The UDHR
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was adopted by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly on 10 December 1948. It is a statement of what is required for human beings to live with dignity and respect. The team that drafted the declaration included the First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, a Lebanese professor, a Chinese philosopher, and French lawyer and a Russian diplomat. It was truly universal. The UN then created the United Nations Human Rights Commission (UNHCR) which drafted a brief statement of human rights ranging from freedom of speech to having an adequate standard of living.
The UDHR is an aspirational statement. This means that countries are to use the goals it sets out to guide policies that will respect, protect, and fulfil the rights of all human beings. Human rights are rooted in the idea that every human being deserves to live with dignity, simply by virtue of being human. In theory, discrimination on any grounds is prohibited.
What are our human rights?
They are:
· the right to life, liberty, and security
· prohibition against slavery, torture, and discrimination
· freedom of thought, speech, and religion
· the right to have a nationality and the right to claim asylum
· freedom of movement and right to a fair trial
· the right to education
· the right to the highest attainable standard of health
· the right to an adequate standard of living, including habitable housing and the prohibition against forced evictions
· the right to freely participate in cultural life
· the right to work, which includes favourable conditions of work and a right to rest and leisure.
Why do some human rights vary by nation?
Global leaders were presented with some tricky problems when it came to creating policies that would protect the human rights included in the UDHR. The declaration was deliberately brief so that different cultural and political systems could adapt the broad ideas to their individual needs. That meant there was a lot of room for interpretation. Many countries feel human rights are less important than other priorities, such as domestic political and economic issues. For example, even as the USA was voting in favour of the UDHR and celebrating Mrs Roosevelt’s leadership in the drafting process, it was actively discriminating against its own African Americans in education, the right to a fair trial and housing access – for example the so-called ‘Jim Crow laws’.
In the decades since the UDHR’s adoption, there have been tremendous steps forward in guaranteeing human rights in many places, but there remain many obstacles:
· women’s rights continue to face challenges around the world, as countries claim that their cultural practices prohibit equal treatment for women.
· some countries arrest people when they criticise the government, while others have laws that disadvantage minority populations – for example the Rohingya peoples of Myanmar, and the Uighurs in China.
The ECHR
In addition to the UDHR there are regional treaties in some parts of the world, for example the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which came into force in 1953. This reflected regional priorities as well as the period when it was drafted, and it therefore focused largely on civil and political rights like the rights to a fair trial and to freedom of religion.
The ECHR also established a Court - the European Court of Human Rights - which hears cases brought by individuals who feel their rights under the ECHR have been violated. The European Court has legal teeth since, unlike most international treaties, the Convention is integrated into national law of signatory countries, including the UK. The UK integrated the ECHR into its laws in 1998.
The legal enforcement of the ECHR has caused issues for some people in some countries, who feel the court infringes on their sovereignty - an ongoing concern that was one motivation for the recent Brexit decision. A recent example is the discontent of some for the failure of the UK government’s policy to ‘export’ migrants to a third-party country – Rwanda.
How are human right governed?
Unfortunately, there are widespread violations of human rights. Despite the UDHR’s clear declaration by world leaders that all human beings ought to have certain rights no matter who oversees the government, many countries continue to claim that their sovereignty ranks higher than these rights. Efforts to enforce human rights are therefore only as strong as governments allow them to be.
Despite these difficulties, several international treaties protecting human rights have been created over the years. Treaties are different from declarations because they are legally binding, but they can be difficult to enforce because participation is voluntary. Some treaties are about specific human rights issues (e.g. torture and racial discrimination), and about specific groups of people (e.g. women, children, people with disabilities, migrant workers). Most countries have signed at least one of these treaties - for example, 194 nations have legally adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child [CRC] (exceptions include Somalia, South Sudan, and the USA). However, that doesn’t mean that all 194 countries follow the rules of the CRC.
War crimes and crimes against humanity
In addition to norms regarding human rights that govern how states treat their own people, there are also international laws about crimes that take place during wartime (war crimes), or which are so serious that they harm humanity (crimes against humanity). These laws overlap with human rights laws, but they differ in one important respect: they are not just aspirations for how humans ought to be treated, breaking them is a crime and those who do so can be sent to prison if they are found guilty.
The Geneva Conventions, like the UDHR, were adopted following the Second World War, when there was a global political commitment to a peaceful future. These rules prohibit abuse of civilians, genocide and a whole host of other actions ranging from torture to bombing hospitals. It wasn’t until the 1990s that a court was created that would bring individuals to trial for these crimes.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) hears cases against leaders who order atrocities. Like all international bodies, the ICC is only as strong as the countries that created it choose to make it, which means that it has faced criticisms over the places it focuses on in its trials, and how effective it is at bringing people to justice. The fact that the USA is not a member of the ICC, fearful perhaps of its involvement in wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, indicates just how strong, or otherwise, this body is. The Russian President Vladimir Putin is currently indicted by the ICC over his decision to invade Ukraine, and some of the deaths associated with it.