Efficacy of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Are Human Rights Enough?

On the 10th day of December 1948, the United Nations met in Paris France to adopt the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This declaration was conceived when the entire globe was recovering from the wants of horrific conflict and bloody Second World War, and Hitler’s led Holocaust. The United Nations Human Rights proclaimed that all human races are born free and equal in dignity and rights. In the historical corridors and medieval scripture precepts, the prospects of human rights are not in shortage. The evolution of modern universal Human Rights was conceived shortly after the end of World War Two, to curb the barbaric violence and terror which was deemed as an avenue to halt consequential emergence of human rights abuse in the world. But are human rights enough? Have they contained the authentic objectives it intended to? This essay intends to examine whether the provisions by the Universal Declaration on Human Rights are enough in sanitizing the world from the harms of immorality by man upon another, and in pursuits to give voice to justice and equality. Also, individuals seeking HRM dissertation help can explore how these principles are going to intersect with contemporary practices in human resource management.

According to Young and Quibell, 2015), the voices of the marginalized do not permeate far and remain inaudible to the owners of political, economic and legal powers. This makes one to wonder about the legitimacy of human rights provisions, if it cannot claim the status of ignored outsiders. Within a short period of time, human rights have ascended to become the language of humanity. Beside the metaphysical presumption of “human rights as a language of humanity”, Von Bernstorff, (2018) maintain that the fact that all human races including the least fortunate embraced the language of human rights to affirm its position as the world’s most moral precept for the public domain. Human rights rest on the threshold of global order and is perceivable through different settings and ways, with one of the most visible being its quick development internationally. Through its legal consecration, human rights became a crucial element of international order, widely acceptable amongst the community of nations.

The supportive proponents of human rights are continually bombarded with inconvenient and uncomfortable truth. Scanning throughout the spinning wheel of time, the world has not been at ease but rather confronted with crises the same period whereby human rights became idolized and conceived as a remedy to such crises. A critical eye looking through the future may see clearly the future of the world. Entering into the new world of increased scepticism arouses fundamental doubts concerning human rights’ capacity to address related challenges. Within and without academic sphere, many people have openly critiqued human rights and dismissed them as partial credo for unrepresentative segments of modern society.

Barreto (2012) writes there are no shortage of condemnations against human rights, and observe this critiquing has become integrated in politics to be used as a tool by populist politicians for attaining political support. Within the anti-populist spectrum, there is a growing body of studies conceding about failure of human rights to deliver on its authentic mandates. Samuel Moyn is presented as one of the key figures in this hymn of disenchantment. Moyn (2018) maintains that in its dominant and established form, human right is highly implicated in the construction of our contemporary crisis-prone age. Particularly and in contrary to what remains the modern view within human rights domain, Moyn (2018) emphasizes that human rights can be strongly placed at the scene of continuing moral crime of domestic and global material inequality, which consequently disrupts various jurisdictions of shared human existence.

In his book, Moyn is eloquent as he is clear that human rights are basically “not doing enough” to practically and morally challenge major intolerable and harmful crimes of modern era; material inequality. Moyn (2018) criticizes human rights and associated movements on what he deems failure to exhibit a moral ambition toward the sanitization of corrupted politics and economics which according to him houses the tragedy of social inequalities and injustices. Moyn further challenges modern constructs of human rights and presents human rights as a direct and immediate driver of the horrors of the Holocaust and World War Two. Further, Moyn argues that the failures and structural weaknesses of human right bodies are not responsive to systematic material inequality therefore fail to address the challenges of social rights.

Cooper (2019) traces the development of human rights throughout historical occurrences particularly the French Revolution, the Bible, and the maturation of European welfare state. The scholar observes despite the presence of human right sentiments and principles in the corridors of history, they have failed to plunge this world into a pool of equity and gross equality. In the United States, Human Rights were conceived during the United States Declaration of Independence in 1776, thereafter becoming part of the Bill of Rights in United States Constitution. The French Revolution welcomed the birth of the Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen in 1789. In addition, the Inter-American Conference enacted a resolution in 1945, aiming at the establishment of an International Forum for strengthening Human Rights of Mankind. The United Declaration of Human Rights maintains that all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. In ancient scriptures of the Holy Books, the utterances about human rights are noticeable (Young and Quibell, 2015).

Moyn’s arguments concerning social rights bring forth consolidated analyses of local and international quests to dismantle poverty especially during the 20th century. Moyn’s resentment of modern human rights lies on the two main discourses; his view that social rights rapidly forsook inculcating material equality in favour of subsistence and the analysis of the human rights proponents’ inability to strongly challenge the effects of international dominance of neoliberalism. The subject of human rights has obtained intense attention, and many proponents and advocates of this subject have conceded that human rights are inscribed in the hearts of people; and were long before the drafting of the proclamations.

In practice, human rights have accomplished some noteworthy achievements fundamentally in the realm of political and civil rights. Considering the subtle precept of equality as non-discrimination, the international human rights fraternity has triumphantly challenged structural forms of status inequality globally. Discrimination constructed on protracted range of personal identities is illegalized in many countries, with struggle still on-going in countries which have not and indeed where discrimination disregards the legal custom through cultural, social and religious practices and beliefs (Young and Quibell, 2015). Alongside this struggle lies a plethora of challenges, despite there being progress. Within the human rights body, there is a group of through inclined into believing that priority ought to be granted to supporting political and civil rights campaigns chiefly because these constitute the point where success is most secured. This ideology is partly pragmatic and partly preferential towards political and civil rights. According to Moyn, this is a failure to address the intricacies of material inequalities by the human rights proponents; but instead supporting the intolerable conditions of material inequality.

According to Dolinger 2016, the moral obligation to derive and exercise equality to all through the protection of political and civil rights fail to accommodate the quests for distributive equality through solid formulation and safeguarding social rights. In addition, the scholar acknowledges that the 1976’s International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights was an instrumental framework for induction of social rights; he exemplifies how social rights neglected the effort to address material equality but concentrated on less demanding pursuit of securing enough material resource for all.

Moyn (2018) argues that the international human right project is constrained by interior distinction between sufficiency and equality. When status equality become fundamental to the quest for political and civil rights, sufficiency suffices in respect to social rights counterparts, writes Dolinger (2016). Further, Moyn beliefs sufficiency revolves around establishing how deeper individuals are from having nothing while material equality focuses on how to overcome the unjustifiable discrepancies between various people. Based on normative precepts sufficiency is wholly compatible with material hierarchy and huge inequalities between individual’s material resources. Statistics demonstrating many vulnerable people dying of hunger and poverty-related maladies underage attests to human rights failure to quench the less demanding objective of material sufficiency. Fagan (2019) believes lowering social rights to the acquisition of sufficiency indicates a clear lack of moral aim, while contributing towards the expanding material inequalities globally.

The legal pronouncements concerning social rights are conspicuously hamstrung by the absence of political willpower to implement such pronouncements. According to Young and Quibell (2015), even upon the enforcement of such social rights pronouncements, the norms in which social rights are integrated are weak and inadequate to the degree that compatible with material inequalities. The scholar maintains a view that relinquishment of the material equality in many political, institutional and intellectual developments is conspicuous in human rights provisions. In the event that human rights are incorporated into our humanity, then the prospects of social rights should be equally incorporated because they are human rights; and this would be a milestone made towards discrediting material inequality.

Pitts (2019) writes that the abandonment of material equality for sufficiency has capacitated human rights to inhabit in peace with the constantly dominating neoliberalism. Moyn (2018) argues; “the selective attention of human rights politics towards a minimum provision of the good things in life has made them unthreatening to a neoliberal movement that, sometimes achieving or tolerating that goal, has devoted itself most unerringly to the intensification of material hierarchy”. Moyn concedes with various activists and thinkers on the view that neoliberalism constitutes a harmful and damaging set of economic practices and prepositions. Further, Moyn insists that human rights are a construct of neoliberalism; and is its driving force globally. The suppression of social rights to an issue of sufficiency correlates with a form of political economy; whereby human rights are purported to elevate the living statuses of the millions of people living in absolute poverty; while abandoning the harms interwoven with the widening gap in material inequality.

Williamson (2009) criticizes international human right fraternity on the ground it fails to challenge the deleterious effects of neoliberalism. The scholar maintains that neoliberalism has negatively transformed the globe, with human rights posing no framework to curb the continuing transformations. The apparent inability of human rights to address neoliberalism rests on the inability to challenge and condemn material inequality through social rights.

Klein (2016) argues material inequalities are one of the most challenging pathologies in modern world. The constructs of human rights lack concerns to provide redress to this “cancer”. He affirms that human right bodies do not accommodate political or economic strategies and commitments to curtail neoliberalism and therefore neoliberalism will keep on enriching the few elites; thus, widening the discrepancies in wealth distributions, while at the same time exposing many people into unsustainable instability and uncertainty. In Moyn’s arguments, the prospects of human rights should not partake in the dinner table of human civilization because they fail to address the inner drivers of inequalities, which ironically it purports to dismantle from the face of the earth.

The proponents of the wellbeing of ordinary people have questioned the relevance of human rights, and have interrogated their vibrancy in attending to the immediate fundamental rights. A critical eyeing on the global government leaders, institutions, policy pronouncements and local initiative championed locally and the debates aroused by academia have ventured into the meaning of inequality and sufficiency. Moyn (2014) in his dismissal of human rights provisions lies on the threshold of what those who are deemed as fortunate members of the society have in relation those who are not. Moyn therefore does not underscore the potentials of those who have in uplifting the threshold of the less fortunate members of the society. In addition, therefore, Moyn is disproportionately focusing on the top down axis of the continuing danger of neoliberalism.

In its structural form, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is not a treaty and therefore does not invite legal obligations for countries. It is a demonstration of basic values shared by all members of global community (Moyn, 2018). The Universal Declaration of Human Rights has been invoked since its conception, and as a result has an integral part of customary international law. Moreover, the Universal Declaration has rendered forth a broad array of various international treaties that are legally binding on the nations ratifying them. Such treaties include the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Other binding treaties conceived on the threshold of the Universal Declaration include the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women 1979 and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination 1965. In view of these conventions, the world has no shortage of models for addressing some of the worst ills of modern societies. However, despite their eloquence and presence, these ills are propagated in various forms through neoliberalism which then provides a vivid indication that the Universal Declaration is not enough in uprooting the systemic ills of contemporary societies (Moyn, 2018).

According to Featherstone (2019), fundamental driver to the establishment of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights were the harsh horrors, persecution and atrocities propagated by the Nazi regime under Adolf Hitler during the Holocaust. Griffin and Griffin (2018) observe nothing came out from the Declaration concerning the protection of people from the wants of organized atrocities and genocide since no vivid authority was mandated to the UN or any member state to interfere to save the population prone to persecution. All UN pronouncements beginning with the Declaration and her consequential treaties and conventions approved thereafter primarily focuses on principles, generalized rules and legal concepts geared to protect the people of the world (Roosevelt, 2003). However, these provisions are silent concerning collectivises doomed by the powers of evil; except for the Genocide Convention which execute human rights protection through prevention and punishment. However, this convention focuses much on punishment and therefore leaving the prevention segment under-defined, making it unresponsive.

The conception of various principles inscribed in the Declaration of Human Rights was proposed by and voted by some of the key proponents of the United Nations. These proponents waged in the preparation and of the Declaration were carrying out some of the worst illegalities against human rights in history. For instance, Britain sent Jewish war survivors seeking their way to Palestine back into Europe. In other incidences, the British solders massacred 24 unarmed villagers at Batang Kali during the Malayan emergency. In Congo, Africa, Belgium had indulged in a plethora of untold misconducts against the Congolese through the cruel policies, and so with France in North Africa; and indeed, Russia’s murderous treatment of dissenters and the United States’ discrimination against African Americans (Hayman and Moyn, 2011). These observations strangled the basic founding principles of the established human rights order; but yet the drafters of the Declaration came from these countries.

Concerning the objectives of the Human Rights Declaration, its preamble asserts that “recognition of the inherent dignity and the equal and inalienable rights of all members if the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world…” (UN General Assembly, 1948) Justice and freedom are rights, and Young and Quibell (2015) believe it would have been more instrumental and concise to enumerate the two precepts together with equality and dignity and to group them as supportive components of the others. It is cumbersome to comprehend the nexus between human rights with peace in the globe, or as the preamble states the fundamental essence if “promoting the development of friendly relations between nations” (United Nations General Assembly, 1949). Indeed, in the contemporary world, where there is no respect for freedom and human rights, there is no peace either. During the 20th century, majority of the countries in the Latin America sphere witnessed dictatorial regime which hampered people fundamental rights. These countries did not pose danger to the international community. Therefore, there is no evidence that governments abusing their peoples’ rights do not necessarily pose any quantifiable threat to global peace.

Countries such as Vietnam, Cuba and Iraq are examples of human rights violating countries which are likely to go to confrontations and war. This axiom does not prove anything as yet there are a myriad of countries disrespecting human rights and never go to war. On the same vein, human rights monitoring countries sometimes go to war but not against themselves. Further, some of the interventions discussing human rights reestablishment have ended inducing forth war. This therefore provides a vivid indication that the prospects of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are just but an illusion, unattainable and irresponsive to the realization of international human rights amongst the community of nations.

Hannum (2015) suggested the Declaration with her subsequent covenants and treaties on various principalities of human rights do suffer from one fundamental failure: a large percentage of the UN nations live under authoritarian regimes. Some of these states are constructed in the precepts of harsh religious systems which fail to abide by the basic values and principles contained in the Declaration. It is only a smaller portion of the world where countries exercise free political competitions, civic life and independent media and respect of fundamental freedoms. It is therefore conclusive that the provisions of the Universal Declaration are a construct of wishful resolutions which are not implementable in a good number of countries and therefore do not safeguard plenty of mankind.

In conclusion, this essay suggests that the drafters of the Declaration did a core historical and legal misconduct by wrapping the rules and principles of the Declaration to Adolf Hitler’s brutal regime. The Declaration sought to protect people but it fails to address minorities or societies succumbing to the dreary regimes of dictators; where suffering is consolidated. Instead the Declaration is basically a mere declaration, without force of law and somewhat a wasted effort. The Declaration is therefore responsive to addressing material inequalities and other structural political challenges embedded in some of the modern societies.

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