"Article 3. Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person." - Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948
Human Rights in Decline: the decade long crisis
2016 marks the tenth anniversary of the establishment of the United Nations Human Rights Council and also coincides with the tenth consecutive year that human rights are in decline world wide. Over the past few days this blog has reflected on what the United Nations bureaucracy could have possibly gotten wrong that has contributed to this worsening situation in which the Council has been described as having turned into Frankenstein's monster.
However at the same time the Left's take over of human rights discourse over the past decade to advance its own agenda has benefited it but at the expense of the international human rights consensus. For example, Amnesty International's campaign beginning in 2007 to conflate the right to an abortion with its worldwide campaign to stop violence against women alienated many Catholic supporters, and has been described as anti-Catholic.
Catholic bishops, who had been members of Amnesty International, had to resign over the abortion issue because the human rights group had become an abortion lobby group. Catholics generally have been encouraged to boycott the organization. Independent Catholic News reported:
Catholic roots of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Pope John Paul II recalled the Roman Catholic Church's role in 1991 in the Papal Encyclical Centesimus Annus published on the 100th anniversary of Rerum Novarum:
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is heavily informed and influenced by Catholic social doctrine found in the 1891 Papal Encyclical Rerum Novarum by Pope Leo XIII. The Catholic Church in its social teaching rejects both liberalism and communism embracing a defense of the dignity of human beings grounded in its own metaphysical vision of personhood.
The holistic approach to human rights that embraces both civil/political and social/economic rights was not found in a compromise between the liberal Anglosphere and the socialist Soviet sphere but was the initiative of Catholic thinkers, states and the Holy See that shaped this important document that was embraced by the major faiths around the world that shared its common truths achieving a unanimous human rights consensus with that document.
Human rights, as an idea, have a conservative pedigree that stretches back to the Middle Ages and to the Catholic Church. The first time in human history that a universal concept of human rights in which they are applied to all living being on the planet emerged out of a debate concerning the Spanish conquest of the Americas in the 16th century.
The modern language of human rights emerges out of the public debate surrounding the treatment of Native Americans in the first years of the Spanish conquest and led King Charles V to organize a debate between Bartolomé De Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda in 1550 in which the humanity of the indigenous peoples of the Americas and their ability to govern themselves was recognized as briefly outlined in the following quote by Bishop Bartolomé De Las Casas:
Conservative roots of the European Union's Human Rights System
This is what happened in the French Revolution and reached its apex with Maximilien Robespierre, in 1794 with his observation that he applied in governance: "The government in a revolution is the despotism of liberty against tyranny." It is a contradiction in the same way that combining absolute freedom and equality as revolutionary goals are in contradiction and doomed to failure. Robespierre was only applying the logic of enlightenment thinker Jean Jacques Rousseau who wrote of "forcing men to be free."
However the Stalinists of old and the new "Socialists of the 21st Century" who divided humanity along class lines have not had as great an impact as the newest generations of the Left that instead of appealing to a common humanity has further fractured and divided people by race, sex, class, gender, sexual orientation, and ability. The great religions are now to be restricted to the private sphere and any questions that they may raise about the new divisions can be dismissed as "belief-based bigotry."
Ireland's Pro-Life stance criticized by the UNHRC in contradiction with the UDHR
The UN Human Rights Committee in March of 2016 criticized Ireland's pro-life laws, but at the same contradicted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its pro-life clause under Article 3. Both Catholicism (1.27 billion) and Islam (1.6 billion) which make up 2.87 billion believers hold strong bioethical considerations about abortion that are also shared with Orthodox Judaism. Post-Christian societies in Western Countries have legalized abortion with varying levels of restrictions with the United States having some of the most extreme pro-abortion laws when compared to Western Europe.
Finally, human rights defenders instead of focusing on what divides us by race, sex, class, gender, sexual orientation, ability, and religion should seek to recognize our common humanity with a focus on the dignity of the person.
Conservatives need to embrace their human rights legacy and reject attempts by intellectual adversaries who claim that there is only a "liberal conception of human rights." There is a conservative tradition of human rights that stretches back centuries and has a far better record of success than their liberal enlightenment and revolutionary counterparts.
2016 marks the tenth anniversary of the establishment of the United Nations Human Rights Council and also coincides with the tenth consecutive year that human rights are in decline world wide. Over the past few days this blog has reflected on what the United Nations bureaucracy could have possibly gotten wrong that has contributed to this worsening situation in which the Council has been described as having turned into Frankenstein's monster.
However at the same time the Left's take over of human rights discourse over the past decade to advance its own agenda has benefited it but at the expense of the international human rights consensus. For example, Amnesty International's campaign beginning in 2007 to conflate the right to an abortion with its worldwide campaign to stop violence against women alienated many Catholic supporters, and has been described as anti-Catholic.
Catholic bishops, who had been members of Amnesty International, had to resign over the abortion issue because the human rights group had become an abortion lobby group. Catholics generally have been encouraged to boycott the organization. Independent Catholic News reported:
Cardinal Martino, who served as the Holy See's permanent observer at the United Nations, says that this change of position is part of the "pro-death" agenda in modern culture. The cardinal said that Amnesty International's decision means Catholics and Catholic organizations should no longer financially support the group. "The promotion of abortion opens the door to the slippery slope of evil and death, where human rights are taken away from the most innocent and vulnerable children of God," he said. "I believe that, if in fact Amnesty International persists in this course of action, individuals and Catholic organizations must withdraw their support."Furthermore Article Three of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights guarantees the right to life, and this is not accidental. This is because this human rights document drafted and signed on December 10, 1948 was not a compromise between liberalism and socialism but lobbied for and drafted by Christian Democrats with the active support of the Catholic Church.
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| Jacques Maritain |
Pope John Paul II recalled the Roman Catholic Church's role in 1991 in the Papal Encyclical Centesimus Annus published on the 100th anniversary of Rerum Novarum:
...[A]fter the Second World War, and in reaction to its horrors, there arose a more lively sense of human rights, which found recognition in a number of International Documents52 and, one might say, in the drawing up of a new "right of nations", to which the Holy See has constantly contributed. The focal point of this evolution has been the United Nations Organization.One of the drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was Jacques Maritain, a French philosopher who was a profound Catholic and anti-modernist inspired by Christian humanism:
There is but one solution for the history of the world, I mean in a Christian regime, however it may be otherwise. It is that the creature be truly respected in its connection with God and because receiving everything from Him: humanism but theocentric humanism, rooted where man has his roots, integral humanism, humanism of the incarnation.
The formation of the
United Nations was an opportunity for Latin Americans to push for
international human rights standards. The American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man
was the first international human rights instrument signed into
existence in Bogota, Colombia on May 2, 1948 eight months prior to the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights
in December of 1948 where Latin Americans played a major and crucial
role, among them the Cuban delegation. The first draft of the Declaration
was fashioned from various models collected by the UN Secretariat among them
"a model based on a Cuban-sponsored proposal at the San Francisco
conference, a proposed first draft offered by the Chilean delegation,
and the earlier Panamanian draft."
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is heavily informed and influenced by Catholic social doctrine found in the 1891 Papal Encyclical Rerum Novarum by Pope Leo XIII. The Catholic Church in its social teaching rejects both liberalism and communism embracing a defense of the dignity of human beings grounded in its own metaphysical vision of personhood.
The holistic approach to human rights that embraces both civil/political and social/economic rights was not found in a compromise between the liberal Anglosphere and the socialist Soviet sphere but was the initiative of Catholic thinkers, states and the Holy See that shaped this important document that was embraced by the major faiths around the world that shared its common truths achieving a unanimous human rights consensus with that document.
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| Bishop Bartolomé De Las Casas |
The modern language of human rights emerges out of the public debate surrounding the treatment of Native Americans in the first years of the Spanish conquest and led King Charles V to organize a debate between Bartolomé De Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda in 1550 in which the humanity of the indigenous peoples of the Americas and their ability to govern themselves was recognized as briefly outlined in the following quote by Bishop Bartolomé De Las Casas:
“All the races of the world are men, and of all men and of each individual there is but one definition, and this is that they are rational. All have understanding and will and free choice, as all are made in the image and likeness of God . . . Thus the entire human race is one.”
Although relatively unknown in the English language Francisco de Vitoria (1483-1546), regarded as the founder of the “School of Salamanca,”
arrived at the University of Salamanca in 1526, the University had already been
founded in 1218. Following the debate between De Las Casas and de
Sepúlveda King Charles V would side with neither but followed de Vitoria's council
which recognized the humanity of the indigenous people and their right
to their own property. The Salamanca School and De Las Casas would leave
a profound mark on Latin American thought and human rights discourse. However the claim by some academics remains that only liberals can have a conception of universal human rights.
Be that is it may it was not just in Latin America and the United Nations where conservative forces advanced regional human rights structures but also in post World War Two Europe.
Conservative roots of the European Union's Human Rights System
Dr. Marco Duranti's new book The Conservative Human Rights Revolution: European Identity, Transnational Politics, and the Origins of the European Convention will be available on December 1, 2016, but the description that is already available points to the key role conservatives, Winston Churchill among them, played in bringing about the EU's human rights system.
"The Conservative Human Rights Revolution radically reinterprets the origins of the European human rights system, arguing that its conservative inventors envisioned the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) not only as an instrument to contain communism and fascism in continental Europe, but to allow them to pursue a controversial political agenda at home and abroad. Just as the Supreme Court of the United States had sought to overturn Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, a European Court on Human Rights was meant to constrain the ability of democratically elected governments to implement left-wing policies that conservatives believed violated their basic liberties."
The Modernist rewrite of human rights history
This history is often overlooked with a preference in modern human rights circles given to documents from the Enlightenment associated with the French Revolution which would be associated with the Left. For example "The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen," also known as the "Declaration of Human and Civic Rights" adopted on August 26, 1789 which is a product of the French Revolution as is the even more egalitarian document produced in 1793 the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen from the Constitution of Year I. Article 1 of the 1789 declaration reads:
"Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good."
"Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good."
Nonetheless, the fruits of these documents did not offer much in the way of protections or safe guards for French citizens who were subjected to the French Revolution's terror. The French Revolution born of enlightenment liberalism, and a rejection
of the Ancien Régime and the Catholic Church, gave Europe its first modern genocide of peasants in which men, women, and children of The Vendee were systematically exterminated, and the end result was the rise of the dictator Napoleon Bonaparte and a world war that took three million lives.
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| Edmund Burke by James Watson © National Portrait Gallery, London |
Failure of the Abstract predicted by the first modern conservative
Edmund Burke was one of the few who foresaw as early as 1790 in his book, Reflections on the Revolution in France,
published less than a year into the French Revolution, foresaw where
the follies of enlightenment liberalism and its abstractions would end in wholesale slaughter, tyranny and war.
Burke's concept of human dignity as derived from the creator
combined with a concept of man's moral equality has deep roots in the
Christian tradition which incidentally is where the very language and
concept of human rights first emerged in the 1200s in the Catholic
Church and was refined by Thomas Aquinas.
Edmund Burke's defense of the marginalized, the colonized, and the
conquered was rooted not in abstract enlightenment theory but a
Christian moral vision of the universe. According to Burke, in his 1796 Letters on a regicide peace ,man has freedom but it is not absolute:
First, to permit absolute freedom is to tolerate profound inequalities because people if left to their own devices develop hierarchies. Secondly, to enforce absolute equality requires an all powerful state to repress natural inequalities. The end result is not absolute equality but a small group with great power at its disposal making slaves of the majority.
As to the right of men to act anywhere according to their pleasure, without any moral tie, no such right exists. Men are never in a state of total independence of each other. It is not the condition of our nature: nor is it conceivable how any man can pursue a considerable course of action without its having some effect upon others; or, of course, without producing some degree of responsibility for his conduct.Enlightenment liberalism constructed abstract models that failed to take into account the full complexity of human nature and its contradictions. The French human rights charter declares men absolutely both free and equal. Edmund Burke and modern conservatives believe that "full equality" outside of the moral and spiritual sphere is unattainable and a dangerous fiction.
First, to permit absolute freedom is to tolerate profound inequalities because people if left to their own devices develop hierarchies. Secondly, to enforce absolute equality requires an all powerful state to repress natural inequalities. The end result is not absolute equality but a small group with great power at its disposal making slaves of the majority.
This is what happened in the French Revolution and reached its apex with Maximilien Robespierre, in 1794 with his observation that he applied in governance: "The government in a revolution is the despotism of liberty against tyranny." It is a contradiction in the same way that combining absolute freedom and equality as revolutionary goals are in contradiction and doomed to failure. Robespierre was only applying the logic of enlightenment thinker Jean Jacques Rousseau who wrote of "forcing men to be free."
Descendants of Robespierre confronting and infiltrating human rights institutions today
The communist regime in Cuba has played an active role at the United Nations and in the Americas to undermine human rights standards and institutions. Sadly, it has had some successes in undermining international free speech standards and next month may see a long term objective realized with the crippling of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. The Castro regime's allies in the region: Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Venezuela have refused to fund the world's oldest human rights system. Bolivia and Ecuador have called for the elimination of the human rights body.
However the Stalinists of old and the new "Socialists of the 21st Century" who divided humanity along class lines have not had as great an impact as the newest generations of the Left that instead of appealing to a common humanity has further fractured and divided people by race, sex, class, gender, sexual orientation, and ability. The great religions are now to be restricted to the private sphere and any questions that they may raise about the new divisions can be dismissed as "belief-based bigotry."
Civil and political rights and social and economic rights may all be in decline but repressive regimes can pay lip service to the above six areas and improve their ranking while still denying all humans within their territory their civil, political, social and economic rights.
Ireland's Pro-Life stance criticized by the UNHRC in contradiction with the UDHR
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| British Section of Amnesty International and its objectives in 1962 |
Restoring the dynamic tension to the human rights conversation
In 1961 Amnesty International was founded by Peter Benenson and consisted of a board of trustees that included all the major British political parties: Labour, Conservative, Liberal and religions: Roman Catholic, Anglican, Baptist, Jewish and Humanist.
If human rights are to regain their relevance and end its worldwide decline then all parties (and this includes religions) must be invited to the table and not censored beforehand because it does not serve a particular political agenda. Furthermore the right to life, enshrined in both Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in Article 1 of the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man should apply to all, at all stages of life. Competing rights claims need to be weighed and measured carefully, but recognizing the transcendent importance of the person.
Conservatives need to embrace their human rights legacy and reject attempts by intellectual adversaries who claim that there is only a "liberal conception of human rights." There is a conservative tradition of human rights that stretches back centuries and has a far better record of success than their liberal enlightenment and revolutionary counterparts.
 |
| Human Rights Council marked 10 yrs, held a panel w/all former Presidents last week |
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