The Aspiration & Reality of Human Rights
A group of “nerds and computer geeks” took it upon themselves to fix the world.
Photo credit: Markus Spiske
Hello friends!
It’s been a couple of weeks since I last published on The Misfit. Unfortunately, I caught COVID and took time off to heal. I’m feeling better now and very grateful!
As my sister says, “there is no greater wealth than your health.” That could not feel truer.
Now that I’m back, I would like to talk about something that’s piqued my interest lately - and that is the great aspiration and reality of human rights. But first, a small history lesson.
The Origins of Human Rights
The Nuremberg trials were a series of 13 trials held in 1945-46 with the goal of bringing Nazi war criminals to justice.
Military personnel, doctors, lawyers, industrialists and more were held accountable to their crimes against peace and humanity.
“The Nuremberg trials established that all of humanity would be guarded by an international legal shield and that even a Head of State would be held criminally responsible and punished for aggression and Crimes Against Humanity.” (source)
(As fate would have it, Hitler would never stand in trial because he committed suicide to avoid capture at the end of WW2.)
Leaders worldwide thought that “international law” could help prevent another event like holocaust from ever happening again.
So, that’s when the United Nations (U.N.) was born.
Made up of 51 countries at the time, the U.N. was created in 1945 to maintain international peace, security and human rights. The next 40 years were spent developing what we now called “international criminal law”.
Since then, the number of international human rights treaties, declarations and statements has never been higher.
The Aspirations of Human Rights
Those who founded the United Nations (U.N.) truly believed that human rights could be “internationalized, institutionalized and universalized in a document” - Helen M. Stacy, Human Rights Scholar.
They created core human rights and urged governments to provide these rights to their citizens.
“There are fourteen core international human rights treaties covering everything from racial discrimination to violence against women to children’s human rights as well as hundreds of related international agreements. Under these treaties and agreements governments of signatory states undertake to see to it that human rights are included in their national legislation, enforced in national courts, and enacted into government domestic policy. As international phenomena go, the coupling of human rights values to legal forms is an extraordinary historical development.” — Helen M. Stacy
These human rights asserted that everyone had the right to:
life, liberty and security
the right to express their opinion, belief and religious affiliation
the right to a standard of living, health, education, housing
and the right to participate in governments
If the Nuremberg trials thrusted human rights forward, the United Nations catapulted these rights.
And YET, for all its progress, there continues to be human rights catastrophes every single day.
The Harsh Realities of Human Rights Today
Governments promise to uphold these human rights but continuously fail in their obligations big time.
“In the last half-century 127 civil wars occurred in 73 states, killing more than 16 million people.” Helen M. Stacy
Over and over again, the world has seen human rights violations flourish even when laws are in place to avoid them.
Here are just some examples:
Sudan: killing people, raping women, harming villages
Syria: bombing, using chemical warfare on civilians and causing one of the biggest refugee crisis of the world
United States: creating no-man’s lands to carry out inhuman activities in Guantanamo Bay
Venezuela: executing and making political opposition members disappear
Australia: abusing Indigenous peoples
The problem is many of these governments will either neglect or fail to acknowledge these rights.
Worse, they may blatantly enforce violations to minority populations they dislike. We’ve seen this play out with the Hutu and Tutsi people of Rwanda and the Sunni and Shia people of Iraq.
Other times, certain human rights issues are simply not “worthy” of attention because they don’t have the same weight that wartime crimes have.
… Like, Female Genital Mutilation (FGM).
Although the United Nations adopted CEDAW (Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women), mothers in some African countries hold their little girls down for the activity of cutting EVEN when there are national criminal laws that prohibit this.
The reality is that there is a major gap between law and practice at the international, national and cultural level. So, human rights protection are still far from ideal.
Global Networks are Changing the Game
Today, we’re seeing something extraordinary happen:
Non-government organizations making a bigger impact in protecting human rights than our parliaments are
Corporations being more powerful than governments
Mass media acting as formal institutions of truth (even if they’re flip flopping between fiction and non-fiction)
But there’s a sneakier phenomenon taking place right under our noses…
That is global networks of people forming to perform the role of formal governments.
Take a look at Bitcoin for example.
A group of “nerds and computer geeks” have taken it upon themselves to create a sound monetary system because the one we have is plagued by corruption, misuse and lack of transparency. They stopped waiting and built a solution themselves.
“Fix the money, fix the world” right?
While doing so, they began to dislodge governments and disrupt the financial system as we know it. That is remarkable!
Time will tell how the change in our economic structure – one that is more fair, democratic and open thanks to Bitcoin – will affect our quality of life and ultimately our rights.
If anything we will continue to see these decentralized networks of people and technologies grow as the world becomes more scary and unsafe and tumultuous for us. Gone will be the days of authority to effect meaningful change.
I think it’s safe to say… we’re all done waiting for salvation.
One Last Word
Human rights this century will be different than in the 20th century. How so? I’m not exactly sure.
One way I can imagine is that human rights activism will continue to be sparked by persuasion, passion, and a deep duty to humankind vs. the more traditional top-down-approach.
…Think “Me Too”, “Black Lives Matter”, “the Freedom Convoy” movements…
And it has to be.
As our democracies become sacrificed there will be new losers. Possibly more losers. More losers in society causes havoc and ignites civil wars - especially when they were previously winners.
No one is feeling it more than the parent who sacrifices eating so their child can eat, or the refugee who must give in to prostitution to earn money or the girl who was forced into early marriage.
NO ONE.
The world around us is experiencing tiny, little tremors everywhere. It’s inevitable an explosion will take place. But I have hope!
I just have to look at nature to draw inspiration. It is often said that land renews itself and gives way to new wildlife after a forest fire.
After fires, the charred remnants of burned trees provide habitats for insects and small wildlife, like the black-backed woodpecker and the threatened spotted owl, which make their homes in dry, hollow bark… Sometimes, post-wildfire landscapes will explode into thousands of flowers, in the striking phenomenon known as a superbloom. — (source)
Oohhh, how I hope we’re headed towards the superbloom!!
I suspect human rights will change drastically for the better. But not before it is much, much worse.
We must remember we’re ALL agents of change. It is our responsibility to protect each other at all costs because it can no longer be left to the great institutions.
So, write about it. Make videos. Talk about it at the dinner table. Vote with your like buttons and your dollars and your feet and don’t stand for crap.
I have the ultimate faith in you, in the heartbeat of humanity and in our undying spirit of freedom.
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.”-- Margaret Mead
***This week I interviewed a Venezuelan man seeking asylum in the United States. The conversation was 2.5 hours long with 10 pages of handwritten notes. It was a humbling conversation. I’ll be sharing the interview next week so make sure you’re subscribed to The Misfit to get it straight in your inbox!