It was 60 years ago today
Happy birthday to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – 60 today!
Unfortunately, like so many reaching a grand old age, the UDHR finds itself increasingly sidelined, it’s wisdom ignored as young turks who think they know better barge it aside.
Human rights have a bad reputation right now. The Human Rights Act in this country is under attack pretty much constantly. It’s deliberately misrepresented. When you’ve got the Justice Minister, desperate for votes and a buffing for his ego, running to the Daily Mail to depict the act as a ‘villain’s charter’ you know we’re in trouble.
The thing is, human rights aren’t some high-flown rhetoric, some utopian aspiration never to be achieved. They are the minimum standard of human behaviour. They are the least we should expect of each other. Here’s Article 1 of the Declaration:
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.
It’s the baseline not the zenith of human achievement. It’s a shame we can’t even rise to that most of the time with our opposable thumbs and huge brains. How many of our leaders use it as a yardstick to their decisions?
So yes, the UDHR needs to be celebrated. Even more, more than ever, it needs to be enforced.
Posted on December 10th, 2008 at 8:19am under Human rights
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• 7 Comments |
“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.”
Oh god, does that mean I’m supposed to be nice to Labour voters?
That’s all very well, but I don’t recall signing it myself. In fact it was agreed before I was born. What makes it any more relevant to my life than anything else that was written before I was born? Why should I respect that any more than Slaughterhouse 5, The Communist Manifesto, or the Bible?
Can I write a Universal Declaration with my mates down the pub and demand you follow that, too?
Re: “What makes it any more relevant to my life than anything else that was written before I was born?”
It gives you the right to voice such earth-shatteringly cretinous opinions for a kick off!
Just read the post over again and thank fate that you’re not Shannon Mathews, a child soldier, a prisoner of conscience, a falun gong practitioner, etc etc etc etc.
I’m sure they’ll consider an amendment if you want to declare yourself exempt from its protections.
If you think you or your mates have sufficient moral standing then please, go ahead.
Powerful post becuase I was doing a play recently about torture, which relies on making the people your torturing less than human of developing structures that convince that it is okay to treat someone in that way either based on who they are or what they’ve done (or could do).
And a lot of the time, in post-show discussions, people would suggest that the play was dealing with issues we no longer had to consider, that we’d never return to anything like Gitmo again.
That made me angry because Human Rights, as you point out, are a baseline to work up from, to keep aspiring from. It made me angry becuase torture and other anti-human techniques will return at the slightest threat to our ‘national security’ or ‘terrorist threat’.
That’s a very affecting short film. And not just because Stipe’s voice gets me every time.
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