Introduction

In his definitive study of the drafting history of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), Johannes Morsink (1999) has little to say about the purpose and meaning behind Article 28, giving only slightly more attention to accompanying Article 22, which serves as an introduction to the “new” economic, social, and cultural rights (ESCR) set forth in Articles 23–27. According to Morsink, some of the drafters of the UDHR took the view that the two articles essentially covered the same ground, and thus there was no need to include both of them together. However, this position was ultimately rejected. The only substantive discussion of Article 28 that Morsink (1999, 231–232) provides involves the use of the word “good” in the original draft: “Everyone has the right to a good social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.” This vague adjective was later removed.

Based on this thin history, it is apparent that Article 28 was not one of the more hotly contested provisions during the drafting of the UDHR, and with the notable exception of the work of Thomas Pogge, which is referenced later, there has not been a great deal of scholarly attention given to this article since that time, either. Thus, it would be easy to dismiss Article 28 (as well as Article 22) on the basis that it offers no new substantive right, but only the appropriate and proper conditions to achieve certain rights.

In the preceding chapter we mentioned Sudan as a ‘forgotten country’. Although a fair amount of publicity has been given to the massive levels of human rights violations that have afflicted this country, no humanitarian intervention has taken place, and the UN peacekeeping force (UNAMID) was strongly rejected by Sudan as a foreign invasion. Still, some day the violence will stop and soon thereafter the world's attention will turn to another crisis. However, efforts to bring truth, justice and a stable government to Sudan in these difficult circumstances will most assuredly not be given anywhere near the same level of attention by the world's media as putting an end to the physical violence. Yet achieving these goals is vital to the long-term prospects for peace, and arguably this will be a much more difficult and a much more complicated undertaking than stopping physical violence.

In this chapter we focus on the way in which countries that have suffered gross human rights violations attempt to deal with their past. How can society be rebuilt and made functional in the wake of such abuses?

This book is designed for a class on human rights or for the treatment of this subject in related courses. In our view, ‘human rights’ is one of the most important and most interesting subjects. After all, the study of human rights is essentially about how we treat all other people with whom we share this planet. In its essence, striving for the respect of human rights is a quest for human dignity. Human rights are about recognizing, honouring and protecting the human dignity of each one of the six billion people on this planet. When human rights are not protected, the victim's human dignity is thereby ignored. But what this also does is to deny the humanity in all of us.

In this book, we work under the assumption that students study human rights because they are deeply interested in making a positive contribution to the world. Our goal is to build on this interest and this passion. Along with this, our strong sense is that students want to ‘get into’ human rights immediately and we have structured this book with this goal in mind. In that way, this book is less theoretical and less historical than other books in this realm, and every effort has been made to focus on the humanity on which human rights is based.

The reader will also find a much different and more challenging conceptualization of human rights compared with the ‘standard treatment’ of human rights in other textbooks.

In the preceding three chapters we argued that all indviduals have unalienable rights simply because they are human. Respecting these rights is essential for individuals to have the chance of living a life in human dignity. States have a responsibility and obligation to protect these rights, primarily within, but also outside, their own borders. Yet, as we have already shown with various examples throughout this text, for many people the protection of their human rights is a very distant ideal. Most people have at least some of their rights violated most of the time. In this chapter, we show which countries provide better, or worse, protection for specific human rights in the twenty-first century compared with other countries. Related to this, we touch on issues of measuring human rights and human rights violations. We discuss why one might want to measure and quantify the concept of human rights and then show examples of how this has been done in the study of human rights. The first section focuses on civil and political rights, before we turn to economic, social and cultural rights in the second half of this chapter.

Measuring exactly which rights of which individuals are violated when and by whom is an impossible undertaking. However, many attempts have been made to capture the extent to which certain groups of rights are violated in specific countries.

This brief concluding chapter focuses on three related issues. The first involves how human rights have come to be conceptualized. As we have noted before, there has been a strong tendency to equate human rights with atrocities carried out in distant lands with no seeming or apparent connection with our own lives. In that way, human rights have been limited to ‘other’ people – other than ourselves, that is.

Under this approach, starvation in Ethiopia is seen only as Ethiopia's human rights problem; torture in Egypt is seen only as Egypt's human rights problem; the AIDS epidemic in South Africa is seen only as South Africa's human rights problem, and so on. As the reader will know by now, we reject this thinking. Just as human rights are themselves universal, so is the responsibility to protect human rights universal as well. At the very least, many of the things that affect the lives of everyone, such as health care, education, environmental quality, food safety, working conditions and so on, involve human rights.

The second point we want to highlight is that it would be wrong to be fatalistic about the prospects of human rights for the future. We take the opposite view because the empirical evidence, from around the globe, is on our side. For example, during the Second World War, the Nazi regime in Germany committed probably the worst genocide in the history of humankind.

We live in revolutionary times. For nearly all of human history, there was no such thing as ‘human rights’. Rather, individuals had whatever ‘rights’ their own government decided to bestow upon them. But what if a state granted few rights – or worse, if it engaged in cruel and barbaric behaviour against its own citizens? Unfortunately, until a relatively short period of time ago, this was viewed as a purely ‘domestic’ or ‘internal’ matter between a government and its own people, and was thus treated as being outside the purview of the rest of the international community.

All this has changed, at least in theory. Certainly, the greatest impetus for the present-day human rights revolution was the Holocaust, when an estimated 6 million Jews were cruelly and systematically killed during the Second World War. Here was undeniable and incontrovertible proof that citizenship might offer absolutely no protection against a government that sought to make war on a particular group of people within a given society. Yet what the horrors of the Holocaust also showed was that this laissez-faire attitude regarding how a government treated its own citizens was simply no longer acceptable. Thus what emerged from what was arguably the darkest period in all human history was the present-day human rights revolution.

What are human rights?

The legal philosopher Michael Perry has summed up the essence of human rights by positing that there are certain things that ought never to be done to people and certain other things that should be done (Perry 1998).