Human Rights in the World Community

This text on human rights consists of essays by more than thirty scholars, each one arguing a different aspect of human rights. One thing they all have in common is that they discuss how a nation’s economy effects how the rights are enjoyed.

In the seventeenth essay, Judy Fudge (University of Kent) discusses how labor rights have changed as countries move from heavy industry to digital business. She begins with a quote by Bob Hepple, about rights being little more than “paper tigers,” which is an essential problem discussed in this book. She writes about “social rights” as a way to address the deficits of citizenship, and by deficits, I mean the economic inequalities. Just because the law says “everyone is equal” doesn’t mean it’s going to happen that way. Businesses can still promote sexism, and though not discussed in her essay, disabled people can be kept out of a lot of jobs for image reasons. Fudge also discusses how the courts are uneasy at dealing with social rights, owing to their debatable nature as opposed to being codified.

Michael Ignatieff (former politician from Canada) writes about the USA’s focus on civil rights at home while at the same time sponsoring dictatorship in Latin America. The USA, despite the famous Bill of Rights, opted out of the UN declaration of children’s rights, and dragged its heels on the UN convention on genocide. It wasn’t that the USA had no desire for involvement, but that the USA could not use foreign rules in its own courts. I admit that children’s rights go begging in the USA, as seen with the “kids-for-cash” scandal in Pennsylvania. Perhaps US lawmakers, aware of the problem at home, don’t want to look hypocritical. Thanks to the US doctrine of states’ rights, it is difficult for our central government to make laws for the entire nation. Rights an autonomy can be a fickle thing, no?

Human rights are difficult to guarantee anywhere, as opposed to rule of law. It was an issue back in the feudal England, when the Barons could do as they pleased to the serfs. It was a problem in Russia, when the serfs were literally commodities, and the only reason the Czars ended serfdom was that it impeded industrialization. Even in the United States, it’s a problem on the micro level, especially with regard to families. Take for instance the right to keep the money you earn; if a teenage girl in The Bronx has an afterschool job, what’s to stop the girl’s irresponsible mother from bullying her into handing over her paycheck?  

The recent book by Janette Sadik-Khan, titled Street Fight, discusses the city of Medellin and what I call “commuter’s inequality.” If you have all the poor people living in the hills above the city, and the commute to town is a two-hour bus ride, then how will the people get to work? If all the public-funded schools are in town, how will the kids get to school? As is the case with many of the arguments in Human Rights in the World Community, many of the deficits of rights are actually deficits of the economy. Poor people are more likely to pull kids out of school and send them to work, so there’s less guarantee that a right to education will be enforced.