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Eleanor Roosevelt, The Struggle for Human Rights, 1948

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Eleanor Roosevelt, The Struggle for Human Rights, 1948

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We must not be confused about what freedom is. Basic human rights are simple and easily understood: freedom of speech and a free press; freedom of religion and worship; freedom of assembly and the right of petition; the right of men to be secure in their homes and free from unreasonable search and seizure and from arbitrary arrest and punishment.

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Session of the First World Conference on Human Rights, held in 1968, organised upon a Jamaican initiative. 

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The international community cannot successfully confront future challenges without a clear sense of where it has come from.

According to McNeilly, the subject of human rights in this view is not a universal human but a Western construct and the universal content of rights articulated in international law appears as  an all too familiar assertion of colonial power, inattentive to cultural particularities, promoting a Eurocentric approach to human life and its flourishing.

Although it is true that historically The North, particularly the 1930s and 1970s, played key roles there is a collective amnesia of the role the Global South has played in many of the conventions to the declarations we see today.

The problem, according to McNeilly, emerges ‘when the meaning of “the universal” proves to be culturally variable, and the specific cultural articulations of the universal work against its claim to a transcultural status’. Through this process the universal emerges as an open-ended ideal which can be rearticulated anew and is not restricted to its current legal or normative form. In this process of universalisation the universal ‘can be articulated only in response to a challenge from (its own) outside’, from the unspeakable that it has produced through exclusion.

The adoption of the International Convention on Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination was a key moment as were the 1966 adoptions of the Human Rights Covenants. These achievements was part of a wave of a forceful multilateral human rights diplomacy driven forward by States of the Global South.

I agree that we need radical social transformation and this cannot be done in a world whereby the perpetrators or enablers of human right violations continue to make and preach the human rights for the world to abide by. The systems which aim or purpose is to uphold and protect human rights often enable or don't go far enough. A recent example of this is the US choosing to veto a Security Council resolution that would have called for "humanitarian pauses" to deliver lifesaving aid to millions in Gaza. But this is not to have selective memory or ignorance to the role the Global South have played in securing and establishing some of the most important human rights documents we have.

Sources:
McNeilly, K. (2015). Reclaiming the Radical in Universal Human Rights: Universality as Universalisation.International Human Rights Law Review,
4(2), 256-276. https://doi.org/10.1163/22131035-00402007

https://www.universal-rights.org/how-the-global-south-shaped-the-international-human-rights-system/

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Of course we did not start talking about human rights at the UN, it started long before the UN or even the League of Nations was established.

”Where, after all, do universal human rights begin?...In small places, close to home”. - Eleanor Roosevelt

The Code of Hammurabi: One of the earliest and most complete set of legal codes formed in 1754 BC. It's significance lies in the notion that justice ought to be fair and impartial.

Stoic Ethics: Numerous scholars have stated that, or implied, that the Stoics were the first to develop a doctrine of what may reasonably today be called human rights. Their notions are that human rights surrounds the notion of natural law.

By natural right is meant a sort of a thing which is to have the effect of law, which is to have an effect paramount to that of law, but which subsists not only without law, but against law; and its characteristic property, as well as sole and constant use, is being the everlasting and irreconcilable enemy of law. As scissors were invented to cut up cloth, so were natural rights invented to cut up law, and legal rights - Jeremy Bentham

Richard Dagger, speculates that the concept of rights did not emerge, in explicit form, during the classical or early medieval periods, because in those periods it was status concepts that dominated political thought.

Although I am inclined to agree with Dagger than many principles in classical or medieval periods were based on status concepts, for example the Stoics writings were embodied in the special status of one type of human being, the sage. It is not to say that it does not hint at the idea or the principle of what human rights are, it is fair to say that those who are protected by human rights has always been limited and even to this day, even though it might not be as apparent or written down, it is exposed that there is a hierachy of those who have their rights protected and those who don't in our foreign policy and the interference, or lack thereof, in those who don't hold themselves to international law and human rights.

It is reality for example that my access to education here in Ireland as a 22 year old young woman is vastly different to my counterpart in Afghanistan. How far have we really come in combating those who block and take peoples human rights from them? In my view, we are nowhere near doing enough.

Sources:
https://www.history.com/news/hammurabi-code-legal-system-influence

BETT, RICHARD, 'DID THE STOICS INVENT HUMAN RIGHTS?', in Rachana Kamtekar (ed.), Virtue and Happiness: Essays in Honour of Julia Annas, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy (Oxford, 2012; online edn, Oxford Academic, 24 Jan. 2013), https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199646043.003.0009,

Jeremy Bentham, ‘Anarchical Fallacies: being an examination of the Declaration of Rights issued during the French Revolution’ (1816), reprinted in J. Waldron, Nonsense Upon Stilts: Bentham, Burke and Marx on the Rights of Man (1987)

James Griffin, DISCREPANCIES BETWEEN THE BEST PHILOSOPHICAL ACCOUNT OF HUMAN RIGHTS AND THE INTERNATIONAL LAW OF HUMAN RIGHTS.

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How the Code of Hammurabi Influenced Modern Legal Systems | HISTORY

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The collection of laws and regulations carved into stone thousands of years ago carries principles and ideas that are still applied today.

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The disregard for human life, in a post World War 1 world and the movement towards equality for minorities led to the idea for the need for a place for the world to come together on issues like security, peace and justice.

The League of Nations: Often referred to as the first UN, was established after the first World War to oversee international security and disarmament.  The failure of the League in the 1930s was based on Member Nations undermining its authority and France and Great Britain appeasing Hitler, leading to the outbreak of World War 2. Its lack of military power was significantly obvious and detrimental to the idea of multilateralism.

The United Nations: Although the UN has mass critics and rightly so, it is the only place in our world that brings 193 countries together to find consensus on some of the biggest issues. The addition of the Security Council, the only legally binding committee in the UN, was the biggest and most significance difference in the new body. The main purpose of this was to give the UN more power to interfere in Member States in times of abuses of power and violations of human rights. Unfortunately in the context of Russia's aggression in Ukraine we can see how the power of the veto can essentially eliminate that entire idea.

Sources:
On An Equal Footing With All: Ireland at the League of Nations

https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zbg4t39/revision/9

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This year marks the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 

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Adopted in 1948, the UDHR is known as the worlds best known human rights document and became the first global human rights document to set a common standard to which all nations should aspire, although not legally binding, it has been used as a focal point for campaigners, NGOs and those facing hardship to point to as a great source of defense.

The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights 1976 is legally binding and has been ratified by 167 Member States:

"They name certain core rights that evoke Lockean principles, rights to life, liberty, and security of a person; and against arbitrary imprisonment, slavery and torture as well as more complex right against genocide." Charles Beitz

Human rights are at the center of every conversation, debate and resolution at the United Nations today. This is not to say that the UN does enough to uphold and protect these rights even within its own institution and work. A prime example of this is the UN's lack of a universal response to the Covid-19 crisis. But the UDHR is a monumental and historic document with underpins human rights policy and law today at every stage.

Sources:
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/ATAG/2018/628295/EPRS_ATA(2018)628295_EN.pdf

Beitz, Charles, What Human Rights Mean.

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Human rights underpin the aspiration to a world in which every man, women and child lives free from hunger and is protected from oppression, violence and discrimination, with the benefits of housing, healthcare, education and opportunity.  - UN High Commissioner for HR, Navanethem Pillay

Advancing human rights cannot be left to international law, it is too difficult, widespread, complicated and too slow to be able to keep up.  It is not hat over the last fifty years the body of treaties and decisions of international courts has grown large enough for those courts now to be able to tell us definitively whether a certain human right exists and what fairly precisely its content is. Human rights have hugely developed, for example ideas like online rights, rights of privacy and freedom of speech have all been introduced or massively changed to what we may used to know because of social development. What do these rights and protections mean in the world today and how do we continue to develop the idea of fundamental human rights to cover these new types of issues.

Beyond the multiple roles of human rights in international organisations and national foreign policies, human rights also have important function as foci of political activity, both inside and outside the policy process, for a large number of NGOs. These functions include education and advocacy, standard-setting, monitoring and sometimes enforcement.

When we say that human rights are universal, we might mean that all human beings at all times and places would be justified in claiming them... few of the human rights in listed in the Universal Declaration would pass this test.

Sources:
Daniel Moeckli, Sangeeta Shah, Sandesh Sivakumaran, David Harris, International Human Rights Law.

Beitz, Charles, What Human Rights Mean.

James Griffin, DISCREPANCIES BETWEEN THE BEST PHILOSOPHICAL ACCOUNT OF HUMAN RIGHTS AND THE INTERNATIONAL LAW OF HUMAN RIGHTS.

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Natural Rights: Natural rights theorists imagined that political society developed by means of a social contract from a pre-political 'state of nature' where people had certain rights that nobody was entitled to violate. These rights, in Robert Nozicks phrase, were "side constraints". Natural rights express protections upon which people are entitled to insist regardless of their institutional memberships.

Historische Zeitschrift: Almost unanimously, contemporary historians have adopted a celebratory attitude toward the emergence and progress of human rights, providing recent enthusiasms with uplifting backstories, and differing primarily about whether to locate the true breakthrough with the Greeks or the Jews, medieval Christians or early modern philosophers, democratic revolutionaries or abolitionist heroes, American internationalists or anti‐racist visionaries.

US Declaration of Independence 1776: Holds that people are "endowed by their creator" with certain rights, Unalienable rights which could not be taken away, proposing a theoretical justification for human rights, which the UDHR does not do.

Women's Suffrage Movement: Women, and men, fought for over 100 years for the right to vote. On August 18, 1920, the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was finally ratified, enfranchising all American women and declaring for the first time that they, like men, deserve all the rights and responsibilities of citizenship.

Sources:
Samuel Moyn, The First Historian of Human Rights, The American Historical Review, Volume 116, Issue 1, February 2011, Pages 58–79, https://doi-org.ucc.idm.oclc.org/10.1086/ahr.116.1.58

https://www.history.com/topics/womens-history/the-fight-for-womens-suffrage

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Women's Rights Movement Begins

The campaign for women's suffrage began in earnest in the decades before the Civil War. During the 1820s and '30s, most states had extended the franchise to all white men, regardless of how much money or property they had.

At the same time, all sorts of reform groups were proliferating across the United States- temperance leagues, religious movements, moral-reform societies, anti- slavery organizations-and in many of these, women played a prominent role.

Meanwhile, many American women were beginning to chafe against what historians have called the "Cult of True Womanhood": that is, the idea that the only "true" woman was a pious, submissive wife and mother concerned exclusively with home and family.

Put together, all of these contributed to a new way of thinking about what it meant to be a woman and a citizen of the United States.

Seneca Falls Convention

In 1848, a group of abolitionist activists-mostly women, but some men-gathered in Seneca Falls, New York to discuss the problem of women's rights. They were invited there by the reformers Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott.

Most of the delegates to the Seneca Falls Convention agreed: American women were autonomous individuals who deserved their own political identities.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident," proclaimed the Declaration of Sentiments that the delegates produced, "that all men and women are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

What this meant, among other things, was that they believed women should have the right to vote.

Civil Rights and Women's Rights During the Civil War

During the 1850s, the women's rights movement gathered steam, but lost momentum when the Civil War began. Almost immediately after the war ended, the 14th Amendment and the 15th Amendment to the Constitution raised familiar questions of suffrage and citizenship.

The 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, extends the Constitution's protection to all citizens-and defines "citizens" as "male"; the 15th, ratified in 1870, guarantees Black men the right to vote.

Some women's suffrage advocates believed that this was their chance to push lawmakers for truly universal suffrage. As a result, they refused to support the 15th Amendment and even allied with racist Southerners who argued that white women's votes could be used to neutralize those cast by African Americans.

In 1869, a new group called the National Woman Suffrage Association was founded by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. They began to fight for a universal-suffrage amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Others argued that it was unfair to endanger Black enfranchisement by tying it to the markedly less popular campaign for female suffrage. This pro-15th-Amendment faction formed a group called the American Woman Suffrage Association and fought for the franchise on a state-by-state basis.

Gallery: The Progressive Campaign for Suffrage

This animosity eventually faded, and in 1890 the two groups merged to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was the organization's first president.

By then, the suffragists' approach had changed. Instead of arguing that women deserved the same rights and responsibilities as men because women and men were "created equal," the new generation of activists argued that women deserved the vote because they were different from men.

They could make their domesticity into a political virtue, using the franchise to create a purer, more moral "maternal commonwealth."

This argument served many political agendas: Temperance advocates, for instance, wanted women to have the vote because they thought it would mobilize an enormous voting bloc on behalf of their cause, and many middle-class white people were swayed once again by the argument that the enfranchisement of white women would "ensure immediate and durable white supremacy, honestly attained."

Did you know? In 1923, the National Woman's Party proposed an amendment to the Constitution that prohibited all discrimination on the basis of sex. The so-called Equal Rights Amendment has never been ratified.

Winning the Vote at Last

Starting in 1910, some states in the West began to extend the vote to women for the first time in almost 20 years. Idaho and Utah had given women the right to vote at the end of the 19th century.

Still, southern and eastern states resisted. In 1916, NAWSA president Carrie Chapman Catt unveiled what she called a "Winning Plan" to get the vote at last: a blitz campaign that mobilized state and local suffrage organizations all over the country, with a special focus on those recalcitrant regions.

Meanwhile, a splinter group called the National Woman's Party founded by Alice Paul focused on more radical, militant tactics-hunger strikes and White House pickets, for instance-aimed at winning dramatic publicity for their cause.

World War I slowed the suffragists' campaign but helped them advance their argument nonetheless: Women's work on behalf of the war effort, activists pointed out, proved that they were just as patriotic and deserving of citizenship as men.

Finally, on August 18, 1920, the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified. And on November 2 of that year, more than 8 million women across the United States voted in elections for the first time.

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Women's Suffrage - The U.S. Movement, Leaders & 19th Amendment

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The women's suffrage movement was a decades-long fight to win the right to vote for women in the United States. On August 26, 1920, the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was finally ratified, enfranchising all American women and declaring for the first time that they, like men, deserve all the rights and responsibilities of citizenship.