Fifty years on from its adoption by the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Right remains an extraordinarily radical and challenging document, despite the inevitable gaps exposed by events in the meantime.
In this International Report, human rights are examined through the lens of world development. It is the third in a series of Developing World supplements published by The Irish Times. The first concentrated on development education and the second on multilateral development policies, especially through the European Union.
This International Report on human rights poses questions from around the world and provides a forum for debate.
The Declaration was adopted by representatives of some 50 nation-states. Their sovereign equality is a cardinal principle of international society expressed through the UN system, which now embraces more than three times the original number of members.
It is on these nation-states that individuals normally have to rely for enforcement of human rights. It can readily be seen that there is an abiding tension between the principles of national sovereignty and universal rights.
But, even if state boundaries were to disappear overnight and their functions taken over by regional organisations such as the EU or by a global state organised through the UN, we would still be left with the systematic inequalities characteristic of today's world.
It is all too tempting to say human rights discourse is invalidated by these two major constraints. That is the conclusion drawn by realists of diverse stripes, left or right, postmodern or communitarian. They say, variously, that nation-states should or do follow their own interests, that rights are relative, or incommensurable between different communities.
The facts of the contemporary world stubbornly contrive nevertheless to rebut such pessimism about the universality of human rights. Despite differences of circumstance and culture, common humanity is made increasingly apparent by the globalisation of economic forces, the interdependence of political affairs and the worldwide nature of communications.
Such factors are encouraging a reconsideration of politics, citizenship and democracy beyond the nation-state in an effort to make them more accountable. Basic needs for subsistence, security and respect for cultural status are recognised to exist in common. So are threats to humankind as a whole, whether to do with environment, health, malnutrition or campaigns of genocide.
The same applies to means by which such rights may be attained. The Universal Declaration recognised in Article 25 that "everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and his family." The force of this argument stands undiminished in a world in which 1.3 billion people, 23 per cent of the planet's population, are estimated to be living in absolute poverty. Hence intellectual efforts to define a right to development, to span the gulf between civil and political rights which form the classical agenda of liberalism, and economic and social rights which are so often their precondition.
Human rights have become the international language in which demands that these issues be tackled are expressed. But, as Mary Robinson, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, puts it, "the essence of rights is that they are empowering".
It is very often only when they become part of the fabric of political struggles that they take on a real content. Hence the notorious resistance of authoritarian governments to such claims, often, in that part of the world, in the name of "Asian values".
But note the fact that opponents of such governments contest precisely their efforts to deny universality. Note also, at the other and far more powerful end of the international spectrum, the outright refusal of the US to agree to the jurisdiction of the new international court on grounds of its own national interests.
So much for the impermissibility of impunity with which Washington often berates tyrants around the world. The human rights discourse is intolerant of such hypocrisies.
Universality therefore demands, as a new standard of civilisation, that we apply the norms to ourselves as well as to the rest of the world.
In Ireland, we have much to learn from this new discourse. Human rights form an integral part of the Belfast Agreement, with the Government committed to introduce the European Convention into domestic legislation as a result and to approximate legal orders north and south in these respects.
Whether, when and how this should be done is discussed in these pages.
The Department of Foreign Affairs finds that human rights issues increasingly affect all areas of Irish foreign policy. This is fully reflected in development policy, both in the aid and political divisions of the department.
In the aid area, for example, there are concrete programmes of training for due legal process, public service reform, parliamentary accountability, anti-corruption and democratisation. In the political area, human rights benchmarking and mainstreaming are standard tests of policy, as is support for democratisation and good governance.
Ireland, as a signatory of important legal conventions in the human rights sphere, must regularly defend its record before international monitoring bodies.
The successive UN conferences on the environment, human rights, population, women and social policy over the last six years have created a network of activists and an agenda quite outside the exclusive control of governments or the UN agencies themselves. Within this framework a new multi-level political arena is being created, largely around human rights issues, which has an undoubted capacity to effect change in policy and awareness.
Irish hypocrisies about refugees, asylum seekers and migrant workers are powerfully exposed in such a framework. We are making the transition from an emigrant to an immigrant society belatedly and unevenly, the last EU member-state to do so. The process lays bare raw experiences of exclusion and inclusion built up over many centuries of colonialism and migration. The attitudes concerned relate not only to the newcomers and strangers seeking refuge amongst us, but to those who left these shores in search of work and a freer personal environment. As they return to fill out the Irish labour market they encounter many of the same prejudices encountered by other migrants.
This is the real stuff of development and human rights. Our response will test their limits in coming years.
In so arguing and deciding Irish people will be participating in a much wider debate about the international system. Tensions between nationstates and international society over human rights will affect attitudes to development. It remains to be seen whether it is possible to move from the sovereign equality to the international solidarity implied by giving human rights a genuinely universal frame of reference.