Human rights as a global conversation on human dignity
Opinions differ on what human rights are and where they originated. However, those who argue that there are different ways in which different people in the world view and promote human rights tend to agree that human rights are about respect for the dignity of every human being and should be guaranteed in every nation.
Advertisement
Today, thanks to human rights, workers, women, minority groups, and people with physical disabilities, who are often discriminated against in some societies, are able to appeal to human rights values to demand respect for their identity.
As a value system, human rights such as the right to life and freedom of thought offer a secular alternative to discriminatory religious beliefs and cultural practices in a diverse world.
Human rights have become popular in the world today not because they serve the interest of the powerful, but because they protect the dignity of the powerless.
Sadly, what should be a simple conversation about human dignity often descends into unhelpful debates over individual freedom versus communal traditions and universal rights versus national sovereignty.
These have been fuelled, in part, by academic rifts over the origins and codification of human rights as moral values and legal entitlements.
Some scholars who have written about the history of human rights have given too much credit to Western thinkers as the originators of the idea of human rights. In an article he wrote in 1982, the American Political Scientist Jack Donnelly argued, controversially, that individual freedom that underlies the idea of human rights is a Western moral value.
By overlooking the fact that individual liberty, as a key feature of human rights, actually exists in every human society, Donnelly helped to promote the false impression that human rights are Western values that Europe and America gave to the world.
Other Trending Stories
Magna Carta
In fact, in the same century that the English issued their Magna Carta (1215), outlining the rights and freedoms that English people were entitled to, and long before the Americans declared the same in their Bill of Rights (1789), the Mandingo people of Mali, in West Africa, had proclaimed similar principles, in 1236, that affirmed the freedom and dignity of “every human being” and not just the Mandingo nobility.
Freedom of religious thought existed in the kingdoms of Congo and Ndongo, in Central Africa, before the Portuguese came there in 1492. Different sexual orientations existed in the Kingdom of Buganda before European missionaries brought Christianity to that East African kingdom, in the late nineteenth century.
The presence of these human rights values in many African societies, before contact with Europeans, should not obscure the existence of brutal customs and oppressive traditions in other African societies. Clearly, long before contact with Western ideas many people in Ghana and other parts of Africa viewed individual and group freedoms as inseparable features of human rights. Beyond the arguments over the origins of human rights, there is another controversy over how and why today’s international human rights laws were written.
Human rights principles
Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of the American president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, led the movement, in 1948, to write down the 30 human rights principles that exist in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the main source of today’s international human rights laws.
The absence of representatives from Africa and other societies under colonial rule, at that time, among the eighteen people who drafted the UDHR, has led some critics to suggest that this international human rights declaration is a Western liberal ideology imposed on the rest of the world. It is important to examine the historical circumstances under which the UDHR was developed.
The world had just witnessed the systematic attempt by Nazi Germany to exterminate Jews as a group across Europe and the world. About six million of them had been destroyed in concentration camps. Jews were not the only victims. The Nazi regime had also targeted members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses (as a religious group), and homosexuals (as a social group), among others, for annihilation.
More than one million Africans had fought and died, as colonial subjects, between 1939 and 1945, in the war that exposed and also ended these Nazi atrocities. Africans fought to ensure that black people could enjoy the fundamental human right to life.
Thus, despite the absence of African representatives on the “Human Rights Commission” that drafted the UDHR, what its members did, spoke loudly to the aspirations of those who were absent.
These aspirations, embodied in the preamble of the UDHR, acknowledge that the dignity and equality of all members of the human family are the foundation of freedom and justice.
That disregard for human rights have, throughout human history, resulted in offensive acts against human conscience. The UDHR proclaims these as neither European, American nor African values, but rather as “a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations.”
African Charter
The adoption, in June 1981, of an African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR) by member states of the then Organisation of African Unity reaffirmed the fact that rights and freedoms enshrined in the UDHR are also the values of Africans and worthy of protection.
The 68 articles of the ACHPR do not deviate from the right to life and freedom from persecution that the UDHR grants to every human being. In fact, the Charter reinforces them as fundamental human rights that every African is entitled without any discrimination. Ghana ratified this Charter on January 24, 1989.
Advertisement
We should view human rights as claims that individuals and groups everywhere assert to in protecting their dignity as human beings and the responsibility of national governments and the rest of society to respect those claims. These are the values by which we should judge how far we have come as a people in our diverse but interconnected history.