Human Rights and Wrongs

Slavery, Terror, Genocide

Helen Fein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317257967
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Human Rights and Wrongs explains the persistence of crimes against humanity since the Holocaust-including slavery, terror, and genocide. Using extended country descriptions and analyses, the book goes beyond case studies to explain such gross human rights violations in terms of an integrated theory of life integrity, giving readers vivid illustrations in addition to a theoretical framework. Distinguished author Helen Fein then asks how we can arrest human wrongs and discusses whether democracy is the answer. She shows the positive links among human rights, freedom, and development and draws out policy recommendations from her findings.

1

Distinguishing among Human Rights and Wrongs

Of all the animals with which this globe is peopled, wrote David Hume [1739–1740], “there is none towards whom nature seems, at first sight, to have exercised more cruelty than towards man, in the numberless wants and necessities with which she has loaded him, and the slender means which she affords to the relieving of these necessities.”… [Thus] the idea began to develop that human beings also possess invisible things called “rights” that morally protect them from the aggression of their fellow men, and especially from the power of the governments under which they live.

—Kenneth Minogue,
“The History of the Idea of Human Rights,” 1989

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, people concerned with human rights still must wrestle with the fact that the denial of critical human rights continues to be the norm in many countries. Denial continues despite the wave of declarations and treaties after 1945 proclaiming universal human rights and criminalizing genocide, torture, and apartheid, even after the breakdown of the communist bloc in Eastern Europe and the end of apartheid in South Africa in the 1990s.

I argue herein that such denial has been normal because it serves distinct social functions not only for rulers but at times for many citizens of societies in which gross violations of human rights—persistent human wrongs—are the rule. This book asks what explains critical human wrongs, beginning with violations of life integrity (defined later in this chapter), and what might prevent or block their use.

The transformation since 1945 of the ideal of universal human rights—rights owed to all persons because of their humanity—from laws of particular states into international law is a major contribution whose promise remains unfulfilled. There are many different ways of justifying rights, but they begin in Western civilization with the idea of natural law expressed by John Locke (1690) and embodied in the Declaration of Independence of the American colonies (1776) and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789) passed by the French National Assembly. Both asserted that men were created free and equal and assumed white men the subject—they became citizens.

The framers of these declarations upheld slavery and racial, property, and gender discrimination for two centuries. The consensus on the roots of rights did not extend to other persons and groups who might enjoy them. In the United States, the excluded African slaves had to get the backing of the federal government after the Civil War for emancipation and voting rights. The latter were later denied and not reliably secured until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1965. Both African-Americans and women in the United States (as did women elsewhere in the West) had to mobilize through social movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in order to wrest such rights. Rather than focusing on how human rights can be justified, my aim is to show, through selected case studies, how and why they were denied from the middle of the twentieth century to the present and what effect that has had on people and nations. In this chapter, I sketch the basis of a social theory accounting for why and how groups sustain or deny basic rights. I start with a constructivist approach and focus on violations condemned in the modern era of rights consciousness and earlier. This era began after World War II with the extensive agreement among countries that was affirmed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) passed by the UN General Assembly in 1948.

Human rights were constructed by people, principally in relation to the state, itself an organization evolving through history. As Jack Donnelly and Rhoda Howard argue, the rights that were wrested several centuries ago in the West and began “as a tactic of the bourgeoisie to protect its own class interests… [have] long since broken free of these origins” and are indispensable now to protect peoples throughout the world (Donnelly 1989, 70). Their origin has no more bearing on their universality or usefulness today than the origin of polio or smallpox vaccine has on the benefts of such inoculations to people in other lands.

Constructing and Distinguishing among Human Rights

Human rights can be viewed as a way to resolve certain basic human dilemmas, stemming first from human vulnerability as observed by Hume in the eighteenth century. Humans need protection to grow from infancy, to survive hunger and drought, environmental assaults, and a scarcity of resources. Both cooperation and competition between and within groups for resources—as well as for status (honor), position (rank and class), and power—are pervasive in social life. Competition for such goods often triggers conflicts between groups and states.

Such conflicts have led to wars and justifications for despotism or unlimited authority. Although the state, an “association that claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of violence” (Weber 1946 [1919], 34), is supposed to protect its citizens from the violations of invaders, crime, and internal chaos, it is also a leading violator of rights. The practice of violence, intimidation, and terror by many states continues to be accepted by many people who apparently believe that the need for security justifies state violence; we ask why and how that happens herein.

In a classic statement of the justification for an absolute state, Hobbes accounted for (1651) the state as an institution to protect man from a state of nature that had produced anarchy or virtual war of all against all in which life was “nasty, solitary, poore, brutish, and short” (1961, 98–100). This account is often reconfirmed today in failed states and those torn by civil war. Regardless of whether we regard Hobbes’s explanation as an allegory, a myth, or an ideology to justify seventeenth-century despotism, concentrated state power arouses another need: to protect people from the state and from authority. Lord Acton’s dictum that “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” still remains true (Encyclopedia of World History 2000, 3). Rights can be viewed as social constructs to check the state and fulfill human needs for protection, participation, expression, and subsistence. Rights protect human dignity, but dignity and honor—values in many traditions—do not necessarily imply rights or universal human rights (Donnelly 1989, chs. 3 and 4; Howard 1995, 4). Rights are claims (wrested, ceded, or promised), implying an acknowledgment, obligation, and duty by one party to another. The claim has been most often addressed to the state, which is today obligated by international law to protect all citizens but in earlier times had contracted to protect one group or class of citizens. Because rights were first developed and used against the state, and the state is usually the final guarantor of rights, I focus in comparison primarily on differences between states in respecting or violating rights.

How does one begin to distinguish among and rank priorities among rights? The UDHR had thirty articles, and since then rights of specific categories—women, children, the colonized—have been articulated and new rights have been proclaimed, such as the right to peace and the right to development (rights of states or collectivities rather than individuals).

Scholars and lawyers have divided rights in several ways. Some divide rights into generations of rights, viewing political and civil as first generation, social and economic as second generation, and collective rights such as development and peace as third generation. Some scholars see civil and political rights as being negative or cost-free rights, merely requiring the state to keep its hands off, whereas social and economic rights are positive rights, costly and dependent on the level of development. Others criticize this dichotomy as a false distinction (Cranston 1964, 40; Donnelly 1989, 31–34). We can conclude that the protection of civil and political rights is not primarily dependent on wealth or social investment but does demand political will. Economic and social rights, as they are conceived today, are more contingent on resources. But resources alone do not account for how well states do in fulfilling them. Chapter 8 presents evidence that poorer states that respect life integrity and political rights are more apt to develop and prosper with their citizens enjoying better health and longevity than are poorer states that are gross violators.

The difference between classes of rights is taken into account in international covenants protecting both classes of rights (further discussed in chapter 8). Many supposed debates over ranking rights argue over whether economic rights are really rights or are political goals or entitlements. These debates (which often barely conceal the advocate’s motives of rationalizing regimes with dirty hands) have led some, such as Donnelly (1989, 34–37), to declare that rights are indivisible. Yet, we can only determine how different kinds of rights are related by making distinctions among them and observing indicators of states’ practices—respect for or violations of rights.

My distinctions among rights did not come from any a priori theory but were devised after two decades spent studying human wrongs—especially genocide and massacres. I began in 1987 to analyze human rights reports of states across the globe with past incidents of genocide or present group conflict, focusing on a class of basic prepolitical rights I label life integrity rights (Fein 1988, 1995). Life integrity rights 1) are distinguished in this book from 2) civil and political rights and 3) subsistence rights, especially the right to food (among social and economic rights). This division, although the labels differ, corresponds to that of several other theorists (discussed in Donnelly 1989, 28–41). There is general agreement on the right to life and personal security, to liberty, and to subsistence.

Both life integrity rights and liberty preface the age of democracy. There is historical evidence that both life integrity rights and subsistence rights have been respected in some traditional and nondemocratic societies. The right to food was enforced in Europe in early modern times through bread riots (Rudé 1964). Indeed, the division between political and economic rights is recent. The leading question, often not noted, is which and whose economic rights. The right to property was one of the first rights in eighteenth-century natural rights that was justified by Locke and specified in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789) and the U.S. Constitution (1789). The right to life, liberty, and property, taken as a given in the eighteenth century, recast in the U.S. Declaration of Independence as “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” was amended in the twentieth century as the right to life, liberty, and subsistence (or the right to food). The modern emphasis on the latter can be viewed as a complement to property rights, a response to the fact that many people (often the majority in developed societies) work in organizations, factories, and farms that they do not own or personally control.

Many authors also agree on what constitutes human wrongs; these consistently include two classes of violations of life integrity (spelled out in table 1.1): (1) killings, torture, and arbitrary arrest and punishment and (2) slavery and apartheid.

Table 1.1 Life Integrity Rights and Their Violations

Rights	Violations	International Law and Date in Force
1. The right to life	Genocide, mass killing, summary/extrajudicial executions, and “disappearances”	UN Genocide Convention, 1951 *UDHR art. 3 **ICCPR
2. The right to personal inviolability/not to be hurt	Torture, rape, and sexual abuse; inhuman and degrading treatment and punishment	UN Convention Against Torture 1987 *UDHR art. 3 **ICCPR art. 9
3. The right to be free of fear of arbitrary seizure, detention, and punishment	No due process or any process, arbitrary detention, lack of fair trial	*UDHR art. 3 **ICCPR art. 9
4. Freedom to own one’s body and labor	Slavery, forced labor, debt slavery, and equivalent institutions	Slavery Convention 1927 Supplementary Convention 1957; Convention Concerning Abolition of Forced Labor 1959
5. The right to free movement without discrimination	Group macrosegregation (apartheid), microsegregation, group detention, and forced resettlement	Convention on the Punishment of Apartheid 1976; Int. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination 1969, **ICCPR art. 9, 13
6. The right to procreate and cohabit with family	No marriage or family formation by state policy; kidnapping and adoption or involuntary transfer of children	*UDHR art. 3 **ICCPR art. 9

Notes:

* UDHR—Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948)

** ICCPR—International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1976)

Life Integrity Rights and Their Violation

My focus is on life integrity rights, because they protect the most basic values that transcend cultures and enable people to enjoy other rights. In order to rank these, I used a method derived from the work of John Rawls.¹ The violation of life integrity rights has been criminalized in international law over the past seventy years (see table 1.1). Looking backward through Western history, it is notable that life integrity rights were wrested before political rights and economic rights claimed in modern times.

I start with the physical right to be—to exist—followed by the right to be physically and mentally secure—not to be hurt or violated, to be free from arbitrary fear—and to own one’s body and labor, to move freely, and to procreate and live with family (see table 1.1). Life integrity rights imply an integrated set of claims defending the biological and social integration of body and mind among all humans (denied by genocide, murder, and torture); of self-ownership, mobility, and social dignity (denied by slavery, segregation, and apartheid); of self and family (denied by prohibiting marriage and family development as under slavery and certain forms of totalitarianism); and of the reciprocal guarantees for protection of human groups (denied by genocide).

The right to life is the most fundamental among human rights. Although not absolute, the right to life is basic in both domestic and international law—indeed, “all other human rights become meaningless if the basic right to life is not duly protected” (Van Aggelen 1986, 742). In many civilizations human sacrifice and infanticide were approved social practices, practices that have been suppressed at different times and places over the last 2,600 years. The socially enforced suicide of widows (suttee) was common in India until the nineteenth century, and incidents of suttee still occur in that country. Recognition of the right to life as a universal human right is a recent achievement (in the last millennium) in human histor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Acronyms
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• 1 Distinguishing among Human Rights and Wrongs
• 2 Twentieth-Century Slavery within the State
• 3 Slavery, Trafficking, and Globalization
• 4 States of Terror in the Late Twentieth Century: Algeria and Argentina
• 5 States of Terror Turn to Genocide: Guatemala and Iraq
• 6 States of Genocide, Genocidal Massacres, and Ethnic Cleansing
• 7 No Brave New World: Democracy and Human Rights
• 8 Human Rights, Freedom, and Development
• 9 Conclusion and Implications: What Can Be Done?
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author