Human Rights are not Abstract

On the Prospects and Abuses of the Current Human Rights Discourse

“Human Rights Day” celebrated internationally on December 10 reminds us that human rights are only restrictedly observed. The author warns that human rights are severed from their social promises and the debate narrowed to personal liberty.

By Thomas Gebauer

[This article originally published in: Frankfurter Rundschau, January 2004 is translated from the German on the World Wide Web, www.fr-aktuell.de/ressorts/nachrichten_und_politik/dokumentation/.]

The cause of human rights is seemingly doing well. Hannah Arendt complained that the idea of human rights makes little progress because its defenders cannot go beyond the importance of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Today powerful actors speak of human rights.

Politicians urge their observance, transnational trading firms formulate social standards valid at the other end of the world and the military only want to intervene humanitarianly and not wage wars any more. The moral concern for the chances and problems of fellow human beings seizes the whole society and is no longer only the hobby of starry-eyed unrealistic philanthropists. Nevertheless human rights violations have increased along with public engagement for human rights.

2.8 billion people are waging a sheer hopeless struggle for survival with less than two dollars a day. Although the world economy has grown sevenfold since 1950, fewer and fewer people profit from the global wealth. Economic disruption and social marginalization spread above all in the countries of the South. The disintegration of state structures favors the informalization of violence and lawlessness. Minorities are persecuted, children are exploited and freedom of the press is trampled on. Every year 14.4 million people die of curable sicknesses. A third of the world’s population lacks access to the most necessary medicines. Misery and social cuts are everywhere. As a consequence, violence produces ever-new violence. Even in countries with a long democratic tradition like the US or Germany, the re-introduction of state-legitimated torture is debated today. Security, it is said, can only be guaranteed by limiting civil rights.

Is the intention of denying the catastrophic course of history and diverting from one’s participation in the human rights violations implicit in the omnipresent emphasis on human rights?

Human Rights – Legal Norms or Legal Demands

A gap between the idea of human rights and their reality has existed since time immemorial. The 1776 “Virginia Bill of Rights” in which all-later human rights declarations were oriented proved compatible with a state whose wealth and existence were based on slave labor and the destruction of the aboriginal Indian population. Thomas Jefferson wrote, “All men are born equal.” He only had in mind men since women were denied the right to vote.

The idea that all people are endowed through birth with inalienable rights and that human rights represented sacred legal norms was strongly rejected by Hannah Arendt. “We are not born equal. We become equal as members of a group by virtue of our decision to guarantee equal rights to one another”, she wrote shortly after the end of the Second World War. On account of the experience of her own statelessness, Arendt recognized that rights are worth nothing if they are not politically enforced and secured. “Human rights are not attributes of a kind of human nature but qualities of a world built by people.” Only as part of a legally constituted collective can people assure themselves of the rights to freedom and equality. Social disqualification always leads to lawlessness.

Therefore the “right to have rights” (Arendt) precedes all other rights. This right is threatened more than ever given the increasing exclusion of broad parts of the world population. The world is moving closer together in the course of economic globalization while its division was never so great. On one side is the rich North whose inhabitants can enjoy many kinds of privileges as a result of their economic, technological and cultural predominance. On the other side is the global South, the zones of misery, economic disqualification, permanent humiliation and wars where the material basis of human rights is simply lacking. Human rights turn out to be rights of the privileged if one takes ownership conditions as the standard. There is seemingly no place for human rights where human existence is focused on naked survival because traditional economic cycles and social structures have collapsed.

Human Rights in the Context of War and Globalization

The negative effects of the global deregulation of capitalism have often been described. These negative effects prevail because there are hardly democratically legitimated systems of control and regulation. That the globalized economy needs a new political superstructure was only clear later on. Now the idea of global governance is making the rounds. International NGO-networks strive for a humanly just organization of the world. The powerful states seek stabilization of the new world order in security policy. Human rights – alongside military-political objectives – increasingly appear in the strategic reflections of the European Union.

The middle class origin of the dominant understanding of human rights is nearly always ignored in the debate. The democratic and emancipative substance of human rights is emphasized. The close connection of human rights with the development of capitalism and its corresponding legal orders is then disregarded. This is very clear in the right to private property with which the rising middle class justified the necessity of a radical breach with the prevailing feudal order and at the same time passed off its specific interest as a general interest. The insistence on property rights represented an unquestionable historical advance during the anti-feudal revolts. Still the ideological foundation for the dominant view that capitalism has no alternative and its global expansion is the true goal of history was laid through the mystification of particular material interests into natural and eternal rights.

The current human rights discourse is very two-edged. Emancipatory goals and the assurance of economic globalization together with its negative effects are stressed. On one hand, the call for greater protection of human rights originates from the promise that something should come to everyone though for a long time rights were only reserved for some. On the other hand, wars contributing to the stabilization of global supremacy and privileges are increasingly waged under the banner of human rights. This ambivalence blossoms grotesquely. While the wars in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq presumably all had the goal of ending serious human rights crimes, those who rejected war as a means of politics were reproached for inhumanity. In contrast, the military almost sparkled in the role of the calvary from Hollywood westerns that only turns up when civilization has to be rescued from the claws of the barbarians.

Human rights are not abstract rights but are subject to the dynamic of the social and historical context. The social terrain on which the conflict around human rights occurs is still contested. Unfortunately the development of human rights seems to be declining today. A multitude of “achieved” rights are undermined. The social rights of people are threatened.

The Indivisibility of Human Rights

Remembering the enormous destruction of the two world wars, the United Nations in 1948 passed the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights”. Supported by the conviction that future assurance of world peace will be impossible without full respect for the rights of all people”, the authors of the UN Human Rights declaration formulated programmatic goals that became binding international law with later UN conventions.

The two human rights pacts from 1966, the “Convention on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights” and the “Convention on Political and Civil Rights”, are among the most important conventions. The latter limits the power of the state in relation to individual citizens and their “freedom rights”. The economic- and social pact enumerated obligations of the political community toward its citizens, in a word “the social rights”. Both pacts entered into effect in 1976 and have been ratified by 147 states. Since then, the right to work and social security, the right to union organization, the right to health care and a proper living standard, the right to education and participation in the cultural life in all ratifying countries should be valid law and no longer only ideas that will become law sometime or other.

Both pacts have the same preamble: “The ideal of the free person can only be realized when conditions are created in which everyone can enjoy his or her economic, social and cultural rights and his or her civil and political rights.” Despite the postulated indivisibility of human rights, the economic- and social pact is subordinate to the civil pact. In the course of the new neoliberal order of the world, the debate was narrowed to the group of freedom rights while the social rights reflecting the ideas of equality and social justice were overshadowed. The lands of the rich North usually consider them only as declarations of intent, not as valid legal claims justiciable by individual citizens

Instead of taking the necessary steps to maximize education, health and cultural possibilities as imposed on states by the economic- and social pact, most states of the world have gone in an opposite direction. They have reduced public expenditures referring to deficient funds and the supposed superiority of private suppliers. Social division accelerates with the privatization of public services. That elementary human rights are involved in access to libraries, medicines and theaters is also increasingly forgotten. The deregulation of human rights inevitably follows the deregulation of the rule of law whose institutions only assure present domination and powerful economic interests.

Shortly after the fall of the Berlin wall, the Mexican author Carlos Fuentes warned that the idea of freedom could atrophe to neoliberal liberation from social responsibility and freedom rights could have only trade, investments and capital transactions as their subject and no longer people. The development of the last years has shown that Carlos Fuentes’ warning was precocious. Human rights threaten to be completely severed from their social promises to serve the legitimation of capitalist predominance.

The demand to respect human rights directed to the countries of the South is almost always joined with the demand for free enterprise orientation. Neo-conservatives in the US have perfected the equation of freedom rights, democracy and unbridled markets so that it becomes a moral principle that can hardly be shaken from the outside. However if human rights only serve the justification of a global economic liberalism, then they definitively lose their protective and critical-emancipatory substance.

The Global Renewal of Human Rights Protection

The protection of human rights can only be understood globally today in view of globalization. We should be warned against excessive expectations. Neither a world state nor an institutionalized world civil right guaranteeing political and social rights to all people exists. Even an international civil court that can be convened by individual persons, unlike the recently instituted international criminal court, is still in the future. Only those Europeans whose countries accepted the “European Human Rights Convention” can immediately bring suits before an inter-state court, the European tribunal.

Globalization has not brought more legal security to the majority of the world’s population but the opposite: a kind of re-feudalization of their social context. Fewer and fewer can appeal to the institutions of a democratically legitimated rule of law. For more and more people, the realization of their human rights depends on the philanthropic engagement of foreign relief organizations. Human rights will only have a chance in the future if their development and protection are renewed “from below”.

The international public seems to have accepted this challenge. Anti-globalization intellectuals, writer associations, internationally connected non-governmental organizations, unions, churches and a vast number of regional and local self-help projects advance into the institutional void created by globalization and now insist on a political and moral foundation of human rights.

A double responsibility is incumbent on this “new double movement”. On one side, personal engagement for new forms of life and communication must be oriented more strongly in human rights. On the other side, public human rights discourse must unveil particular power interests and show that efforts for a society where “the free development of every individual is the condition for the free development of all individuals” (Marx) are on the agenda.