The conservative case to save human rights from decline

"Article 3. Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person." - Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948

“…Conservatives have excellent credentials to speak about human rights. By our efforts, and with precious little help from self-styled liberals, we were largely responsible for securing liberty for a substantial share of the world’s population and defending it for most of the rest.” — Margaret Thatcher, State Craft P. 249

 

Freedom House 2016 charts decade of decline in rights and freedoms

End of the Human Rights Consensus?
The nonviolent end of the Cold War between 1989 and 1991 along with the end of totalitarian communism in Europe coincided with a decade long improvement in human rights and freedoms world wide. This trend over the past ten years has been in the opposite direction and is due to a number of factors, including the rise of China and Russia's return to authoritarianism after a brief democratic spring in the 1990s.

The War on Terror following the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States, the March 11, 2004 attacks in Spain and the July 7, 2005 attacks in Great Britain led to set backs in human rights in Western countries responding to international terrorism.  However, the geopolitical map and the war on terror do not alone explain this worsening international environment for human rights.

There is a crisis of values reflected in the fragmentation of the international human rights consensus achieved in 1948. What is manifested now had its origins 26 years ago with Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam.  The Iranian representative to the United Nations explained that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was a "relativistic secular understanding of the Judeo Christian tradition." However the UN Human Rights Declaration as initially conceived was not relativistic but over time human rights mechanisms have engaged in a proliferation of rights that give that appearance creating a breakdown in the 1948 consensus. Sadly, on the human rights front the practitioners of Islam have not been the only ones alienated but so too have many Catholics.

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. The United Nations bureaucracy has gotten a lot wrong that has contributed to this worsening situation. The UN Human Rights Council has been described as having been turned into Frankenstein's monster.

Although a contributing factor, the international decline in human rights cannot be laid solely at the feet of the United Nations. The cause goes to the abandonment of the foundations of human rights thought. First principles have been compromised and ignored in the service of expediency. For example, taking a human life can never be a right because human beings have a right to life. Taking a life is at best a necessary evil done in self-defense to save one's own life. The right to an abortion is a contradiction in conflict with universally recognized human rights.

 

The Left's take over of human rights discourse over the past decades to advance its own agenda has benefited it but at the expense of the pre-existing 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 and all the world's great faith traditions.

Jacques Maritain

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:

...[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.

Bishop Bartolomé De Las Casas

The debate on personhood
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 beings 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 the Catholic Bishop Bartolomé De Las Casas and the humanist attorney Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda in 1550 in which the personhood 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), the founder of the “School of Salamanca,” arrived at the University of Salamanca and was elected the prime chair of theology there in 1526, the University itself had 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 Bishop De Las Casas would leave a profound mark on Latin American thought and human rights discourse. Despite this history some academics claim that only liberals can have a conception of universal human rights.

The debate on personhood rages today over the unborn and in order to justify abortion claims a difference between human life and moral personhood. Not treating human life and moral personhood as interchangeable opens up the debate not only to abortion but also infanticide because very young babies, according to Oxford University medical ethicists, and some philosophers do not achieve the status of moral personhood.  established through modern philosophical inquiry. This is a slippery slope long rejected by the Catholic Church.

The proliferation of rights, this includes abortion rights are paradoxically undermining fundamental human rights to life, liberty and private property. Meanwhile progressives demonize conservatives, and traditional religious institutions for not joining their "human rights" bandwagon that fractures human identity, cheapens human dignity and undermines human rights while claiming to celebrate them.

Meanwhile history demonstrates that conservative forces led the drive to limit the absolute power of the sovereign in the 13th Century. Remember that on June 15, 1215 forty barons pressured King John into affixing his seal on The Great Charter (Magna Carta in Latin) at a field in Runnymede, England. It was the British aristocracy that initiated this profound change. This document placed the sovereign under the rule of law and established this principle among the English speaking peoples.  730 years later after the catastrophe of WW2 Conservatives and Christian Democrats sought to advance regional and international human rights structures with the aim of strengthening the protection of human rights in Latin America, Europe and Internationally.

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." 

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.

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 combined with respect for tradition and a knowledge of history. According to Burke, in his 1796 Letters on a regicide peace ,man has freedom but it is not absolute:

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. The same ideas rooted in Christendom that motivated de Vitoria in 1550 in Spain drove Burke's vision 240 years later in Great Britain: the intrinsic dignity of man.

The trouble with absolute equality

First, to permit absolute freedom is to tolerate profound inequalities because people if left to their own devices develop hierarchies naturally. 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

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.

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. 

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 and the right to life.

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 track record of success than their liberal enlightenment and revolutionary counterparts. This is because Conservatism respects the past, and informed by it looks to how its actions today will impact future generations.

This is why Conservatism is best positioned to rebuild the international human rights consensus in 2016 that the Left has wrought asunder with its abstract utopian projects.

The Latin American Origins of Today's Human Rights Discourse

What does a 16th Century priest from Chiapas have to do with the 1948 Human Rights Declaration? A lot.

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.” - Bishop Bartolomé De Las Casas

“It was never the people who complained of the universality of human rights, nor did the people consider human rights as a Western or Northern imposition. It was often their leaders who did so.”

Mr. Kofi Annan, United Nations Secretary-General

The belief that human rights are universal and existed prior to the formation of the state are today the subject of debate as the 1948 consensus that led to the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights appears to have fractured in part because of its profound and unexpected impact. The August 5, 1990 Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam basing as its only source of reference, explanation, or clarification of its 25 articles in Islamic Shari'ah followed with the undermining the freedom of expression in 2008 by the Organization of The Islamic Conference in the UN Human Rights Council adding a blasphemy clause is of great concern, but the presence of the Cuban delegation as a co-participant in this process is a betrayal of five centuries of Latin American history and one more betrayal of the fundamental principles enunciated by José Martí, the man they claim as an inspiration to their "cause."

When Fidel Castro in the above interview in Havana in 1986 divides freedoms i.e. rights as one set being revolutionary liberties and another being bourgeois liberties and claiming that there are two different concepts of liberty he is rejecting the Latin American tradition which was best expounded in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that there are basic human rights that are universal and not separated by political/ideological or as in the Islamic claim by religious differences but are the same for everyone.

First the development of the modern language of human rights emerges out of the public debate surrounding the treatment of American Indians in the first years of the Spanish conquest and led King Charles V 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 quote by Bishop Bartolomé De Las Casas at the top of the page.

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 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.

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 and was signed into existence in Bogota, Colombia in April of 1948 nine 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 "were 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 1948 Human Rights Revolution was led by Latin Americans firmly grounded in the centuries old scholastic natural law tradition along with their real life experiences in the American continent over five centuries. That caudillos, dictators and tyrants have attempted unsuccessfully to destroy that tradition only to met by the resistance of generations of Latin Americans serves only to prove the profound roots that human rights have in the Americas.

The challenge to a universal human rights standard in the last century led to the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau and to the Holocaust in Nazi Germany; separate drinking fountains and segregation in the Southern United States; and in Cuba this led to whole classes of people being sent to prison camps, forced labor camps known as the UMAP, and in the early years to the firing squad by the thousands. Luisa Perez, a former Amnesty International prisoner of conscience, describes the beatings and inhuman treatment visited on her and other female Cuban political prisoners by Cuba's revolutionary communist dictatorship.