70 years since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – hope against hope
GENEVA: Save the Children estimates that 84,701 children under five have died in Yemen from untreated cases of severe acute malnutrition between April 2015 and October 2018.”
“The grim analysis of United Nations data comes as intense fighting has again erupted in Yemen’s strategic port city of Hodeidah.”
Meanwhile, the UN considers Yemen the world’s biggest humanitarian crisis and warns that without an end to the fighting, the country, in which more than half the population is already at risk of famine, faces the worst famine in decades.
Such have been the headlines day after day since the start of the war in Yemen in 2015. The tragedy is that statistics, coupled with the sensationalism of news, swiftly lose their impact. We become inured to the human catastrophe unfolding before our eyes as we turn the pages of our newspapers or flick channels on our television sets in search of something less distressing ( or less demanding).
This year sees the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, proclaimed in Paris by the United Nations General Assembly on Dec. 10, 1948. Following the unmitigated horrors of World War 2, it was a milestone in the history of human rights. Yet, 70 years on, the river of human history continues to be poisoned by injustice, starvation, displacement, fear, instability, uncertainties and politicized sectarian and ethnic divisions.
Key ethical considerations
Today it seems we are moving further away from the concept of universal rights, in favor of my rights, even if at the expense of yours ( although the other may be you yourself ), with a callous disregard for the Declaration’s two key ethical considerations: a commitment to the inherent dignity of every human being and a commitment to non- discrimination.
The schisms in the world today have become so numerous, the inequities so stark, that a universal respect for human dignity is something that must be brought back to the consciousness of the international community.
Recognition of religion and individual cultural identities are a crucial part of the mix. Unlike citizenship — the legal membership of a sovereign state or nation — identity encompasses the totality of how one construes oneself, including those dimensions that express continuity with past ancestry and future aspirations, and implies affinity with certain groups and the recognition of common ties. In brief, it demands the recognition of the totality of the self, of one’s human dignity, irrespective of background, ethnicity or financial clout. A call to be empowered to fulfil one’s potential, without kowtowing to a social construct or relinquishing any part of one’s heritage.
Hunger or human dignity
We need to be proactive in addressing the growing global hunger for human dignity for it goes to the very heart of human identity and the polarity/plurality divide, and without it, all the protections of the various legal human rights mechanisms become meaningless.
We have gone from a world of symmetries and political and military blocs, to a situation of fearful asymmetries and violent, armed non-state actors.
The polarity of hatred among people is corrosive, not only in the Mashreq/ Levant, but across the globe. The retrenchment into smaller and smaller identities is one of the most striking paradoxes of globalization. Binary fallacies lead nations to dead ends; to zero sum games.
Cross- border themes of today, water, energy and human dignity, must be discussed at a regional level, as a creative common, rather than country by country. The neglect of these themes has meant that the West Asia area has become a breeding ground for rogue and extremist actors. The complex dynamics among the three greatest forces shaping our planet — man, nature, technology — require a whole new outlook. Yet there is no need to reinvent the wheel.
In drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, its proponents ( or the drafting committee) sought to underpin a shared ideal, a common standard for all peoples and all nations, a code of conduct of rights and responsibilities if you will.
I should like to pay tribute to my late mother- in- law, the Begum Shaista Ikramullah. When she, the first Muslim Indian ( as she then was) woman to gain a Ph. D. from the University of London, working in 1948 with Eleanor Roosevelt on the Declaration of Human Rights and Convention Against Genocide, declared: “It is imperative that there be an accepted code of civilized behavior.”
Adding later: “The ideas emphasized in the [Declaration] are far from being realized, but there is a goal which those who believe in the freedom of the human spirit can try to reach.”
Conventions and agreements
To date, we have fallen far short. Nonetheless the UDHR, not only provided the first step towards the creation of the International Bill of Human Rights ( completed in 1966 and came into effect in 1976), but gave rise to numerous conventions and international agreements which should give us cause for hope. I would like to mention but a few.
Of personal interest is the 1948 Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide which was worked on and signed by the late Begum Ikramullah. She strongly supported the work of Professor Raphael Lemkin who lost 24 members of his family in the Holocaust. Raphael Lemkin defined genocide as “a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.”
Some years later, the Helsinki Final Act (1975) “provided a basis for creating conditions favorable to peace in Europe and made human rights a common value to be respected by all nations in a world which was divided into East and West camps in that period.” It gave rise to the Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly, a nongovernmental organization of people in Europe, dedicated to the promotion of fundamental rights and freedoms, peace, democracy and pluralism and to our own Middle East Citizens’ Assembly.
More recently, I had the honor to serve on the Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor, whose fundamental purpose was to empower those living in poverty through increased protections and rights — thereby addressing simultaneously, exclusion, loss of dignity, and the link between poverty and lack of access to the law.
The basic premise of its report ( published in 2008) was that the law should work for everyone, and included as a key underpinning, state/ governmental investment in the conditions of labor.
Despite these positive steps, the three main challenges identified by the Independent Commission on International Humanitarian Issues ( ICIHI): man against man, man against nature and manmade disasters, summarized in the title of our report, “Winning the Human
Race?” continue to prevail ( or there is much, much more to be done.)
In a world where nearly one person is forcibly displaced every two seconds as a result of conflict or persecution, and where 85 percent of the world’s displaced are being hosted by developing countries ill- equipped to do so, of which Turkey, Pakistan, Iran, Jordan and Lebanon are in the forefront and in which 15 percent of all mankind live in areas somewhat euphemistically described as "fragile states," the moral lobby that is still strong across the world must act in cohesion. Together we must ensure that equal citizenship rights and human dignity are at the forefront of all development efforts. Further, that the shift towards viewing human dignity as an individual, and not collective attribute, is realized.
Human welfare first
This means placing human welfare firmly and definitively, at the center of national and international policymaking.
We continue to hear of a security order or an economic order, neither of which have succeeded in creating a universal order from which all of humanity benefits. In the face of this disharmonious logic, it is time for a humanitarian order based on the moral and ethical participation of the peoples of the world, as well as an intimate understanding of human nature.
We have, in the reports mentioned above and in other projects, a well- honed tool box of critical issues and agendas which should form the multi- stakeholder platform of our commitment to the universal ideals we all cherish. As with the UDHR, these reports are a clarion call to action — it is up to us to ensure they also represent a continuation of imaginative thinking for a universally beneficial creative process.
It is time to take off the blinkers of thinking only of ourselves — of our tribe and of our nation against all others — and consider how much can be achieved by drawing on the whole pool of our talents and resources to address common concerns on the basis of our shared humanity. We need an inclusive approach to meeting challenges, one that accounts for both the natural and the human environment. Only thus can we attain the desired organic unity between man and nature and the ethics of universal responsibility. This may sound idealistic; it is, but whether we are talking about water scarcity, food security, poverty, education, the ability for everyone to fulfil their potential, we need to focus on human dignity both in its ontological dimension by virtue of our very humanity and in its operative dimension as enhanced by our self- accomplishment.
We were not put on this earth to go forth and multiply, desecrate and destroy, but to bring life as well as hope for future generations.