.” Two examples of successful grassroots organizations tied to international human rights include the Ixcan Association for Human Rights, and the Haitian Women in Solidarity organization. These groups working at the local level would hopefully be able to, perhaps in a step-by-step process, mold and shape local traditions into shapes that protect human rights. These efforts would of course need to be generally in line with the ideals of the UDHR, and could perhaps be overseen by international human rights groups such as Amnesty International.

Lastly, the UDHR has failed in achieving its goals because it has simply set the bar too high. In the twenty-first century, the volumes of sweat, amounst of time and levels of international cooperation needed to fulfill the idealistic goals set out in the thirty articles of the UDHR simply do not exist. More importantly however, many countries now still do not take the reasons for human rights seriously enough to make the UDHR work. Truly, if “the suggested reasons for human rights are to go deep enough, then the rights they require, at least some of these rights, will be unrealistically demanding,” The reasons behind the existence of human rights are both vast and noble in nature, but the requirements that they produce in reality are simply too much for the world as it is today. Canada, once again sets the bar for high human rights standards – Canada resides in that small clutch of nations that has extended full rights to same-sex partners, and Canada’s peace-keeping activities are well-known around the globe. Once again, Canada must continue to champion human rights that other countries are simply not ready for. Indeed, “it seems unlikely that the best best reasons for human rights can be given full expression in any feasible set of human rights, at least in our present world.” Only when the UN sets lower standards can the rest of the global community bring these goals to fruition.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights came at a timely moment in history; after the defeat of Nazi Germany. At that point in history, emotions ran high and humanity found the need to draft a document stating its intentions to never again let those atrocities of war be committed again. In his haste, man failed to recognize the many problems with his new found document – the failure to take into account cultural and religious differences of the world’s people, the unwillingness of world powers to actively support those golden ideals, and final, bitter truth; that the world is simply not ready for such sweeping changes to human rights. In the coming years, perhaps in the next few decades or centuries, maybe the global community will take the necessary steps to amend the UDHR, and once again work towards fostering global human rights cooperation.

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There you have it, my end-of-the-year ISU for CLN 4U0.

Cheers,

Kamster