Human Rights Crises and turning points: Valladolid, Spain (1550), Paris, France (1948), and ???? (2018)

“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 (1550)

Jacques Maritain

We are in the midst of an international human rights crisis. Will we rise to the occasion once again?

Human Rights are in crisis around the world and have been for some time. At such a moment it is important to return to and reflect on first principles.  The idea that human rights predate the rules set out by governments, some important thinkers argue, is based on natural law.  In 1951 the Christian Democrat philosopher Jacques Maritain published Man and the State and on pages 84-85 of his book explored the historic and rational foundation of human rights in the natural law that remains relevant today:

Shall we try to establish our faith in human rights on the basis of a true philosophy?  This true philosophy of the rights of the human person is based upon the true idea of natural law, as looked upon in an ontological perspective and as conveying through the essential structures and requirements of created nature the wisdom of the Author of Being.

The genuine idea of natural law is a heritage of Greek and Christian thought. It goes back not only to Grotius, who indeed began deforming it, but, before him to Suarez and Francisco de Vitoria; further back to St. Thomas Aquinas (he alone grasped the matter in a wholly consistent doctrine, which unfortunately was expressed in an insufficiently clarified vocabulary, so that its deepest features were soon overlooked and disregarded); and still further back to St. Augustine and the Church Fathers and St. Paul (we remember St. Paul's saying: "When the Gentiles who have not the Law, do by nature the things contained in the Law, these, having not the Law, are a law unto themselves ...") and even further back to  Cicero, to the Stoics, to the great moralists of antiquity and its great poets, particularly Sophocles.  Antigone, who was aware that in transgressing the human law and being crushed by it she was obeying a better commandment, the unwritten and unchangeable laws, is the eternal heroine of natural law: for, as she puts it, they were not, those unwritten laws, born out of today's or yesterday's sweet will, "but they live always and forever, and no man knows from where they have arisen."

Jacques Maritain played an important role in the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 and  in the above mentioned book described how individuals of radically different and traditions were able to come to a consensus on a fairly detailed document.

"How  is  an  agreement  conceivable  among  men  assembled  for  the  purpose  of  jointly  accomplishing  a  task  dealing  with  the  future  of  the  mind,  who  come  from  the  four  corners  of  the  earth  and  who  belong  not  only  to  different  cultures  and  civilizations,  but  to  different  spiritual  families  and  antagonistic  schools  of  thought?  Since  the  aim  of  UNESCO  [United  Nations  Educational,  Scientific  and  Cultural  Organization]  is  a  practical  aim,  agreement  among  its  members  can  be  spontaneously  achieved,  not  on  common  speculative  notions,  but  on  common  practical  notions,  not  on  the  affirmation  of  the  same conception  of  the  world,  man,  and  knowledge,  but  on  the  affirmation  of  the  same  set  of  convictions  concerning  action.  This  is  doubtless  very  little,  it  is  the  last  refuge  of  intellectual  agreement  among  men.  It  is,  however,  enough  to  undertake  a great  work;  and  it would  mean  a  great  deal  to  become  aware  of  this  body  of  common  practical  convictions."

Timing is also key and in the aftermath of World War II where the crimes of the Nazi Holocaust were exposed to the world, and the failure of the nation state not only to protect the lives of its citizens but to systematically slaughter them created a shock to the conscience of the international community that made the drafting of such a document possible. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was ratified in Paris, France on December 10, 1948. It had happened before.

Bartolomé de Las Casas

Four centuries earlier in the midst of a clash of civilizations beginning with the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Americas in 1492 and the Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire in 1519 and the Inca empire in 1532.  Native Americans were enslaved and mistreated by the Spanish conquerors, but this led to the Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas publishing "The Devastation of the Indies" outlining Spanish cruelty against the indigenous peoples of the Americas.

Artistic rendering of Columbus's expedition to the Americas

On July 3, 1549 the Council of the Indies declared to the King of Spain that the harm to the Indians and to the King’s moral standing by the ongoing conquest required an examination of what was taking place. The Council declared:

The greed of those who undertake conquests and the timidity and humility of the Indians is such that we are not certain whether any instruction will be obeyed. It would be fitting for Your Majesty to order a meeting of learned men, theologians, and jurists … to … consider the manner in which these conquests should be carried on … justly and with security of conscience.

In April of 1550 the King, Charles I of Spain and Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire, ordered that all New World conquests be suspended until a special group of theologians and counselors would decide upon a just method of conducting them. This led to a debate regarding the treatment of Native Americans by the Spanish conquistadors that took place in the Spanish city of Valladolid between the lay scholar Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda and now Bishop de Las Casas that same year. It was the first time that the morality of conquest was formally debated and a universal conception of human rights discussed that challenges assumptions today.

"The Devastation of the Indies" Bartolomé de Las Casas

 In 1550 and 1948 two international human rights crises led to two debates and reflections that first during the Spanish conquest of the Americas generated the idea of universal human rights and following the carnage of WWII and the Nazi Holocaust led the international community to agree on a Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

School of Salamanca

Today in 2017, human rights have been in decline worldwide for more than a decade and all signs point to continued deterioration. Will this lead to another round of debate and reflection that will turn the tide in 2018?

Auschwitz

Will a world leader stop a foreign action in order to examine the moral implications as King Charles V did in Spain in 1550? Will the international community come together as they did in Paris in the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust in 1948 and forge a new commitment to human rights? 

Questions one ponders on the eve of the possible arrival of  Hurricane Irma.

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.

Human Rights Decade Long Decline: A Reflection and Quest for Solutions

"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:

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.

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

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:

“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." 

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. 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.

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

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.

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