Article by Article: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights for a New Generation (Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights) - Hardcover

Morsink, Johannes

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0812253507 ISBN 13: 9780812253504

Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is one of the most important and debated sociopolitical documents of the twentieth century. A leading authority on the UDHR, Johannes Morsink is the author of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Origins, Drafting, and Intent (2000) and Inherent Human Rights: Philosophical Roots of the Universal Declaration (2009). With this new book, Morsink has now written a volume for a new generation of human rights students and activists, one that presents an article-by-article account of the formulation of each article in the UDHR. The author comments perceptively on how they have been argued, argued over, and used in a wide range of political discourses. Comprised of short essays on each of the Declaration's thirty articles, this book constitutes the most accessible and comprehensive approach to this document and explicates the UDHR's continued relevance in contemporary times.
Throughout the book, Morsink explains how this 1948 iconic text can help us in the twenty-first century. He shows us the high moral ground we need to fight evils perpetuated during and after World War II that now present themselves in new garb and does so in a clear and concise manner.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Johannes Morsink is Professor Emeritus of Political Philosophy at Drew University. He is author of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Origins, Drafting, and Intent and Inherent Human Rights: Philosophical Roots of the Universal Declaration, both of which are available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Preamble

The word "preamble" has two Old Latin parts to it, prae, meaning "before," and the verb ambulare, meaning "to go." Together they make the Latin verb praeambulare, meaning "going before." That gives us the standard use of a preamble as an introduction to something that follows. In this case what follows (after the operative paragraph) are the thirty articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As are most introductions, this one was written after most of the rest of the declaration was close to being finished. The seven paragraphs of this preamble are called "recitals." They tell us why the Third General Assembly of the United Nations decided to declare this list of universal human rights on December 10, 1948, in Paris, France. Here I cite and comment on the seven reasons the drafters gave for making this declaration.

These recitals give the reader more of the historical background I mentioned in the Preface. They mostly speak for themselves. Still, if we are going to use this iconic text as a weapon against different kinds of antidemocratic authoritarianism, then I should spell out how I interpret the first three of these recitals, for they give us the moral underpinnings for that fight.

In my comment on the first recital, I explain why the drafters thought that human rights are part of people's moral DNA and why they wanted to keep the declaration a secular text accessible to religious and nonreligious people alike. In my comments on the second recital, I explain that we get our knowledge of human rights through our conscience and also that the UD drafters were aware of US president Franklin Roosevelt's Four Freedoms speech. In those on the third recital, I explain that while historically the rights of rebellion and petition form a pair, the drafters honored the latter and dropped the former from their slate of rights. The last four recitals are important for they link the declaration to the United Nations Charter and give the document its international legal grounding.

1) Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,

This recital was the brainchild of the Committee on the Preamble that was appointed rather late in the drafting process. It consisted of the representatives of the United States, China, France, and Lebanon, all of which were (in various degrees) supporters of the idea that human rights are inherent in all members of the human family and not just the result of extraneous factors like government actions or judicial procedures, whether domestic or international. This view holds that people have moral rights that constrain the behavior of others regardless of whether those moral rights are matched (as they should be) in the realm of legality. The Third Committee, which had representatives on it from all fifty-six UN Member States, adopted this recital unanimously. Two things immediately come to mind upon reading the foregoing text.

First, the terminology of "inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family" leads many to think of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. The 1776 Virginia declaration of rights says that "all men . . . have certain inherent rights," and the US Declaration of Independence asserts that all men are "endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights." US founding documents are replete with these kinds of references, which not infrequently have served as a model the world over.

This idea of inherence was not just the pet project of some drafters around the North Atlantic. For instance, Peng-Chun Chang from China defended Article 18 (on freedom of thought and religion) as "one of the most important principles in the Declaration" because "from the eighteenth century, when the idea of human rights was born in Western Europe, freedom of thought had figured among the essential human freedoms and had covered the idea of religious freedom" (A/C.3/SR.127/397). In the discussion of UD 15 (on nationality), Eduardo Anze Matienzo from Bolivia insisted that "nationality was an unalienable human right," adding that in law it "might be regarded as transitory; but as a right it was inherent" (A/C.3/SR.123/351). At one point the Egyptian delegation submitted an amendment that described all the UD rights as "inherent attributes" of the human person (A/C.3/264). Uruguay told the General Assembly that "the inherent rights and freedoms of the human being" were enshrined in the UD (A/PV.181/887).

At one point communist Yugoslavia lobbied for the practice of "establishing, as rights inherent in the human person, the principle of freedom of trade union association and any other safeguards such as minimum wages, equal pay for equal work for men and women, abolition of racial discrimination in economic and social activities, full employment, effective struggle against unemployment especially in a period of crisis and compulsory social insurance, as may provide the basis for a minimum of well-being within the reach of all the workers in the world" (A/C.3/187, as found in W. A. Schabas, "The Universal Declaration of Human Rights," in The Travaux Preparatoires, vol.1 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013], 967-68). Today, in the midst of a worldwide pandemic that hits lower-income workers most and with marches against systemic racism all over the United States and its former colonialist allies, this Yugoslav list of "rights inherent in the human person" does not sound nearly as far flung as it struck the members of the Economic and Social Council, which passed on it in the late 1940s but could not prevent it from influencing the work-related rights we have in the declaration. Some seventy-five years after the UD adoption, the belief that a wide range of human rights are part of people's moral DNA has come to be shared around the globe.

The second thought I need to share on this first recital is that it lets inherence and inalienability fend for themselves without grounding these ideas in any way in religion. This lack of reference to the sacred was not the result of a lack of trying. In the Third Committee the Dutch delegation proposed to insert the part I have italicized into the text: "Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family, based on man's divine origin and immortal destiny, is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world" (A/C.3/219).

The Dutch argued that their "amendment affirmed the relation between the Creator and man, stated the latter's origin and referred to his destiny" (A/C.3/SR.164/755). L. J. C. Beaufort made the observation that "for those who were agnostics or atheists, the Netherlands amendment was merely devoid of any meaning, but it could not harm them or offend their conscience. . . . On the other hand, if the amendment were adopted, it would give satisfaction to the majority of the world's population, which, generally speaking, still believed in the existence of a Supreme Being" (ibid.). Beaufort said his proposal was also "required for practical reasons, because the rights of man had to be protected in countries where the omnipotence of the State had precedence over the rights of individuals" (ibid.).

The communist delegates rightly felt themselves addressed and responded in force. In an overstatement, Alexandre Bogomolov of the USSR reminded Beaufort that "the dispute on the divine origin of man had been fought out in Paris as long ago as 1789 when the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizen had included no reference to the divine origin" (A/C.3/SR.165/758-59). He overlooked the fact that the French Assembly noted in its preamble that it proclaimed this otherwise secular bill "in the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2021
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0812253507
• ISBN 13: 9780812253504
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 208
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande