Human Rights - for who?

Here is Mike van Graans speech:

Human Rights in a Globalised World: Who's human? Who's right?

Seventy years ago, in 1948, 48 countries adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. “The days of our years are three score and ten” goes the biblical passage which has long been used by some to mark the average length of human life. Has the Declaration reached its three-score-and-ten sell-by date?

But then, 70 years is not the average length of life, is it? Women in Japan may expect to live for at least 86 years, while the average sub-Saharan African has a life expectancy of 58, a difference of some twenty-eight years.

Inequality with regard to income, access to healthcare, education, social support and a variety of other factors impacts directly not only on the length and the quality of lived experience, but on the fundamental right to life itself, and on the manner in which the rights and freedoms enshrined in the Declaration are experienced.

1948 was a significant year, not only for Human Rights.

The Marshall Aid Plan was approved by the American Congress, with $5 billion allocated to rehabilitate 16 European countries after the devastation of the second world war.

Burma and Sri Lanka declared their independence from Britain in 1948 as the end of the war heralded a period of decolonisation, with Ghana, the first African country to assume independence the year before.

But 1948 was also the year in which white South Africans elected the National Party into power, thereby leading to the formal imposition of apartheid, so that while the rest of Africa was unravelling its colonial history, a form of internal colonisation was reinforced in earnest in South Africa, with the black indigenous majority subjugated to white minority rule, a crime against humanity that was to last another 46 years. 

South Africa was one of eight countries that abstained from voting in favour of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.

One of the countries that did vote for the Declaration was Israel, which was itself established earlier that same year on the back of what Palestinians call the Nakba, the exodus of some 700 000 Palestinians who fled or were expelled from their homes, a conflict that still scars and polarises our world today.

The International Court of Justice opened in The Hague.

The World Health Organisation was launched.

The US Armed Forces were desegregated.

Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated.

All of this in 1948.

The United Nations came into being in 1945 at the end of the Second World War. Its charter declares its purposes in Article 1:

• To maintain international peace and security and to that end, to take effective collective means for the prevention and removal of threats to peace, for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace, and to bring about by peaceful means and in conformity with the principles of justice and international law, adjustment or settlement of international disputes or situations which might lead to a breach of the peace
• To develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principles of equal rights and self-determination of people and to take other appropriate measures to strengthen universal peace
• To achieve international cooperation in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural or humanitarian character and in promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion and
• To be a centre for harmonising the actions of nations in the attainment of common ends

Notwithstanding these worthy goals, in seventy years, our world has become a more dangerous place. In 1945 when the United Nations was formed, only the United States had nuclear weapons. Today, nine countries have a total of more than 15 000 nuclear weapons.  We have allowed the absurdity of guaranteeing the future of the human species, not through pursuing the noble injunctions of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but by developing and stockpiling weapons that could end life on our planet. 

Our future is guaranteed by the threat of not having one, while in the name of greed – masquerading as progress, development and civilisation – some plunder and destroy our earth, robbing many of their right and desire to live in harmony with nature.

In 1994, we South Africans elected Nelson Mandela as President in our country’s first post-apartheid elections, with the world focusing its attention on the “miracle rainbow nation” while just a few countries to the north, 800 000 people were being slaughtered in a genocide in Rwanda, this, despite numerous monuments and museums about genocide that declare “never again”.

That genocide unleashed a war in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1998, which has since claimed more than 6 million lives and displaced more than 4 million people in what some have labelled “the silent genocide”.  The UN presence is one of the largest deployed, but it has had little effect in quelling the armed conflicts, much of it now centred on exploiting the DRC’s rich mineral wealth, including accessing coltan, a mineral necessary for the production of smartphones.

“Everyone has the right to life…” states Article 3 of the Universal Declaration, but whose lives really matter?  Whose lives are expendable to sustain the quality of life for the elites of the world? 

6 million die in the German holocaust during the second world war, and many are still paying for this outrage today; 6 million die in the DRC and there is…silence.  There is outrage at scores of women being abused by men in positions of authority, the hashtag metoo campaign gains momentum globally, and rightly so!; yet thousands of women are brutalised, with rape employed as a weapon of war in the Congo and there is…silence. 

Article 4 of the Universal Declaration stipulates that “no-one shall be held in slavery or servitude” and that “slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms”. 

That is well and good, and yet, the same racist impulses that regarded Africans as less than human, as mere labour units to serve the economic and social interests of colonial and apartheid elites, render Africans invisible today, expendable, no longer necessary as slaves to work on plantations abroad, but at best, cheap labour units to work in the multinational factories, mines, farms and call centres in their own countries.

Poverty wreaks violence, not only physically on the bodies of its victims, but on their dignity, their psychological and emotional well-being. It is poverty, more than any other factor that limits many millions, even billions from realising the human rights and freedoms promised in the Declaration.

Little wonder then that many Africans – and others - seek better and longer lives in Europe, among other places. Last year, I spent some time on a fellowship in Germany, a country that has been lauded for opening its doors to refugees from the war in Syria. With so much pressure from the populace though, Germany devised a policy that granted political asylum to migrants and refugees on the basis of a hierarchy of “safe countries”; if your country was at war, like Syria, your application to stay would be given preferential treatment.  But if your country was considered “safe”, you would most likely be returned to it.

People fleeing their country to have access to better work opportunities, better medical facilities, better education, the possibility of living to an age in excess of 80, are returned to their country of origin that Europe deems “safe”, even if the quality of your life, your fundamental rights and freedoms are sorely compromised.

Which fundamental human rights do we support? Is there a hierarchy of rights and freedoms?  We organise, mobilise, raise funds to support individuals who fall foul of authoritarian regimes to exercise their right to freedom of expression; our annual human rights reports are filled with stories and statistics about the suppression of media and creative expression;

all this is admirable, necessary and good: but what about the very right to life?  What about the rights to the quality of life enshrined in the Declaration of Human Rights? 

How do we choose which rights and freedoms to support? On the basis of what is important within our cultures? Because of what funders support? Because it’s easier to mobilise around an individual with a story to tell than to change and impact on structures that do violence to the bodies, dignity and spirits of masses of people, thereby refuting their fundamental rights and freedoms?

Do individuals not have a right to seek a better life, a longer life, the kind of life that the Declaration promises?  Does one have to face harassment from the state to escape one’s conditions, because international human rights organisations have foregrounded “freedom of expression” as the key human right and freedom? 

On Friday last week, 27 April, South Africa celebrated 24 years of democracy, more than two decades since we adopted a Constitution that at last affirmed the fundamental human rights and freedoms of everyone, irrespective of colour, language, religion, gender or class, in same way that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights affirms the rights and freedoms of all people, across the globe.

And yet, in the time that we have enjoyed our “freedom”, our country has become one of the most unequal in the world, with an official unemployment rate of 26%, but which, unofficially, is closer to 38%; more than half the population lives below the poverty line and those of us in the top 20% take away more than 70% of the national income, leaving the bottom 40% to eke out a living from less than 7% of the national income.

Constitutionally, we all have the same rights, but in the context of such an unequal society, those of us with education, with resources, with networks are better able to exercise these rights than those with less of these. We are equal, and have equal rights, but only in theory.

I am a writer, a playwright. I have access to the country’s theatres, I am able to stage plays at the major festivals, I am able to critique the excesses of the regime and interrogate the post-apartheid condition with few restrictions. But there are millions of others who have the same right to freedom of expression that I have, but do not have the education, the skills, the access to resources, the language i.e. the means to exercise that right. So while I am able to express myself in such respectable forms, others may take to the streets, engage in all forms of protest, sometimes peaceful, sometimes violent, to express their frustrations and advocate for their interests.

And so it is in our world, with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that grants us all the same rights and freedoms, but a highly unequal world means that some enjoy the Declaration’s rights and freedoms more than others.  “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights…”.  In theory, maybe. But in reality, a child born in a South African township will not have the same rights as a child born in the suburbs. A child born in Sierra Leone will not have the same dignity and rights as a child born in Paris, France. An adult from Bangladesh trying to enter Europe will not be treated in the same way as a white Australian would be.

A European passport is likely to get the holder to more than 150 countries without the need for a visa. An average African passport allows the holder visa-less access to less than half that number. We are not born equal.

I was in queue recently, entering Europe through passport control in Germany.  Ahead of me was an older black African woman; we were on the same plane from Johannesburg. It was 6 ‘o clock in the morning. The immigration official was probably less than half her age. He spent at least seven minutes interrogating her about the reasons for her being in Germany. 

It didn’t matter that she had a return ticket, or a valid visa, or that as it turned out, she was a professor of law and had been invited to teach a course on constitutional law at a German university – all that mattered to the immigration official, was that she was black, and from Africa.

We are not born, and we are certainly not treated with equal dignity. From positions of privilege, we often pontificate and frown upon those who engage in acts of violence, without ever having experienced the violence of having one’s dignity violated, one’s sense of being, one’s identity questioned, and inferiorised, even in, or perhaps especially in, the so-called civilised world.

Last May, a suicide bomber blew himself up at a concert in Manchester, killing 22 people. CNN reported that “the world mourns the deaths of the victims of terror in Manchester”, yet in that same month, more than 800 people had been killed in terror attacks in Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya.

Whose lives are valued? Whose lives are visible? Who has the cultural reach to spread their values, their ideas, their perspectives on world events?  Whose tragic stories are told?  Who is humanised?  It is easy to dismiss and negate other cultural paradigms when one’s own paradigm enjoys hegemony through inequitable global reach via the news media, television programmes, films, music, literature and the like.

Power is exercised not only through political, economic and military means but also through cultural influences, shaping minds, winning hearts, creating consent for particular interests, even though such interests are expressed in more noble, more worthy terms.  Some countries and regions love to talk about the need to find and spread values that unite us, values that will negate the forces of terror, undercut radicalism and turn the world into a mass kumbaya choir.  But values mean little when ultimately, it is economic and security interests that are the main drivers of relationships globally.

Democracy loses its allure when it delivers governments that trade in hatred of the other, when one or two countries at the Security Council can veto resolutions approved 190 others, when powerful nations undermine regimes elected by the people but which do not align themselves with the interests of such powerful nations.  The expressed commitment of some nations to human rights rings hollow through their support of despotic regimes in exchange for military bases, who trade in arms with those who use such arms to terrorise their people, who for decades support tyrants in places such as Egypt and Tunisia and then, when ordinary people reject the tyrants, suddenly find love for the human rights of those people, only to retreat into safe, self-interested silence again when new tyrannies arise and suppress the people once more.

“Everyone has the right to religion…” Article 18.

“Everyone has the right to rest and leisure” Article 24

“Everyone has the right to enjoy the arts” Article 27.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognises human beings as holistic entities; they are not simply physical beings whose physical needs are to be cared for, but they have emotional, psychological, intellectual, spiritual dimensions too. 

“Everyone”, says Article 28, “is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realised”.

And yet, we have a world order that structurally favours a few, that discriminates against the majority.  If the Declaration is indeed still a moral standard bearer, we need to ask whether our activism is focused on the most important factors that impact on the rights and freedoms set forth in the Declaration being fully realised.

We are moved by the stories of individuals who have their right to freedom of creative expression curtailed, who are prevented from speaking truth to power, as we should be.  But where is the outrage at the greed on the one hand and the poverty on the other that does violence to the dignity of billions, proscribing their quality of life, and severely limiting their rights and freedoms?

We are deeply concerned by authoritarian regimes that suppress their citizens’ right to protest, as we should be, but where is the outrage at Israel’s killing and wounding of Palestinian protestors on too regular a basis?

We are outraged by the use of chemical weapons on Syrian citizens, but we shrug our shoulders, and shake our heads at the bombings that have killed hundreds of thousands of people, as if death by bombs is somehow more acceptable, more civilised than being killed by poison.

The manner in which the Declaration is giving meaning in today’s world begs the question: who is human?  Who is considered to be fully human?  And who actually has these rights and freedoms?  Is it only for the elites of the world, the educated, the resourced, the networked?  Or are they really for everyone?

We live in a globalised world where we are interconnected, the lifestyles in one part of the world supported by cheap labour in other parts of the world.  Our clothes, our I-Phones, our cars – like Volvo – are made in China, a country not reputed to have the best human rights record when it comes to freedom of expression.  And yet, it is China that has most lifted people out of poverty.  The United States on the other hand is seen as a liberal democracy upholding freedom of expression – at least within its own borders – and yet, the right to health care as expressed in Article 25 of the Declaration is not something that all Americans enjoy.

The deep inequalities within South Africa pose both short- and long-term security threats.  Those who have, have retreated into gated villages, live behind high walls, with electric fencing and private security firms. 

Similarly, the deep inequalities within our world – between those who have economic, political, cultural and military power – deep inequalities that render our lived experience of fundamental human rights so different, will continue to pose increasing security threats, leading to ever-escalating security measures that undermine other fundamental human rights such as freedom of movement, freedom of expression and the right to privacy.

For the sake of all of our futures, we would do well to pursue with vigour and in earnest to give concrete expression to two fundamental rights in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights” and “everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realised”.

We live in a time of increasing polarisation, of fear and anxiety based on othering and ignorance about others, of retreating into defensive nationalisms.  But sustainable peace will only be possible when we have global social justice, or the rest of our activism work will be dealing with symptoms of inequality, rather than with causes. 

The world, our world, more so than in 1948, needs the Declaration of Human Rights to be universally known, understood and implemented, not just parts of it, but all of it. 

How human we are, how civilised we are, is challenged by how much we care for, and advocate for other human beings whom we don’t know, and who indeed may be quite different to who we are, the same fundamental rights and freedoms that we enjoy.