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oday is Human Rights Day, commemorating the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the UN General Assembly on this day in
1948. And how appropriate it is to the season. Consider Article 1:
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.
They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another
in a spirit of brotherhood.
Damn right. In a way it’s sad that the remaining twenty-nine
articles have to exist at all, spelling out that people should not be tortured
(Article 4) or enslaved (Article 5), or deprived of employment (Article 23) or
leisure (Article 24) or education (Article 26). Shouldn’t this all go without
saying? Apparently not; when the nation that prides itself on being the city on
the hill and the beacon of hope for the world descends to torture and
degradation of human beings for political ends all bets are off.
The release of the heavily-censored report on torture in the
United States comes to us during this joyous season, thanks to the vagaries of
politics and our President’s lame-duck attempt to kill it altogether. And this
on top of the spate of random police officers killing unarmed civilians over
minor crimes or perceived threats. Not that the rest of the world has that much
to boast of, with Pakistan orchestrating lynchings over the purely imaginary crime
of blasphemy, Russia and Uganda persecuting gay people and anybody who so much
as says such persecution is wrong, Ireland and Saudi Arabia engaging in the
worst kind of religious oppression, India’s promotion of rape… All, all are
guilty.
On the whole a noble document, the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights favors good things—equality before the law (7), equal pay for
equal work (23), the right to privacy (12), freedom of thought (18), freedom of
opinion and expression (19), freedom of movement (13), the right to an adequate
standard of living (25), the right to enjoy and arts and share in scientific
advancement (27), and so on. It lies squarely in the tradition represented by
classic US documents like The Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights.
If there’s a single document that spells out the meaning of
the season in practical terms, this is it. It was supported in 1948 by states
as disparate as Afghanistan and Mexico, Egypt and Thailand, Syria and the
United States, Iceland and Turkey. No one voted against it, though a handful of
states (including unsurprisingly Saudi Arabia, the Soviet Union, and the
then-segregated Union of South Africa) abstained from voting.
Too bad we can’t live up to it.
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