Human rights or the right to “have rights”
December 10th of each year is not only a day to commemorate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but also a day to wake up to the long and bumpy road ahead of humanity to achieve human rights worldwide.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 10, 1948, states that human rights are universal and inherent to all human beings simply by virtue of their human nature. The purpose of these rights, in their entirety, is to protect the dignity and freedom of the human person. The Declaration obliges governments to protect human rights, even though the greatest enemy and obstacle to the realization of human rights are governments themselves.
It is worth mentioning that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was the product of learning lessons from the "catastrophe" and, like a statue placed on the bloody ruins of the death camps of Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Treblinka, and Majdanek, as well as on the ruins contaminated with atomic dust of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to serve as a warning to prevent the repetition of the disasters that had occurred.
But humanity has since witnessed other horrific events with disbelief: the Vietnam War, the Khmer Rouge reign of terror in Cambodia, apartheid in South Africa, the Rwandan genocide, the mass murder of political prisoners in Iran, “ethnic cleansing” in Yugoslavia, the Taliban’s rule in Afghanistan, and more recently the “Islamic caliphate of ISIS” in Iraq and Syria. These events have shown that “disasters” are easily repeated and that lessons need not be learned, and that defending human rights must remain on the agenda.
Historical background
The history of the development and evolution of the concept of human rights in its modern sense has gone through three stages: The first stage includes the intellectual efforts of philosophers and enlighteners in the 17th and 18th centuries based on “natural law.” According to these ideas, all humans, regardless of their social status, enjoy certain basic rights. These rights are considered “universal” and every human being should enjoy them based on their nature. However, the idea of “natural law” rarely addresses the question of how this right should be realized, because the “natural state” is not yet a “social legal state.” Therefore, human rights at this stage remain merely an idea.
In the second stage, from the second half of the 18th century, with the American and French revolutions, human rights were transformed from potential to actual from a political and legal perspective, and these revolutions raised human rights to the level of citizens' rights that every human being could invoke. Thus, human rights became for the first time "constituted rights," that is, rights created by a governmental system. However, in parallel with this important step, the character or claim of "universality" of human rights was weakened, because although human rights were declared as universal rights, in reality their addressee was only the citizens of the two countries mentioned, and even in these countries themselves, large segments of society such as women, blacks, religious minorities, and even workers were still deprived of such rights.
In the third stage, which began with the end of World War II, human rights entered the scene as a legal standard and became the subject of an international legal system. As mentioned, the central core of this international legal system is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 10, 1948, which was supplemented in the following years by a series of other binding international treaties. A closer look at the concept of human rights is not without benefit.
The central value of "human dignity "
The concept of “human dignity” is the most central philosophical value of human rights. Immanuel Kant, a German philosopher, believed that in the realm of ends, everything either has a price or dignity. What has a price can be replaced by an equivalent. But what is higher than all prices and for which there is no equivalent has dignity. According to Kant, man is the only being who has dignity and for which there is no price or equivalent. But human dignity should always be understood as a duty and not a privilege. Human freedom of will means his responsibility and responsible behavior, and this means that a person not only can, but is obliged to justify his actions to others. Therefore, accepting human dignity is not a yield in the field of theoretical knowledge, but also carries practical insight and wisdom. So in the philosophy of human rights, dignity is a kind of relationship and not an attribute. In other words, dignity is not something in a person, but a relationship between people; The relationship that a person establishes between himself and others based on humanity. If we attach this dignity to any attributes, we have deprived it of its unique characteristic and limited it. For this very reason, we must speak of the “integrity” and “inviolability” of human dignity. The “inviolability” of human dignity does not, of course, mean that the dignity and honor of any human being is not violated, but rather it means an unbreakable bond between all human beings, and whoever violates human dignity has simultaneously violated his own dignity.
Another point is that status is an innate human condition and not something acquired. In other words, a person's status is inherent in their being and is not the result of effort or merit. As a result, the physical and mental abilities of one person cannot elevate their status over another.
Today, human dignity is considered the highest norm in the constitutions of democratic countries and is inviolable. This norm means considering a special value for the personality and dignity of a person. It is not in vain that today many lawyers and thinkers derive human rights from it, because human dignity is neither transferable nor assignable nor can it be ignored. To explain human dignity more precisely, they link it with other values such as the right to life, freedom, independence of personality, equality of people, justice, solidarity, and a peaceful and non-violent life.
Structural features of human rights
Human rights are not just any rights and have characteristics that distinguish them from other rights. In the reflections that have been made to explain the structure of human rights, the following characteristics are considered for them:
The first characteristic of human rights is their universality. Universality means that human rights have a general validity and are valid for all people and belong unconditionally to all people throughout the world. It should be added that the claim of universality of human rights is one of the most controversial issues of this concept. Its opponents are primarily illegitimate governments that trample on the rights of their citizens. However, some critics also object from a moral perspective that the claim of universality ignores the cultural characteristics of different countries in the world. In contrast, proponents of the universality of human rights argue that, for example, the events of the past decade or two in Islamic and African countries clearly show that human rights are not something created by the West and “imported” to these countries, but are an inseparable and natural part of the demands of the people there, which the relevant governments prevent only by relying on force and violence.
The second characteristic of human rights is their inalienability and indivisibility. In other words, an individual’s human right cannot be taken away from him. Also, no one can give up or renounce his human right. Furthermore, no human right can be violated under the pretext of any “superiority”. Since human rights are personal rights, they cannot be subjugated to the collective or subordinated to the rule of the state. The indivisibility of human rights emphasizes that these rights must always be realized in their entirety.
The third characteristic of human rights is their egalitarian nature. This means that human rights are valid for all human beings regardless of nationality, descent, gender, religion, race, color, social origin, and wealth.
The fourth characteristic of human rights is their validity as moral rights. A right is moral when the norm that enshrines it has moral validity. And a norm has moral validity when it can be justified against anyone who accepts rational argument. By combining the two characteristics of moral validity and universality, we can say that human rights are universal rights with moral validity that can be defended through reasoning against anyone who relies on rational argument.
The fifth characteristic of human rights is their fundamentality. This fundamentality refers to the legal issue. In the matter of human rights, the issue is about the preservation and satisfaction of fundamental interests and needs. A fundamental interest or need is one whose violation or non-satisfaction would result in death or serious harm, or would target the core of human autonomy. There is a direct link between the fundamentality and the moral validity of human rights, but the two are not the same. This link is based on the premise that the more fundamental a right is, the easier it is to justify it to others. The general agreement on the right to life is a clear example of this.
The sixth characteristic of human rights is their priority over substantive rights. This priority means that substantive rights are not a criterion for the content of human rights, but rather that human rights are the criterion for substantive rights. In other words, respect for human rights is a necessary precondition for the legitimacy of substantive rights, and a substantive right that violates human rights is substantively false and therefore invalid. This highlights the importance of respecting human rights standards in the legislative sphere and shows that human rights are above substantive rights.
Democracy and human rights
These same characteristics place the institutionalization of human rights by transferring them to statutory laws and transforming them into fundamental and civil rights on the agenda, both within the scope of international law and within the scope of national law. The institution that can put human rights on the throne is the government. Therefore, it can be concluded that the establishment of a government to protect human rights is itself a human right.
Naturally, human rights in their modern sense are inseparable from democracy. In fact, it is the observance of human rights that gives legitimacy to government. Since the close relationship between the legitimacy of a political system and the observance of human rights is undeniable, the claim that human rights have a universal character can only mean that any system of government in the world that deprives its citizens of them cannot be considered a legitimate political system.
When a person is persecuted solely for their beliefs, an asylum seeker is turned away from the border of a safe country, a peaceful protester is repressed by the police, a person is tortured in prison, an ethnic or religious minority faces discrimination and injustice in a country, or a tyrannical government executes a free-spirited human being, in all these cases we are faced with a violation of human rights. These actions are taking place everywhere despite a document that the vast majority of countries in the world have signed and are so-called allies to observe.
Human rights and “Islamic identity”?
Islamic countries, citing “Islamic identity” and “cultural identity,” refuse to recognize the universal nature of human rights. However, the struggle of many people in Islamic countries for equal rights indicates that the national and ethnic differences of the people of these countries and their so-called “cultural identity” are relative concepts, and in fact, governments in these countries make heavy use of the concepts of “culture” and “religion” as tools to establish their control.
It should not be forgotten that the vast majority of governments in Islamic countries are repressive and illegitimate. Many people in these countries who want to respect human rights standards are considered opponents of their governments and are therefore under pressure and persecution by the governments. In Islamic countries, human rights violations are often justified by citing Islamic sources. In order to emphasize the need to respect “cultural differences” and preserve “Islamic identity,” the governments of these countries claim, among other things, that Islam has a coherent and complete legal system. But even within Islamic countries themselves, there is no single understanding of Islam. Islamic countries offer various interpretations of Islam and Islamic laws, and these interpretations are often contradictory and contradictory.
In the field of Islamic culture, there is widespread discrimination and oppression regarding women's rights, and the rulers of Islamic countries impose discriminatory and regressive laws on women in the name of "cultural autonomy." In theocratic systems such as the Islamic Republic of Iran, due to the intertwining of religious teachings with the state, laws and norms arising from religion and tradition on the one hand, and many modern fundamental rights inspired by human rights on the other, are in a tense relationship with each other.
Today, in the era of "globalization" where the inability of the United Nations to confront undemocratic governments, civil wars, homelessness and displacement, mass migration, poverty and misery, climate change, and environmental destruction is becoming increasingly apparent, the question is more than ever who should defend human rights; that is, the rights of those who, according to the German thinker Hannah Arendt, do not even have the right to "have rights."
It must be remembered that when we speak of human rights, we are speaking of a complex web of philosophical ideas, legal considerations, human demands, political struggles, and economic imperatives, the goal of their national and global realization, despite all the existing obstacles, inevitably takes us to the border of a "utopia."
Source: DW
