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The Essential Role of Human Rights
| Article
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10634 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1993 |
4,090 Words |
| Author
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Leonard R. Sussman
Leonard R. Sussman is senior scholar in international
communication at Freedom House. He is also adjunct professor
of journalism and mass communication in the Graduate School of
Arts and Sciences of New York University. His recent books
include Power, the Press and the Technology of Freedom: The
Coming Age of ISDN. |
For the first time in 25 years, a World Conference on Human Rights convened in Vienna in June. Cries of terror could still be heard after barbarous atrocities drove ethnic populations from their homes, and false prophets of nationalism, religious extremism, and "ethnic cleansing" flouted the very international documents the conference was called to strengthen.
Such horrors, not limited to the Balkans, should generate a U.S. human freedom policy--first to define and publicize human rights violations anywhere, and then to consider appropriate counteractions.
The meeting was yet another beginning in the long, checkered history defining rights and protections to which citizens everywhere are entitled but most never receive. The conference could not reduce the horrors in Bosnia. Nor could the meeting resolve political subtleties such as dubbing economic development a guaranteed human right.
Before the conference began, Amnesty International, which protests cases of abuse, warned that preparatory meetings threatened the very structure created to advance human rights protection.
In Thailand in March, the developing countries accused the industrialized world of harboring "neocolonialist" attitudes toward democracy. They urged a new definition of human rights that better reflects their own cultures, many nondemocratic.
"Because of some weakness in our inner constitution," wrote Thailand's former foreign minister, "outsiders have taken advantage and try to make Asia a target practice." Specifically, said the Asian leader, "human rights charges, to be valid, should not emanate from self-appropriated private or even government sources, acting as if they have the authority or mandate from international authorities."
This view of human rights protection is the classic defense of oppressive nations, though Thailand is not an egregious example. "You can't judge us," this typical defense avers, "because we have a different tradition and culture." In the extreme example, cutting off a hand to punish a thief, though abhorred in most places, is common practice in some cultures and therefore should not be challenged anywhere, the argument runs.
That attitude would set back human rights protection that has been laboriously codified and monitored for the past 40 years.
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