The Importance of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights - Essay Example

? importance of the universal declaration of human rights in protecting human rights Critically evaluate the importance of the universal declaration of human rights in protecting human rights Introduction Before the two World Wars, there was no unified code that identified, defined and preserved the rights of people at a globalised level.1 This means that the protection of human rights was left as the sole responsibility of individual countries. Even though there were some rights of humans that were individually identified by most members of the League of Nations, these were highly isolated and differed one from the other. With the magnitude of human rights abuses that the two World Wars came about with, it became immediately necessary that there become an evenly distributed code that guided the protection of the fundamental human rights of people.2 Acting as the single global unifier of nations, the United Nations under the auspices and guidance of the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) on 10 December 1948 in the French capital of Paris at Palais de Chaillot.3 Since the adoption, academicians and human rights activists have continued to investigate and research into how the Universal Declarations of Human Rights have succeeded or being challenged in the protection of human rights at the universal level. Most often, there are differences in reportage in the successes and challenges of the UDHR but one crucial fact remains that there is potential in the existence of a common grounds under which issues of human rights can be viewed on a globalised perspective. This paper therefore delves into the discussion of the importance of the UDHR in protecting human rights by looking at certain central areas and aspects of universal human rights such as difficulty in defining human rights, ways of improving human rights at the global level and by use of continental conventions, improvements that have been recorded in the Middle East, Asia and African in terms of human rights, and finally the failure to observe universal standards. Difficult to Define what Human Rights are According to the United Nations, the creation of the drafting and eventual adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was done with a notion that sought to identify a common universal code for defining human rights. This is why the phenomenon has a labelling of being universal.4 As a way of ensuring this, several steps were put in place, including the sampling of authors of the Declaration from different regions of the world, so as to be guaranteed that the text was going to “reflect these different cultural traditions and incorporate common values inherent in the world's principal legal systems and religious and philosophical traditions.”5 This way, it was expected that the Universal Declaration was going to be mutually consenting document and code that was going to help in the identification of key practices that constitute human rights protection and those that constitute abuses of human rights on a global scale. But not long after the declaration, several lapses were identified with the definition of what human rights are when taken from the context of cultural differences. In most literature6, human rights are said to be fundamental rights, rather than privileges that are accorded to every person by virtue of the fact that the person is a human being.7 Logically, this means that once a person is born, the fellow would not have to fulfil any processes or duties to qualify to enjoy human rights. Meanwhile, issues of cultural relativism promote the existence of cultural diversity in the world, which means that the fundamental provisions of different cultures must be allowed to be practiced.8 As part of cultural relativism, there is the issue of cultural integrity and diversity, which in itself is protected and enshrined by other United States provisions and declarations. For instance the respect of cultural integrity and diversity means that all cultures of the world must be respected for the principles and values that they believe and hold on to. Meanwhile, as part of the cultural practices and principles of different cultures, what may be a human right in one part of the world ceases to be a human right in another part of the world. This is indeed a major challenge to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as there is currently a loophole, making the declaration culturally relative rather than universal. Another issue that is related to cultural relativism is the fact that 8 countries or nations refused to sign to the declaration in 1948, notably among them being South Africa and Saudi Arabia.9 Because of the absence of some of these nations, there continue to be occasions where the protection of the human rights of citizens becomes difficult and restricted for the United Nations as an enforcement agency in the assurance of protection of human rights for all.10 It is against this backdrop that several commentators and human rights activists have advocated the need for there to be a new approach towards human rights protection where the UDHR is either updated with powers to entangle all UN member nations, or have a new world system for human rights protection.11This system must ensure that by being part of the United Nations, a nation automatically agrees to the UDHR. Continental Covenants and Global Improvements In the opinion of most commentators on human right protection and preservation, one core advantage that the world has benefited from, right after the Second World War is the fact that at the regional and continental level, there were continental covenants and conventions that sought to protect the fundamental human rights of people.12 There are several critical examples of this, which includes the European Convention on Human Rights (1952), the Convention on the Elimination of All forms of Racial Discrimination (1969), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1976), and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (1990).13 These continental covenants and conventions sought to take human right protection from specific parameters rather than generalizing the phenomenon. A typical example is the Convention on the Elimination of All forms of Racial Discrimination (1969), which targeted human right abuses that had to do with racial discrimination alone, rather than the totality of human right abuses such as looking at other areas like gender discrimination. To a large extent, there are those who believe that this approach of taking human rights protection on a thematic basis was more effective, and those who refute this. In the opinion of those who support the continental based idea, they argue that it makes the monitoring and regulation of standards easier because there is always very little to give attention to.14 Those who do not support the idea also claim that this approach leaves out key aspects of human rights protection and cannot therefore be classified as effective.15 On the wakes of the various continental covenants, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights took its inspiration and focus by finding a way of putting together all the disjointed parameters into what was supposed to be a universal paradigm. Even though the UDHR has been criticized as having the weakness of being a culturally relative approach to human rights rather than a universal approach, there are important aspects of the declaration that took a universal focus that are commending for its successes16. For example through the UDHR, there was that awareness created of a document that was accepted as having a universal value for the protection of human rights, that could be considered as "a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations" .17 One other major merit associated with the UDHR in terms of its approach to protecting human rights is the fact that the declaration does not only spell out rules and instructions but also give background to the need and reasons for protecting human rights. For example in the preamble of the declaration, we read of the acknowledgement of the document for the importance of a universal human rights status in maintaining international peace and security.18 Once such committed rationales are given, they give member nations a committed desire to proactively abide by the declaration, knowing that abiding will be done to their own benefit. What is more, under Article 2 of the Declaration, we read of an embedding of almost all disjointed components of continental covenants such as “race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status"19 making the declaration indeed embrace the universal ideas of most regions of the world. Improvements in the Middle East/Asia/Africa In a recent report, it was noted that the Middle East, Asia and Africa remained some of the world’s worst cases of human rights abuse in the early 20th century.20 In Africa, much of the talk of human rights abuse were centred predominantly on issues of political abuse of power, where leaders took up state powers through the power of the gun, and as a way of protecting their seats, used violence, political vendetta and physical oppression to suppress the rights and freedoms of their political opponents.21 Cases of these can be cited in the 1960s towards the early 1980s with countries such as Kenya, Liberia, Ghana, Sudan, Egypt and Democratic Republic of Congo, all of which experienced one form of political overthrow or the other.22 For most of these times however, Africa was continentally governed under the single stewardship of the Organisation of African Unity, which later changed to the African Union, with 53 members out of 54 countries. Indeed with the inspiration of the UDHR and the various forms of continental covenants that were taking place across the globe, the African Union saw the need to have its own approach to protecting the human rights of its people.23 In the case of the Middle East, the most common challenge that had to do with human rights abuses was in the form of inter-country wars and battles that led to oppression and suppression as a result of military action. According to the United Nations, human rights abuses do not only count when there is a direct action against a group of people.24 Rather, all forms of actions that indirectly undermine the exercising and practicing of human rights constitute human rights abuse.25 In the Middle East therefore, whenever there were such outbreaks of war and people were prevented from moving around freely and going about their normal routine that otherwise was part of their fundamental freedoms, it very much constituted human rights abuses. But as time proceeded, the Middle East became more accustomed on the ideas and opinions of the United Nations through the UDHR on the need to resort to more democratic forms of conflict resolution so as to stop the human rights abuses that existed through military violence and war.26 The approach to human rights protection in Asia has been found to be relatively different from what prevails for other parts of the world, particularly in Africa and Europe. This is because in Asia, the nature of human rights violations, which were mostly based on personality attacks and personal criminalisation of people of different socio-political views from state leaders lead to a human rights advocacy approach that is largely controlled by non-governmental organisations and individuals.27 Today, there is the Asian Human Rights Commission that seeks to take up the task of human rights protection from a much coordinated perspective than individuals and non-governmental organisations do. It is said that the Asian Human Rights Commission’s activities are inspired by the UDHR because as part of the preamble of the UDHR, the Asian Human Rights Commission also seek to achieve universality of human rights, at least among all its member states.28 Failure to observe universal standards Even though some of the successes and improvements outlined above may sound very comforting as a step towards the end of human rights abuses in the world, there remain key challenges with failure to observe universal standards. As outlined earlier, the absence of a unified code of definition to what human rights are accounts for differences in interpretation of the system. But what is even worse is the fact that in some areas of the world, there is absolutely no observance of the universal standards; even outside the excuse of cultural differences. It has been said that the commonest causative factor that brings about the pockets of non-observance around some parts of the world is political power abuse. By this, examples can easily be cited with Syria and Iran, where due to the powers that the leaders of these nations want to accrue, continue to suppress the fundamental human rights of people, particularly the right to be democratically part of governance.29 In Syria, there is presently Syrian civil war, also known as the Syrian uprising, which has been blamed largely on armed conflict in the country that is between forces loyal to the Ba'ath government and forces looking to oust it.30 By shutting down the windows of any political influences from within and without the countries, leaders like these gain much control to lord their authorities over their people. The recent civil conflicts in Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, and the one still going on in Syria have all been described as cases of gross neglect for the observance of universal standards.31 Bodies such as Amnesty International have also reported of custodial killings and tortures that took place in 2012 in Bangladesh as a result of security agency imposition of autocratic force on the people.32 Conclusion There have been a number of key topical issues that have been raised on the universal declaration of human rights, all in a bid to investigating or evaluating the importance of the universal declaration of human rights on the protection of human rights. Based on the thematic discussions, there are a number of key conclusions that can be made, based on which administrative decision making can be made on issues of human rights protection. In the first place, it can be concluded that the absence of a unified definition of human rights and the existence of several parameters from which human rights can be viewed from serve as a matter challenge to the UDHR in protecting human rights. It can be concluded that through the United Nations a more rigid global paradigm ought to be established for the protection of human rights. This is because the use of continental conventions has not proved to be very effective due to differences in continental opinions. With these continental conventions, the probability that abuses will continue to be experienced at various places in the name of cultural differences is higher. With the coming of a more rigid global paradigm that is regulated and enforced directly by the United Nations, it is hoped that various forms of abuses against the rights of people will be curtailed more easily.33 Finally, the discussions so far can help in confidently concluding that the UDHR has brought about high levels of significance in the protection of human rights, especially when it comes to regional based protections such as what exists in the Asia, Africa and Middle East. This notwithstanding, the recommendation of the paper must be executed for a more robust level of success. References Journals Bigo D, Controlling a New Migration World. (Routledge 2001). Booth, K, Critical Security Studies and World Politics. (Boulder: Lynne Rienner 2005) Buzan B, Waever O & Wilde, Security: A New Framework for Analysis. (Lynne Rienner 1998) C Cerna, The Structure And Functioning Of The Inter-American Court Of Human Rights, 1979-1992, 63 BYBIL 135. 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