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Human Rights
Human Rights R. Honey, The University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Glossary Civil Rights Rights to participate in the civil life of a society, without restriction by race, religion, or other contestable categories. Cultural Rights Right to express one’s culture, including language, religion, and patterns of social engagement. Cultural Struggles Struggles over the norms of a culture or over the adjudication of different norms when the norms of different cultures are in conflict. Economic Rights The right to participate in an economy, as well as to have basic needs met. Human Rights The protections and privileges one has as part of the shared heritage of humanity. Political Rights The right to participate in the political system, including such rights as to expression as freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and the right to assemble. Social Rights The right to participate in the daily life of a society, as in the right to marry and form a family. Universality The applicability of all rights to all people under all circumstances.
Introduction Human rights, in the time since World War II, have become widely recognized as protections for people against the oppressive actions of states and other actors. Human rights are important in several ways, most significantly in that they have come to take on constitutional status as protections for people and as claims to having basic needs met. In theory, human rights are those rights held by all individuals simply as a consequence of their status as people, part of the common heritage and endowment of human kind. Human rights have come to be regarded as inalienable in that they can neither be taken away nor given way. They are not subject to the powers of class or on the basis of classifications by gender, race, religion, or political ideology. In theory, human rights are universal, applying to all people, independent of where those people are. Human rights reality, however, differs from human rights theory. Though several international agreements hail human rights and affirm their status before the law, the protection of rights on the one hand and their violation on the other, vary over space and through time as people struggle to define and redefine rights, struggle
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over interpretations of rights, and struggle to rein in human rights abuses. Though the global human rights movement claims that rights codified in international agreements are ‘universal’ in that they apply to all people in all places, human rights are the product of political processes and hence have their own political geography. The ‘political geography’ of human rights involves: Where various human rights are protected and, con• versely, violated; The extent to which societies and polities have bought • into competing conceptualizations of human rights;
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and Cultural struggles over human rights at three discernable scales: – struggles with a culture over what should be considered rights; – struggles between cultures over whose conception of rights should be enforced or how differing conceptions should be adjudicated and practiced; and – struggles between a culture and global forces, either resisting widely accepted human rights or resisting global forces that violate rights deemed as important by the culture.
An explanation of the meaning and history of human rights is followed by a discussion of essential debates about human rights, and then an explication of the various political geographies of human rights.
History From the Magna Carta to the twenty-first century, rights have been construed as: individual privileges recognized by the state; protections from state interference in a list of individual or group activities; and claims that individuals or groups could make for gaining the necessities of life. Toward the end of the second Millennium, human rights came to be regarded as protections from any potential oppressor, not just a state. Though the emergence of a global human rights regime only transpired in the twentieth century, the claim for rights, whether logically or legally, can be recognized as far back as the ancient Greeks. The idea of rights gained major momentum with the American and French Revolutions late in the eighteenth century. Most significantly, they challenged the traditional concept of sovereignty, changing it from something held by a
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monarch (or other ruler) and thus giving that ruler unquestioned, unchallengeable power over the people, to a concept in which the basic root of power was the sovereignty of the people who were empowered to delegate control over the machinery of governance to states or other entities that would then act in accordance with the interests of the people. Neither of these revolutions of course succeeded in establishing a human rights regime. The French Revolution succumbed to its own excesses and the military might of those benefiting from the previous conception of sovereignty. The American Revolution codified the rights of white men of property, not all people. Indeed, the constitution of the United States thrice mentions slavery, the epitome of a political and economic system with the most fundamental violations of what later came to be construed as human rights. Slaves were to be counted as three-fifths of a person in two ways, one for taxation purposes, the other when allocating by population the number of seats a state would have in the House of Representatives. As part of the historic compromise between northern and southern delegates, the constitution also precluded prohibition of the slave trade for 40 years after the ratification of the constitution. Legalized systems of chattel slavery were of course largely abolished in the nineteenth century, in some ways, setting the stage for the attainment of a fully fledged human rights regime in the twentieth century. That regime, though, came to the fore only after the excesses of two world wars and the global economic upheaval of the inter-war period. Heretofore, states so jealously protected their sovereign rights – particularly the right to do anything within their own borders with impunity from external sanction – that they rebuffed any efforts to interfere with the power of states in the territories they ruled. The emerging body of international law had not penetrated the control of a sovereign state over the people residing within its recognized boundaries. Woodrow Wilson and others tried to create global institutions, or at least institutions representing the major global powers, in the years immediately following World War I. Their failure to do so, along with the burdens placed on defeated Germany, eventually came to be seen as significant factors in two ensuing disasters: first, the Great Depression that devastated the global economy in the 1920s and 1930s; and second, the rise of fascism, particularly in Germany, that not only led to World War II but also to the most egregious violations of human rights by any state in the history of the world – the Holocaust. After World War II, the newly formed United Nations set into motion a process that resulted on 10 December 1948 in the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). The UDHR is a remarkable document not only in its delimitation of a set of 26 articles defining rights but also given the highly politicized nature of the process leading to its adoption. The process
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almost foundered on a Cold War confrontation between the emphasis of the United States and its western European allies on political and civil rights and the emphasis of the Soviet Union and its eastern European allies on economic rights. Furthermore, people from much of the world had no voice in the deliberations over the UDHR. Living in colonies without UN membership, they were not directly represented in the deliberations defining what their fundamental rights were to be. The adoption of the UDHR, however contentious its generation, marked the first in a series of achievements that created a global human rights regime. Other agreements followed, though with considerable struggle, even rancor. They included two major agreements adopted in 1966, the Convention on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights and the Convention on Political and Civil Rights. Subsequent global agreements include: the Convention on the Elimination of All Discrimination Against Women in 1979, the Declaration of the Right to Development in 1986, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989. The United Nations human rights apparatus also provided for a High Commission on Human Rights and regional entities. In time, the regional entities produced their own human rights declarations, among them the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms in 1950, the American Convention on Human Rights in 1969, and the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights in 1981. Significantly, the claims of human rights have been accompanied by arguments that they should be protected against violations by any actor, certainly states but not just states. Otherwise major twenty-first-century forces such as large corporations, nongovernmental political entities (including military organizations challenging states), international governing bodies (including those consisting of representatives of states, e.g., The World Trade Organization), and nongovernment organizations would be able to violate the rights of people without challenge.
Universality The logic of human rights requires that they apply to everyone, that is, ‘universally’. The argument basically is that only when a right is so broadly recognized and accepted, without exceptions, can it be protective against the onslaught of recalcitrant states or other potential oppressors. ‘Universality’ in terms of applicability and enforcement, however, does not correspond with ‘universality’ in terms of agreement. This is true both for the rights adopted by international agreement and for campaigns to get additional ‘rights’ recognized. Arguments for universality typically call upon some notion of ‘natural law’, whether from the philosopher Christopher
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Brown (in Patman) or the geographer David Harvey. Both Brown and Harvey, after reviewing other ways out of the logical dilemma, conclude that some human protections and claims are so fundamental – so ‘‘natural’’ – that they constitute universal human rights claims based on the common humanity of all people. Universality does not, however, connote universal acceptance. African and Asian critics have argued for ‘exceptions’ based on their cultures. The Banjul Charter, as the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights is known because it was agreed in the Gambian capital city of that name, calls for two very significant caveats. One limits rights unless a person has met responsibilities. Rather than simply recognizing an inherent right to food, for example, the Banjul Charter conditions the right to food on one’s contribution of labor, more generally conditioning ‘‘. . . the enjoyment of the rights and freedoms . . . (on) the performance of duties . . . .’’ The other protects the rights of families and ‘‘peoples’’ from claims of individual rights. This call for African exceptions to what is seen as Western overemphasis on individual rights is matched by similar claims for Asian exceptions. Even with the challenges to universality, the concept is extremely important in human rights law because once human rights documents gain international approval, they become more important than laws and even constitutions, ‘trumping’ other legal standards and other legal positions. As alluded to above, gaining international agreements in the years immediately after World War II turned on competition over the preeminence of civil and political rights on the one hand versus economic, social, and cultural rights on the other. This distinction is often explained as a generational distinction among types of rights, as explained next.
Generations of Rights As suffrage expanded over the centuries, and as the rights of citizens to challenge the state progressed, rights became identified with what now are known as political and civil rights. These rights are designed to assure the freedom of individuals to petition their government and to express themselves even in ways unpopular, whether to the government, in particular, or the society at large, more generally. They include most fundamentally the right of the people to choose their governments through regularly scheduled, fair elections. They also include the communication freedoms – speech, press, assembly – as well as freedom to practice the religion of one’s choice. The United States and its western European allies emphasized first generation rights when the UDHR was being crafted. The rights central to them were clarified in the Covenant on Political and Civil Rights.
The second generation of rights involves not just freedoms but more. These rights include several codified in the UDHR. These and some additional ones are defined more precisely in the Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. In the economic arena, they include the right to have one’s basic needs met, including education, healthcare, housing, and nutrition, as well as the right to employment. In the social arena, they include the right to be treated fairly without regard to one’s race or ethnic background, class, or caste. In the cultural arena, they include the right to a culture, including one’s language. The Soviet Union emphasized these rights in the UDHR proceedings, setting up a position distinctive from that of the Western advocates of civil and political rights. By the end of the twentieth century, human rights activists and scholars identified a third set of rights with characteristics somewhat different from the other two. These are survival rights, including one’s right to stop others from threatening one’s survival, whether through behavior that damages health, the environment, or the sustainability of the global system. Given the traditional focus of geography on human–environment interactions, these rights are inherently geographical.
Cultural Struggles Over Human Rights Arguments for universality of rights aside, human rights are, in truth, socially constructed and the consequence of profound struggle. Indeed, there are three readily identifiable scales of these struggles: struggles within a culture over the definition of a just society; struggles between cultures as each tries to dominate the other or at minimum achieve a resolution recognizing the legitimacy of that culture’s values and preferences; and struggles of a culture against global forces, both defense against what is perceived as interference by the global human rights movement and struggles of a culture against the oppression of global forces, whether economic or political. A consideration of struggles at each scale follows. Human Rights Struggles within a Culture Human rights struggles have been central to the debates of most societies in the years since adoption of the UDHR as those societies have reconsidered their own conceptualizations of right and wrong, their own senses of how society should be organized, and their own senses of justice. Some of those struggles have involved implementation of the UDHR. The American civil rights movement exemplifies struggle over political and civil rights in the Global North. The United States’ criticism of lack of freedoms in the USSR appeared hollow given the use of Jim Crow Laws to disenfranchise the AfricanAmerican community of the United States. These laws
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limited the basic freedoms of African-Americans in 34 of the then 48 states, the exceptions mainly being Midwestern and Northeastern states. A major element of the American debate over civil rights had to do with whether each of the member states of the Union could determine for itself issues of fundamental rights or whether these should be defended by the federal government over the objection of individual states. All three branches of the US federal government were theaters of struggle as the people of the country reconsidered the historic justifications for de jure, or legal, discrimination on the basis of race. The struggle soon swung to de facto discrimination based on social and economic distinctions. A Global South example of struggle over political and civil rights is the struggle over ending the caste system in India. Though the caste system is illegal, it remains the social norm within the country. Mahatma Gandhi, whose philosophy of resistance through nonviolent civil disobedience not only hastened an end to British colonialism in India but also provided the foundation for a similar movement led by Martin Luther King to promote civil rights in the United States, argued strenuously against maintenance of India’s caste system. As in the US, de jure segregation by caste has largely been shunted to history. Even more than in the US, however, de facto discrimination permeates daily life in India. These two examples – the civil rights movement in the United States and the similar movement against the discrimination inherent in the caste system in India – exemplify struggles within a culture over recognition of rights in the UDHR. Struggles also occur within cultures over the codification of new rights – rights not widely recognized in the ratified international agreements – as those cultures reconsider for themselves what it means to be a just society. Two areas of considerable debate over the recognition of new rights in recent decades have been the campaigns against the death penalty and for gay rights. When the UN adopted the UDHR, almost all countries had the death penalty and almost none protected gays, lesbians, and transgendered people from discrimination. The tide against the death penalty has been strong in recent years. From 1985 through 2006, 50 countries abolished the death penalty with only four adopting it, reducing the number of countries with legal executions to 68. Latin America has long eschewed the death penalty, the major exception being Cuba. Almost all European countries have moved away from the death penalty, mainly because of a consensus that it is inhumane but also because it is a requirement for joining the European Union. Most Muslim and African countries retain the death penalty, but China is easily the champion of the death penalty. Of the 1591 people officially executed in 2006, China executed 1010, followed in order by Iran with 177, Pakistan 82, Iraq and Sudan each 65, and the United States 53, leaving 139 executions in the other
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19 countries. Though 38 of the US’s 50 states retain the death penalty, in 2006 only 14 executed anybody, Texas being far and away the leader with 23 executions. Clearly in the 60 years since adoption of the UDHR, the death penalty has become exceptional rather than routine and the prohibition of the death penalty has become a broadly accepted human right not only by such advocacy groups as Amnesty International but widely though, not unanimously, across the globe. In many cultures the struggle against the death penalty has basically been won. In others, with the United States as the major example, the struggle is ongoing. Elsewhere, particularly in Asia and Africa, the struggle has hardly begun with the death penalty widely accepted. Though not nearly as successful as the antideath penalty campaign, the movement for gay rights has in historical terms made dramatic progress since adoption of the UDHR. With arguments based on scripture, many Muslims and Christians continue to reject gay rights out of hand. Elsewhere, including much of Europe and North America, the struggle is on. In a few places, among them New Zealand, the Netherlands, and the Scandinavian countries, national legislation provides protection against discrimination for those who are gay, a reality hardly conceivable when the UDHR was adopted in 1948. Human Rights Struggles between Cultures Clearly cultures struggle over human rights as they consider and reconsider how to define a just society and how they want their own lives to be structured. These struggles are compounded when people with quite different cultures live together in the some country. A poignant example of human rights struggles between cultures is the ongoing struggle for political power in Fiji, a country fairly evenly divided between indigenous Fijians and Fijians of Indian ancestry whose ancestors moved from South Asia to Fiji when Britain ruled both during colonial times. Not only is there the predictable conflict for political advantage between people with two quite different cultures, there is also a claim that the indigenous Fijians, by right, should maintain control over their ancestral lands, their claims trumping the one person/one vote claims of normal democracy. Briefly put, the argument is that an external power (Britain) usurped the power of indigenous Fijians by inserting an alien population. Justice, in accordance with this argument, requires that the indigenous Fijians be allowed to maintain control over their territory. The counter argument is that a person is a person so that everyone should have an opportunity to participate equally in the political process. Furthermore, the IndoFijian population had no voice in going to Fiji, rather being descendants of people who moved there with questionable degrees of influence over their own
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migration. These people should not be punished because their ancestors chose to move or were moved over their own objections. Since 1987, Fiji has had three military coups, each time the key issue being the continued dominance of the indigenous Fijians. The first time New Zealand considered a military response to return power to the duly elected government. In addition, members of the British Commonwealth expelled Fiji. This is an example with a clear conflict between principles: the rights of indigenous peoples versus free and fair elections based on genuine democracy. The indigenous Fijians have maintained power in the face of external pressure because that pressure has never risen to the level of military intervention or sufficiently serious economic sanctions to threaten the Fijian economy. The struggle continues. A second kind of human rights struggle between cultures stems from colonial histories that created twentieth-century sovereign states from areas that had been convenient for the colonial masters rather than a consequence of a political process that included agreements of people to be part of the same country. This problem is most serious in Africa, though not limited to that continent. Nigeria provides an instructive example. The internally generated difference is that before colonialism the area that became Nigeria had, literally, hundreds of cultures, the great majority having their own polities. The largest was the Sokoto Caliphate which had gained control over most of the north in an Islamic jihad that had begun in the early years of the nineteenth century. The smallest included several very small language groupings of a few thousand people each in the southeast. In addition to the ethnic divide, the Christianity that came with colonialism created a religious divide – with missionaries moving inland from the coast and Islam spreading from the Sokoto Caliphate in the north. Two hundred years after Dan Fodio began the jihad, the modern sovereign state of Nigeria is divided both by language and religion. These divisions permeate all realms of Nigerian life, including cultural struggles over human rights. One struggle has been over the implementation of shari’a law in several northern states, though southern Christians interpret the federal constitution as banning it. Accommodations to recognize differences in family structure and tradition even among people living as neighbors have been successful. Family laws, for example, are enforced on a sectarian basis with Muslims following Muslim tradition, Christians their own traditions, and those practicing only traditional religions whatever their traditions call for. Violent clashes among competing groups are all too common, however, with the clashes stemming from such disparate origins as land claims among ethnic/language groups to perceived slights along the religious divide. Nigeria continues to struggle to find mechanisms to allow its very different cultures to live peacefully in each other’s midst.
A third kind of human rights struggle between cultures is of much more recent vintage with massive migrations of people from the Global South to work in the Global North, whether Latin Americans in North America or Africans or Asians in Europe. A number of European countries, for example, have to deal with the paradoxes of maintaining their cultures and being sensitive to the need of their immigrant populations, particularly when the immigrants practice different religions and have significantly different marriage practices. Similar tensions exist in the oil countries of the Middle East when workers with very different cultures outnumber the citizens of several sovereign states. Human Rights Struggles between a Culture and Global Forces Two kinds of cultural struggles over human rights exist at the global scale. One is the resistance of a culture, however small or large, to the global human rights movement. The other is resistance to global forces that violate human rights. Before the UDHR and subsequent human rights instruments became available as part of the global human rights movement, oppressors could stand behind the shield of sovereignty to prevent external intervention when the oppressors violated the rights of the people under their control. Oppressors – whether Pinochet, Kim, Mugabe, or any of a number of others, recent and current – still claim immunity, and the world may be either insufficiently organized or committed to do anything about it. At minimum, a significant share of world opinion brings opprobrium down upon recalcitrant tyrants. In addition, some human rights claims to universal applicability can be challenged if for no other reason than that rights can sometimes be in conflict, however much advocates of rights want to claim otherwise. Consider, for example, the inherent conflict between freedom of the press and the right to a fair trial. Britain and New Zealand tend to fall on the side of the right to a fair trial, preventing disclosure by the media of certain facts, including in some cases the identity of the accused, until a decision is rendered. The argument is that identifying a person charged with a crime would tar that person’s reputation permanently, even if the person were eventually acquitted. In the United States, the bias falls the other way with very little restriction on coverage in hopes that a fair jury can be found and then be quarantined from the media for the duration of the trial. The fear on the US side, that a nefarious government could control the press inappropriately if given the opportunity to limit coverage – including, for example, preventing the disclosure of information that could be damaging to public officials. Rulers may have some room to maneuver as they resist the global human rights movement.
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The African and Asian claims for exceptions to global human rights standards were introduced above. Problems occur when these are merely smokescreens, calling upon tradition to justify female genital cutting or child brides, for example, or to justify inhumane living or working conditions. Whenever an exception to global standards is sought, the onus should be on those seeking the exception to show that it will not subject others to violations of their dignity, rights, and freedoms, to paraphrase the Banjul Charter. As clear as the potential for exploitation is in the case of cultures asking to be relieved from the pressures of the global human rights movement, the evidence is overwhelming when cultures ask for protection so their human rights are not violated by the operation of the global political economy. The case of Kil-Soo Lee is instructive. A South Korean businessman working in cahoots with local functionaries, Lee was able to establish a shirt manufacturing factory in American Samoa. Lee and his organization attracted Vietnamese workers to his facility. He was convicted of human trafficking for basically holding the workers as slaves in his sweatshop and was sentenced to 30 years in a US prison for his offenses. The Lee case is an example of what Kevin Bales calls the new slavery which in some ways is worse than chattel slavery because the enslaver has no reason to maintain the health of the slave. People are trafficked, meaning moved surreptitiously from one place to another for the purpose of illegal employment under the control of another, on all the inhabited continents. Critics such as Bales berate the global political economy for doing little to trace the trafficked people or hold the perpetrators responsible for their actions. This is part of why the Lee case stands out, given its successful prosecution. Other areas of local jeopardy – and human rights violations – given the operation of the global political economy include the diminution of education in Africa as a consequence of Structural Adjustment Programs, movement of toxic materials from the Global North to the Global South, and the proliferation of arms through regions with weak governments and people with the ability to pay.
The Political Geography of Human Rights The introduction above distinguished among three political geographies of human rights: Where various human rights are protected and, conversely, violated; the extent to which societies and polities have bought into competing conceptualizations of human rights; and cultural struggles over human rights at three discernable scales: The third having been addressed at length, focus turns to the first two – the distribution of rights and conceptualizations of rights.
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Establishing whether places are better or worse in terms of human rights violations can be addressed in several important ways. One is to take as a gauge the reports of such organizations as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, two of the most respected human rights organizations. Each, annually, reports to the world about the status of human rights across the globe, paying particular attention to the behavior of national governments. Rare is the country found to be committing no human rights violations. Sadly, all too common are the countries that heavily violate the rights of their citizens and others under their influence. These tend to be the less democratic and less open countries, particularly those of Africa and both Southeast and Southwest Asia. The United States and, to a lesser extent, Britain have been cited for violations encompassing the war in Iraq. China, continuing its traditional opaque administration even while opening up its economy, is also found wanting. The limitations, particularly with Amnesty, stem from an overwhelming emphasis on first generation rights. Second generation rights are amenable to other types of analysis. Sometimes very direct measures can be met. The UDHR says that all children of appropriate age have a right to a free education. Is it so? Are all children of appropriate age in school, and are they required to pay? Being in school does not prove that anything was learned, so surrogate measures may be employed to infer the degree to which rights are met. If, for example, all children in the last generation were indeed educated, then a country should have a high literacy rate among its young adults. Furthermore, if girls are being educated as well as boys, the literacy rates for men and women should be similar. The data on these issues are troubling. Thanks to the reduction in educational expenditures forced on poor countries by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank from the 1970s through the 1990s, a lower percentage of African children are in school in the first decade of the Third Millennium than was the case 30 years ago. Likewise, female literacy rates lag woefully in the countries of the Middle East. The provision of healthcare can also be measured both directly and indirectly. Direct measures include such things as the percentage of children receiving immunizations or the percentage of pregnant women receiving prenatal care. Indirect or outcome measures include such things as rates of diseases or infant mortality. An interesting trend is that though the gap in infant mortality remains, almost all countries have achieved long-term reductions in infant mortality. Northern and Western European countries have the lowest infant mortality rates, as they did a generation ago. A number of countries with midlevel economic development actually have infant mortality rates comparable to those of the best countries a generation ago. This good news is offset by increasing problems with infectious diseases,
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particularly HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis, and such vector-borne diseases as malaria and encephalitis.
The Political Geography of Human Rights in the Twenty-First Century Examining the distribution of human rights shows that the degree of human rights violations is strongly related to the political geography of commitment to rights. The globalization that has dominated the world over the last generation not only brought with it economic penetration that allowed the development of Bales’ new slavery, it also brought with it a commitment to democratically elected governments and transparency. This is not to argue that governments are truly democratic in their electoral system or, in fact, transparent in their operations. It is to argue that democracy and transparency have been global expectations. The places with the strongest human rights records are the places with commitments to open government on the one hand and
protection of those who need protection on the other. They are the places in effect with commitments to both first and second generation human rights. See also: Civil Society; Cultural Studies and Human Geography; Population Geography.
Further Reading Bales, K. (2000). Disposable people: New slavery in the global economy. Berkeley: University of California Press. Brysk, A. (2004). Globalization and human rights. Berkeley: University of California Press. Harvey, D. (1996). Justice, nature and the geography of difference. Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers. Lauren, P. G. (1998). The evolution of international human rights. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Lee, R. and David, M. S. (2004). Geographies and moralities. Cambridge: Blackwell Publishing. Patman, R. (ed.) (2000). Universal human rights? New York: St. Martin’s Press. Santoro, M. A. (2000). Profits and principles: Global capitalism and human rights in China. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Glossary Civil Rights Rights to participate in the civil life of a society, without restriction by race, religion, or other contestable categories. Cultural Rights Right to express one’s culture, including language, religion, and patterns of social engagement. Cultural Struggles Struggles over the norms of a culture or over the adjudication of different norms when the norms of different cultures are in conflict. Economic Rights The right to participate in an economy, as well as to have basic needs met. Human Rights The protections and privileges one has as part of the shared heritage of humanity. Political Rights The right to participate in the political system, including such rights as to expression as freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and the right to assemble. Social Rights The right to participate in the daily life of a society, as in the right to marry and form a family. Universality The applicability of all rights to all people under all circumstances.
Introduction Human rights, in the time since World War II, have become widely recognized as protections for people against the oppressive actions of states and other actors. Human rights are important in several ways, most significantly in that they have come to take on constitutional status as protections for people and as claims to having basic needs met. In theory, human rights are those rights held by all individuals simply as a consequence of their status as people, part of the common heritage and endowment of human kind. Human rights have come to be regarded as inalienable in that they can neither be taken away nor given way. They are not subject to the powers of class or on the basis of classifications by gender, race, religion, or political ideology. In theory, human rights are universal, applying to all people, independent of where those people are. Human rights reality, however, differs from human rights theory. Though several international agreements hail human rights and affirm their status before the law, the protection of rights on the one hand and their violation on the other, vary over space and through time as people struggle to define and redefine rights, struggle
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over interpretations of rights, and struggle to rein in human rights abuses. Though the global human rights movement claims that rights codified in international agreements are ‘universal’ in that they apply to all people in all places, human rights are the product of political processes and hence have their own political geography. The ‘political geography’ of human rights involves: Where various human rights are protected and, con• versely, violated; The extent to which societies and polities have bought • into competing conceptualizations of human rights;
•
and Cultural struggles over human rights at three discernable scales: – struggles with a culture over what should be considered rights; – struggles between cultures over whose conception of rights should be enforced or how differing conceptions should be adjudicated and practiced; and – struggles between a culture and global forces, either resisting widely accepted human rights or resisting global forces that violate rights deemed as important by the culture.
An explanation of the meaning and history of human rights is followed by a discussion of essential debates about human rights, and then an explication of the various political geographies of human rights.
History From the Magna Carta to the twenty-first century, rights have been construed as: individual privileges recognized by the state; protections from state interference in a list of individual or group activities; and claims that individuals or groups could make for gaining the necessities of life. Toward the end of the second Millennium, human rights came to be regarded as protections from any potential oppressor, not just a state. Though the emergence of a global human rights regime only transpired in the twentieth century, the claim for rights, whether logically or legally, can be recognized as far back as the ancient Greeks. The idea of rights gained major momentum with the American and French Revolutions late in the eighteenth century. Most significantly, they challenged the traditional concept of sovereignty, changing it from something held by a
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monarch (or other ruler) and thus giving that ruler unquestioned, unchallengeable power over the people, to a concept in which the basic root of power was the sovereignty of the people who were empowered to delegate control over the machinery of governance to states or other entities that would then act in accordance with the interests of the people. Neither of these revolutions of course succeeded in establishing a human rights regime. The French Revolution succumbed to its own excesses and the military might of those benefiting from the previous conception of sovereignty. The American Revolution codified the rights of white men of property, not all people. Indeed, the constitution of the United States thrice mentions slavery, the epitome of a political and economic system with the most fundamental violations of what later came to be construed as human rights. Slaves were to be counted as three-fifths of a person in two ways, one for taxation purposes, the other when allocating by population the number of seats a state would have in the House of Representatives. As part of the historic compromise between northern and southern delegates, the constitution also precluded prohibition of the slave trade for 40 years after the ratification of the constitution. Legalized systems of chattel slavery were of course largely abolished in the nineteenth century, in some ways, setting the stage for the attainment of a fully fledged human rights regime in the twentieth century. That regime, though, came to the fore only after the excesses of two world wars and the global economic upheaval of the inter-war period. Heretofore, states so jealously protected their sovereign rights – particularly the right to do anything within their own borders with impunity from external sanction – that they rebuffed any efforts to interfere with the power of states in the territories they ruled. The emerging body of international law had not penetrated the control of a sovereign state over the people residing within its recognized boundaries. Woodrow Wilson and others tried to create global institutions, or at least institutions representing the major global powers, in the years immediately following World War I. Their failure to do so, along with the burdens placed on defeated Germany, eventually came to be seen as significant factors in two ensuing disasters: first, the Great Depression that devastated the global economy in the 1920s and 1930s; and second, the rise of fascism, particularly in Germany, that not only led to World War II but also to the most egregious violations of human rights by any state in the history of the world – the Holocaust. After World War II, the newly formed United Nations set into motion a process that resulted on 10 December 1948 in the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). The UDHR is a remarkable document not only in its delimitation of a set of 26 articles defining rights but also given the highly politicized nature of the process leading to its adoption. The process
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almost foundered on a Cold War confrontation between the emphasis of the United States and its western European allies on political and civil rights and the emphasis of the Soviet Union and its eastern European allies on economic rights. Furthermore, people from much of the world had no voice in the deliberations over the UDHR. Living in colonies without UN membership, they were not directly represented in the deliberations defining what their fundamental rights were to be. The adoption of the UDHR, however contentious its generation, marked the first in a series of achievements that created a global human rights regime. Other agreements followed, though with considerable struggle, even rancor. They included two major agreements adopted in 1966, the Convention on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights and the Convention on Political and Civil Rights. Subsequent global agreements include: the Convention on the Elimination of All Discrimination Against Women in 1979, the Declaration of the Right to Development in 1986, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989. The United Nations human rights apparatus also provided for a High Commission on Human Rights and regional entities. In time, the regional entities produced their own human rights declarations, among them the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms in 1950, the American Convention on Human Rights in 1969, and the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights in 1981. Significantly, the claims of human rights have been accompanied by arguments that they should be protected against violations by any actor, certainly states but not just states. Otherwise major twenty-first-century forces such as large corporations, nongovernmental political entities (including military organizations challenging states), international governing bodies (including those consisting of representatives of states, e.g., The World Trade Organization), and nongovernment organizations would be able to violate the rights of people without challenge.
Universality The logic of human rights requires that they apply to everyone, that is, ‘universally’. The argument basically is that only when a right is so broadly recognized and accepted, without exceptions, can it be protective against the onslaught of recalcitrant states or other potential oppressors. ‘Universality’ in terms of applicability and enforcement, however, does not correspond with ‘universality’ in terms of agreement. This is true both for the rights adopted by international agreement and for campaigns to get additional ‘rights’ recognized. Arguments for universality typically call upon some notion of ‘natural law’, whether from the philosopher Christopher
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Brown (in Patman) or the geographer David Harvey. Both Brown and Harvey, after reviewing other ways out of the logical dilemma, conclude that some human protections and claims are so fundamental – so ‘‘natural’’ – that they constitute universal human rights claims based on the common humanity of all people. Universality does not, however, connote universal acceptance. African and Asian critics have argued for ‘exceptions’ based on their cultures. The Banjul Charter, as the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights is known because it was agreed in the Gambian capital city of that name, calls for two very significant caveats. One limits rights unless a person has met responsibilities. Rather than simply recognizing an inherent right to food, for example, the Banjul Charter conditions the right to food on one’s contribution of labor, more generally conditioning ‘‘. . . the enjoyment of the rights and freedoms . . . (on) the performance of duties . . . .’’ The other protects the rights of families and ‘‘peoples’’ from claims of individual rights. This call for African exceptions to what is seen as Western overemphasis on individual rights is matched by similar claims for Asian exceptions. Even with the challenges to universality, the concept is extremely important in human rights law because once human rights documents gain international approval, they become more important than laws and even constitutions, ‘trumping’ other legal standards and other legal positions. As alluded to above, gaining international agreements in the years immediately after World War II turned on competition over the preeminence of civil and political rights on the one hand versus economic, social, and cultural rights on the other. This distinction is often explained as a generational distinction among types of rights, as explained next.
Generations of Rights As suffrage expanded over the centuries, and as the rights of citizens to challenge the state progressed, rights became identified with what now are known as political and civil rights. These rights are designed to assure the freedom of individuals to petition their government and to express themselves even in ways unpopular, whether to the government, in particular, or the society at large, more generally. They include most fundamentally the right of the people to choose their governments through regularly scheduled, fair elections. They also include the communication freedoms – speech, press, assembly – as well as freedom to practice the religion of one’s choice. The United States and its western European allies emphasized first generation rights when the UDHR was being crafted. The rights central to them were clarified in the Covenant on Political and Civil Rights.
The second generation of rights involves not just freedoms but more. These rights include several codified in the UDHR. These and some additional ones are defined more precisely in the Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. In the economic arena, they include the right to have one’s basic needs met, including education, healthcare, housing, and nutrition, as well as the right to employment. In the social arena, they include the right to be treated fairly without regard to one’s race or ethnic background, class, or caste. In the cultural arena, they include the right to a culture, including one’s language. The Soviet Union emphasized these rights in the UDHR proceedings, setting up a position distinctive from that of the Western advocates of civil and political rights. By the end of the twentieth century, human rights activists and scholars identified a third set of rights with characteristics somewhat different from the other two. These are survival rights, including one’s right to stop others from threatening one’s survival, whether through behavior that damages health, the environment, or the sustainability of the global system. Given the traditional focus of geography on human–environment interactions, these rights are inherently geographical.
Cultural Struggles Over Human Rights Arguments for universality of rights aside, human rights are, in truth, socially constructed and the consequence of profound struggle. Indeed, there are three readily identifiable scales of these struggles: struggles within a culture over the definition of a just society; struggles between cultures as each tries to dominate the other or at minimum achieve a resolution recognizing the legitimacy of that culture’s values and preferences; and struggles of a culture against global forces, both defense against what is perceived as interference by the global human rights movement and struggles of a culture against the oppression of global forces, whether economic or political. A consideration of struggles at each scale follows. Human Rights Struggles within a Culture Human rights struggles have been central to the debates of most societies in the years since adoption of the UDHR as those societies have reconsidered their own conceptualizations of right and wrong, their own senses of how society should be organized, and their own senses of justice. Some of those struggles have involved implementation of the UDHR. The American civil rights movement exemplifies struggle over political and civil rights in the Global North. The United States’ criticism of lack of freedoms in the USSR appeared hollow given the use of Jim Crow Laws to disenfranchise the AfricanAmerican community of the United States. These laws
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limited the basic freedoms of African-Americans in 34 of the then 48 states, the exceptions mainly being Midwestern and Northeastern states. A major element of the American debate over civil rights had to do with whether each of the member states of the Union could determine for itself issues of fundamental rights or whether these should be defended by the federal government over the objection of individual states. All three branches of the US federal government were theaters of struggle as the people of the country reconsidered the historic justifications for de jure, or legal, discrimination on the basis of race. The struggle soon swung to de facto discrimination based on social and economic distinctions. A Global South example of struggle over political and civil rights is the struggle over ending the caste system in India. Though the caste system is illegal, it remains the social norm within the country. Mahatma Gandhi, whose philosophy of resistance through nonviolent civil disobedience not only hastened an end to British colonialism in India but also provided the foundation for a similar movement led by Martin Luther King to promote civil rights in the United States, argued strenuously against maintenance of India’s caste system. As in the US, de jure segregation by caste has largely been shunted to history. Even more than in the US, however, de facto discrimination permeates daily life in India. These two examples – the civil rights movement in the United States and the similar movement against the discrimination inherent in the caste system in India – exemplify struggles within a culture over recognition of rights in the UDHR. Struggles also occur within cultures over the codification of new rights – rights not widely recognized in the ratified international agreements – as those cultures reconsider for themselves what it means to be a just society. Two areas of considerable debate over the recognition of new rights in recent decades have been the campaigns against the death penalty and for gay rights. When the UN adopted the UDHR, almost all countries had the death penalty and almost none protected gays, lesbians, and transgendered people from discrimination. The tide against the death penalty has been strong in recent years. From 1985 through 2006, 50 countries abolished the death penalty with only four adopting it, reducing the number of countries with legal executions to 68. Latin America has long eschewed the death penalty, the major exception being Cuba. Almost all European countries have moved away from the death penalty, mainly because of a consensus that it is inhumane but also because it is a requirement for joining the European Union. Most Muslim and African countries retain the death penalty, but China is easily the champion of the death penalty. Of the 1591 people officially executed in 2006, China executed 1010, followed in order by Iran with 177, Pakistan 82, Iraq and Sudan each 65, and the United States 53, leaving 139 executions in the other
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19 countries. Though 38 of the US’s 50 states retain the death penalty, in 2006 only 14 executed anybody, Texas being far and away the leader with 23 executions. Clearly in the 60 years since adoption of the UDHR, the death penalty has become exceptional rather than routine and the prohibition of the death penalty has become a broadly accepted human right not only by such advocacy groups as Amnesty International but widely though, not unanimously, across the globe. In many cultures the struggle against the death penalty has basically been won. In others, with the United States as the major example, the struggle is ongoing. Elsewhere, particularly in Asia and Africa, the struggle has hardly begun with the death penalty widely accepted. Though not nearly as successful as the antideath penalty campaign, the movement for gay rights has in historical terms made dramatic progress since adoption of the UDHR. With arguments based on scripture, many Muslims and Christians continue to reject gay rights out of hand. Elsewhere, including much of Europe and North America, the struggle is on. In a few places, among them New Zealand, the Netherlands, and the Scandinavian countries, national legislation provides protection against discrimination for those who are gay, a reality hardly conceivable when the UDHR was adopted in 1948. Human Rights Struggles between Cultures Clearly cultures struggle over human rights as they consider and reconsider how to define a just society and how they want their own lives to be structured. These struggles are compounded when people with quite different cultures live together in the some country. A poignant example of human rights struggles between cultures is the ongoing struggle for political power in Fiji, a country fairly evenly divided between indigenous Fijians and Fijians of Indian ancestry whose ancestors moved from South Asia to Fiji when Britain ruled both during colonial times. Not only is there the predictable conflict for political advantage between people with two quite different cultures, there is also a claim that the indigenous Fijians, by right, should maintain control over their ancestral lands, their claims trumping the one person/one vote claims of normal democracy. Briefly put, the argument is that an external power (Britain) usurped the power of indigenous Fijians by inserting an alien population. Justice, in accordance with this argument, requires that the indigenous Fijians be allowed to maintain control over their territory. The counter argument is that a person is a person so that everyone should have an opportunity to participate equally in the political process. Furthermore, the IndoFijian population had no voice in going to Fiji, rather being descendants of people who moved there with questionable degrees of influence over their own
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migration. These people should not be punished because their ancestors chose to move or were moved over their own objections. Since 1987, Fiji has had three military coups, each time the key issue being the continued dominance of the indigenous Fijians. The first time New Zealand considered a military response to return power to the duly elected government. In addition, members of the British Commonwealth expelled Fiji. This is an example with a clear conflict between principles: the rights of indigenous peoples versus free and fair elections based on genuine democracy. The indigenous Fijians have maintained power in the face of external pressure because that pressure has never risen to the level of military intervention or sufficiently serious economic sanctions to threaten the Fijian economy. The struggle continues. A second kind of human rights struggle between cultures stems from colonial histories that created twentieth-century sovereign states from areas that had been convenient for the colonial masters rather than a consequence of a political process that included agreements of people to be part of the same country. This problem is most serious in Africa, though not limited to that continent. Nigeria provides an instructive example. The internally generated difference is that before colonialism the area that became Nigeria had, literally, hundreds of cultures, the great majority having their own polities. The largest was the Sokoto Caliphate which had gained control over most of the north in an Islamic jihad that had begun in the early years of the nineteenth century. The smallest included several very small language groupings of a few thousand people each in the southeast. In addition to the ethnic divide, the Christianity that came with colonialism created a religious divide – with missionaries moving inland from the coast and Islam spreading from the Sokoto Caliphate in the north. Two hundred years after Dan Fodio began the jihad, the modern sovereign state of Nigeria is divided both by language and religion. These divisions permeate all realms of Nigerian life, including cultural struggles over human rights. One struggle has been over the implementation of shari’a law in several northern states, though southern Christians interpret the federal constitution as banning it. Accommodations to recognize differences in family structure and tradition even among people living as neighbors have been successful. Family laws, for example, are enforced on a sectarian basis with Muslims following Muslim tradition, Christians their own traditions, and those practicing only traditional religions whatever their traditions call for. Violent clashes among competing groups are all too common, however, with the clashes stemming from such disparate origins as land claims among ethnic/language groups to perceived slights along the religious divide. Nigeria continues to struggle to find mechanisms to allow its very different cultures to live peacefully in each other’s midst.
A third kind of human rights struggle between cultures is of much more recent vintage with massive migrations of people from the Global South to work in the Global North, whether Latin Americans in North America or Africans or Asians in Europe. A number of European countries, for example, have to deal with the paradoxes of maintaining their cultures and being sensitive to the need of their immigrant populations, particularly when the immigrants practice different religions and have significantly different marriage practices. Similar tensions exist in the oil countries of the Middle East when workers with very different cultures outnumber the citizens of several sovereign states. Human Rights Struggles between a Culture and Global Forces Two kinds of cultural struggles over human rights exist at the global scale. One is the resistance of a culture, however small or large, to the global human rights movement. The other is resistance to global forces that violate human rights. Before the UDHR and subsequent human rights instruments became available as part of the global human rights movement, oppressors could stand behind the shield of sovereignty to prevent external intervention when the oppressors violated the rights of the people under their control. Oppressors – whether Pinochet, Kim, Mugabe, or any of a number of others, recent and current – still claim immunity, and the world may be either insufficiently organized or committed to do anything about it. At minimum, a significant share of world opinion brings opprobrium down upon recalcitrant tyrants. In addition, some human rights claims to universal applicability can be challenged if for no other reason than that rights can sometimes be in conflict, however much advocates of rights want to claim otherwise. Consider, for example, the inherent conflict between freedom of the press and the right to a fair trial. Britain and New Zealand tend to fall on the side of the right to a fair trial, preventing disclosure by the media of certain facts, including in some cases the identity of the accused, until a decision is rendered. The argument is that identifying a person charged with a crime would tar that person’s reputation permanently, even if the person were eventually acquitted. In the United States, the bias falls the other way with very little restriction on coverage in hopes that a fair jury can be found and then be quarantined from the media for the duration of the trial. The fear on the US side, that a nefarious government could control the press inappropriately if given the opportunity to limit coverage – including, for example, preventing the disclosure of information that could be damaging to public officials. Rulers may have some room to maneuver as they resist the global human rights movement.
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The African and Asian claims for exceptions to global human rights standards were introduced above. Problems occur when these are merely smokescreens, calling upon tradition to justify female genital cutting or child brides, for example, or to justify inhumane living or working conditions. Whenever an exception to global standards is sought, the onus should be on those seeking the exception to show that it will not subject others to violations of their dignity, rights, and freedoms, to paraphrase the Banjul Charter. As clear as the potential for exploitation is in the case of cultures asking to be relieved from the pressures of the global human rights movement, the evidence is overwhelming when cultures ask for protection so their human rights are not violated by the operation of the global political economy. The case of Kil-Soo Lee is instructive. A South Korean businessman working in cahoots with local functionaries, Lee was able to establish a shirt manufacturing factory in American Samoa. Lee and his organization attracted Vietnamese workers to his facility. He was convicted of human trafficking for basically holding the workers as slaves in his sweatshop and was sentenced to 30 years in a US prison for his offenses. The Lee case is an example of what Kevin Bales calls the new slavery which in some ways is worse than chattel slavery because the enslaver has no reason to maintain the health of the slave. People are trafficked, meaning moved surreptitiously from one place to another for the purpose of illegal employment under the control of another, on all the inhabited continents. Critics such as Bales berate the global political economy for doing little to trace the trafficked people or hold the perpetrators responsible for their actions. This is part of why the Lee case stands out, given its successful prosecution. Other areas of local jeopardy – and human rights violations – given the operation of the global political economy include the diminution of education in Africa as a consequence of Structural Adjustment Programs, movement of toxic materials from the Global North to the Global South, and the proliferation of arms through regions with weak governments and people with the ability to pay.
The Political Geography of Human Rights The introduction above distinguished among three political geographies of human rights: Where various human rights are protected and, conversely, violated; the extent to which societies and polities have bought into competing conceptualizations of human rights; and cultural struggles over human rights at three discernable scales: The third having been addressed at length, focus turns to the first two – the distribution of rights and conceptualizations of rights.
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Establishing whether places are better or worse in terms of human rights violations can be addressed in several important ways. One is to take as a gauge the reports of such organizations as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, two of the most respected human rights organizations. Each, annually, reports to the world about the status of human rights across the globe, paying particular attention to the behavior of national governments. Rare is the country found to be committing no human rights violations. Sadly, all too common are the countries that heavily violate the rights of their citizens and others under their influence. These tend to be the less democratic and less open countries, particularly those of Africa and both Southeast and Southwest Asia. The United States and, to a lesser extent, Britain have been cited for violations encompassing the war in Iraq. China, continuing its traditional opaque administration even while opening up its economy, is also found wanting. The limitations, particularly with Amnesty, stem from an overwhelming emphasis on first generation rights. Second generation rights are amenable to other types of analysis. Sometimes very direct measures can be met. The UDHR says that all children of appropriate age have a right to a free education. Is it so? Are all children of appropriate age in school, and are they required to pay? Being in school does not prove that anything was learned, so surrogate measures may be employed to infer the degree to which rights are met. If, for example, all children in the last generation were indeed educated, then a country should have a high literacy rate among its young adults. Furthermore, if girls are being educated as well as boys, the literacy rates for men and women should be similar. The data on these issues are troubling. Thanks to the reduction in educational expenditures forced on poor countries by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank from the 1970s through the 1990s, a lower percentage of African children are in school in the first decade of the Third Millennium than was the case 30 years ago. Likewise, female literacy rates lag woefully in the countries of the Middle East. The provision of healthcare can also be measured both directly and indirectly. Direct measures include such things as the percentage of children receiving immunizations or the percentage of pregnant women receiving prenatal care. Indirect or outcome measures include such things as rates of diseases or infant mortality. An interesting trend is that though the gap in infant mortality remains, almost all countries have achieved long-term reductions in infant mortality. Northern and Western European countries have the lowest infant mortality rates, as they did a generation ago. A number of countries with midlevel economic development actually have infant mortality rates comparable to those of the best countries a generation ago. This good news is offset by increasing problems with infectious diseases,
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particularly HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis, and such vector-borne diseases as malaria and encephalitis.
The Political Geography of Human Rights in the Twenty-First Century Examining the distribution of human rights shows that the degree of human rights violations is strongly related to the political geography of commitment to rights. The globalization that has dominated the world over the last generation not only brought with it economic penetration that allowed the development of Bales’ new slavery, it also brought with it a commitment to democratically elected governments and transparency. This is not to argue that governments are truly democratic in their electoral system or, in fact, transparent in their operations. It is to argue that democracy and transparency have been global expectations. The places with the strongest human rights records are the places with commitments to open government on the one hand and
protection of those who need protection on the other. They are the places in effect with commitments to both first and second generation human rights. See also: Civil Society; Cultural Studies and Human Geography; Population Geography.
Further Reading Bales, K. (2000). Disposable people: New slavery in the global economy. Berkeley: University of California Press. Brysk, A. (2004). Globalization and human rights. Berkeley: University of California Press. Harvey, D. (1996). Justice, nature and the geography of difference. Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers. Lauren, P. G. (1998). The evolution of international human rights. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Lee, R. and David, M. S. (2004). Geographies and moralities. Cambridge: Blackwell Publishing. Patman, R. (ed.) (2000). Universal human rights? New York: St. Martin’s Press. Santoro, M. A. (2000). Profits and principles: Global capitalism and human rights in China. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.