Contemporary Human Rights Ideas

Rethinking theory and practice

Bertrand Ramcharan, Bertrand G. Ramcharan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317614500
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Written by a former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (2003–4), this book has been fully updated for a second edition and continues to provide a much needed, short and accessible introduction to the foundational human rights ideas of our times and shows that every government is under international obligation to respect and uphold universal human rights.

Updates include:

• Discussion of the recent intellectual challenges to the international human rights movement
• Examination of the establishment and functioning of the Human Rights Council and the Universal Review Process
• Evaluation of the developments in the area of the Responsibility to Protect and continued efforts to implement the right to development
• Inclusion of issues such as the push for compensation for slavery, experiments with democracy in a number of countries and the decisions of international judicial and human rights organs on conceptual and protection issues

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Global Institutions, International Law and Human Rights.

1 History

Shared heritage, common struggle

• Law and justice: the common heritage of humanity

• Respect for shared humanity in the major religious and philosophical traditions

• The place of the individual in the community and the rights of groups and peoples

• The common struggle for human rights

• Positive rights

• Natural rights

• The public policy function of human rights

• The contemporary role of international consensus and legislation

• Conclusion

Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.

(Robert Kennedy, 1966¹)

This chapter looks at historical aspects of the development of human rights and at the global quest for their implementation and vindication. The following strands are discussed: the shared heritage of humanity in the development of the ideas of law and justice; major religions’ emphasis on respect for shared humanity; the place of the individual in the community and the rights of groups and peoples; philosophical debates that have accompanied the evolution of rights; the idea of the individual’s positive rights; the idea of natural rights; the role of struggle and policy in the development of rights; and the role of international consensus and legislation in the contemporary concept of rights captured in the UDHR’s opening article: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”²

Law and justice: the common heritage of humanity³

To understand and appreciate the contemporary concepts of law and rights, it is essential to have a sense of the common heritage of humanity in the development of these concepts (see Table 1.1). In Freedom in the Ancient World, the historian Herbert J. Muller noted that although ancient men scarcely believed that freedom and justice were one and inseparable as is now commonplace, “there has always been a real connection between them beginning with the necessity of law for any effective freedom. Law codes, written or unwritten, confer some rights in the very act of specifying obligations and penalties.”⁴

Table 1.1 The shared intellectual heritage of humanity in the development of ideas of law and justice

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BCE
4241	First dated year in history
3500–3001	Earliest known writing, Sumerian cuneiform
2500–2001	The first libraries in Egypt; in Egyptian literature, lamentations and skepticism about meaning of life
2000–1501	Egyptian alphabet of 24 signs
	Mesopotamian Codex Ur-Nammu
	Babylonian Codex Lipit-Ishtar, Codex Eshnunna
	Hammurabi, King of Babylon, sets laws of kingdom in order; Code of Hammurabi is first of all legal systems
1500–1001	Middle Assyrian laws
	Hittite laws
	Hymns of the Rigveda (Vedic religion assigns different powers to the separate deities of the heavens, the air, and the earth)
	Gilgamesh epic
	Moses receives the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai
1000–901	Pantheistic religion develops in India (Brahmanism and Atmanism) teaching identity of self, transmigration of soul; caste system
	In China, rational philosophy gains over mysticism
900–801	Iliad and Odyssey; leather scrolls with translations of Old Babylonian texts into Aramaic and Greek
	The earliest Jewish prophets
800–601	Laws of Lycurgus at Sparta
	Indian Vedas completed (a collection of religious, philosophical, and educational writings). In India, Brahmanic religion defines six stages of the transmigration of the soul
	First written laws of Athens by Draco
	Anaximander of Miletus, Greek philosopher (611–546)
	Zoroaster, founder of Persian religion (631–653)
	Lao-tse, Chinese philosopher, b. 604
600–501	Mayan civilization in Mexico
	During the Babylonian Captivity of the Jews, many books of the Old Testament, based on word of mouth tradition, are first written down in Hebrew
	Cyrus II, the Great of Persia (553–529) established Persian empire; in 536, he frees Jews from Babylonian captivity and aids their return to Israel
	Solon’s laws promulgated in Athens
	Anaximenes and Pythagoras, Greek philosophers
	Mahavira Jina founds Jainism in India; first known rebel against caste system
	Kung Fu-tse (Confucius), Chinese philosopher
	Siddhartha Gautama, Buddha, founder of Buddhism
	Xenophanes founds school of philosophy
	Parmenides, Greek philosopher*
500–451	Neo-Babylonian Laws
	Covenant Code
	Deuteronomic code
	Beginning of historical writing in Greece
	Ramayana, ancient Hindu poem (c.500)
	Empedocles and Protagoras, Greek philosophers
	Herodotus, father of Greek history
	Heraclitus, Greek philosopher
	Socrates, Athenian philosopher (470 to 399)
	Democritus, Greek philosopher
	Ezra, Hebrew scribe, goes to Jerusalem to restore the laws of Moses (458)
450–401	The Decemvirs codify Roman laws in a form known as the Twelve Tables (450)
	The Torah becomes the moral essence of the Jewish state
	Plato (427–347)
	Thucydides, Greek historian (424)
400–351	Aristotle, Greek philosopher (384–322)
350–301	The Indian epic, Mahabharata being written
250–201	Asoka, the Indian emperor, erects columns 40 feet high inscribed with his laws (c.250)
CE
401–450	St Augustine’s City of God (411)
529	Justinian’s Code of Civil Laws
570	Mohammed, founder of Islam
598	Probably the first English school at Canterbury
640	Arabs find famous Alexandria library with 300,000 papyrus scrolls

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The information in this table is excerpted from two sources: the highly acclaimed work The Timetables of History: A Horizontal Linkage of People and Events by Bernard Grun, based on Werner Stein’s Kulturfahrplan (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982); and Russ ver Steeg, Law in the Ancient World (Durham, N.C.: Carolina Academic Press, 2002).

Note: * The Timetables of History, cited above, comments: “In Confucius, Buddha, Zoroaster, Lao-tse, the Jewish prophets, the Greek poets, artists, philosophers and scientists, the sixth century BC reaches a zenith of human wisdom and achievement.”

While these codes mainly imposed constraints, they also protected the individual against uncustomary or arbitrary constraints: “Early civilizations made positive advances towards such ideals in particular through the efforts of kings to protect ordinary men against the abuses of power and privilege.”⁵

Ancient Egypt, Muller assessed, foreshadowed democratic principles of justice when a god declared—in respect of the rights of the deceased—that he had made every man like his fellow man, made the great flood waters of the Nile for the benefit of the poor man and the great man alike, and given all men equal access to the kingdom of the dead. Even if Egypt never achieved this ideal of equality, “at least the next world was thrown open to common men.”⁶

The priests of the Middle Kingdom, scholars noted, were cognizant of the tendency toward recognizing the equality of all men. A declaration of the Sun God in the following excerpt from one of the “Coffin Texts” brought this out dramatically:

I made the four winds that every man might breathe thereof like his father in his time … I made the great inundation that the poor man might have rights therein like the great man … I made every man like his fellow. I did not command that they do evil, but it was their hearts that violated what I had said … I made their hearts to cease from forgetting the West in order that divine offerings might be given to the gods of the nomes … I brought into being the four gods from my sword, while men are the tears of my eyes.⁷

In Mesopotamia, the idea grew that justice was man’s right, not merely a royal favor, and that the gods themselves had approved this right. The ancient Sumerians were the first to formulate law codes; one of the earliest was that of Lipit-Ishtar, who ruled in the first half of the nineteenth century BCE.⁸ The code includes an invocation of the principle of justice: “If a man cut down a tree in the garden of (another) man, he shall pay one-half mina of silver.”⁹

The Code of Hammurabi, which is preserved on a large black stone, contains 282 clauses. It sought to protect the interests of the state and those who served it. The invocation of justice is at the very outset of the code. In the prologue, Hammurabi announced that the gods had sent “me, Hammurabi, the obedient, God-fearing prince to make manifest justice in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil-doer, that the strong harm not the weak.”¹⁰ Maintaining the principle of justice, th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• Foreword to the first edition
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. History: Shared heritage, common struggle
• 2. Human rights in the world community
• 3. International obligation
• 4. Universality
• 5. Equality
• 6. Democracy
• 7. Development
• 8. International cooperation and dialogue
• 9. Protection
• 10. Justice, remedy, and reparation
• 11. Conclusion
• Select bibliography
• Index
• Routledge Global Institutions Series