In a new essay, Mark OHalloranresponds to Article 22 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as part of a continuing series in association with Amnesty International to mark the 60th anniversary of the declaration
1. Imagine now a man who is deprived of everyone he loves, and at the same time of his house, his habits, his clothes, in short, of everything he possesses: he will be a hollow man, reduced to suffering and needs, forgetful of dignity and restraint, for he who loses all often easily loses himself.
If This Is a Man - Primo Levi(Jewish-Italian chemist, Holocaust survivor and author of memoirs, short stories, poems and novels)
IN 1945 THE world was a broken place. Near the halfway point of a century that would prove to be the most savage and bloody in human history, at the end of a World War that had killed 50 million people, and in a time when the imagination of mass slaughter had reached sickening heights, it must have felt as though mankind was losing an essential part of itself, its own common humanity.
Throughout the war and in preparation for the peace that was to come, many groups and individuals had spoken up for the idea of a charter to be constituted that would stand up as a list of the basic and universal human rights. As the war came to a close, however, and in the terrible shadow of Auschwitz and the sheer depravity of the war crimes committed, those calls for a recognition of human rights as being central to international law became deafening.
It was for this reason that, after the United Nations was formally established in 1945, one of the first actions of its newly established Economic and Social Council was the convening of a Commission on Human Rights, whose job it was to draft a bill of the basic rights of man. The enormity and complexity of this task cannot be underestimated. The committee was being asked to compile a bill of rights that went beyond political dogma and religious belief, that was universal and cross-cultural, and that would be a statement of the moral rights and principles that would embody the hopes of millions of oppressed individuals. It was as if the drafters were being asked to answer the question "what is a man?", and there were many who believed it could not be done.
However, under the chairmanship of Eleanor Roosevelt, the committee, comprising delegates from 18 countries, realised it was a question that needed to be tackled before the notion of permanent peace, stability and security in the world could even begin to be entertained or contemplated. Under Roosevelt's heroic leadership, the drafting process took almost two years, and the resulting declaration is radical in that it represents an emphatic statement that human rights belong to everyone without distinctions as to race, sex, language or religion.
2. The peoples of the world are on the move. They have been given courage by the hope of freedom for which we fought in this war. Those of us who have come from the murk and mire of the battlefields know that we fought for freedom, not for one country, but for all peoples and for all the world.
Carlos Romulo
(Filipino diplomat, politician, soldier, journalist
and author. He led the Philippines delegation in the negotiations
to draft the Universal Declaration.)
Over the drafting period, a number of events and circumstances would conspire to thwart the committee's work and progress. To begin with, there was confusion as to what the committee was actually supposed to be attempting. Some believed that, for the project to have any significance, the committee should steer away from the construction of a vague set of principles in the form of a declaration that would have no meaning in law. They believed it was the work of the committee to realise a binding covenant that would have to be ratified by the member states of the United Nations and would come with its own implementation structures and bodies. The construction of such a covenant, however, would have been an extremely arduous task, would have required drafting by teams of international law experts, and would have taken a prohibitively long time.
The more pragmatic members of the committee realised that, with the Cold War gathering and deepening, and with the US and USSR in no mood to construct such international court structures, the only achievable goal in the short term would be to use the politically favourable period of consensus on human rights to construct an acceptable declaration.
The fact that the declaration, when it arrived 60 years ago, did not come with any machinery of implementation dismayed many, but it did have a different and unique strength. The simplicity and clarity of the declaration seems to accord it an independent moral status in world affairs and law. On its own, the declaration has directly inspired two covenants at the UN - on Civil and Political Rights and on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights - but it also became the inspiration for a whole branch of international law. Whereas before the second World War there were few independent instruments concerned with the realisation of human rights, since then, and with the declaration acting as a sort of talisman to the dignity of the individual, that situation has been transformed. Its existence does not mean we live in a world at peace, or in a world where men, women and children are free from torture or exploitation, but perhaps it allows us to catch a glimpse, a very fleeting glimpse, of what such a world might look like, and allows us to believe in the inalienable dignity of each individual.
3. Political rights are the first condition of liberty but today the progress of scientific and industrial civilization has created economic organisations which are inflicting on politically free men intolerable servitude and that, therefore, in the future, the declaration of the rights of man must be extended to the economic and social fields.
Henri Laugier- April 1946.
(UN assistant secretary-general for social affairs at the
time of the drafting of the Declaration)
Article 22 is the first article in the declaration to tackle the social, economic and cultural rights of man. In the early stages of the drafting process some believed that such rights did not belong in the declaration at all. It was believed that "civil and political rights" took precedence over "social and economic rights" because, according to some, the former are a prerequisite for the latter, but not vice versa. The British and Australian delegations in particular argued fiercely for the exclusion of these rights. To their thinking, the inclusion of economic and cultural rights would muddy the waters and, as the UK delegate Lord Dukeston put it, "the world needed free men and not well-paid slaves". But it could equally be asked: what use are civil liberties to the person if he is not protected against poverty?
As Eleanor Roosevelt herself stated, "freedom without bread has little meaning. Freedom from want and freedom from aggression are twin freedoms that go hand in hand", and so eventually the argument to include these "new" or "non-traditional" rights was won. For the first time, it was being accepted that a permanent system of security could be effective only if it had a foundation in economic and social justice. The understanding that freedom from hunger and disease as a matter of right is as essential to human dignity as freedom of expression or conscience was an important and hard-won argument. Expanding civil and political freedoms is indispensable to combating poverty, but on its own cannot remedy the chronic levels of deprivation and want that continue to blight much of humanity.
Article 22 itself came late in the drafting process and can be seen as a covering article for the articles that follow, which deal with employment, leisure, education and community. It states, in clear terms, that everyone has the right to social security, but it then goes beyond looking merely on the rights of the individual but on the rights of the individual as a member of society.
It says everyone has the right to the realisation of his social, economic and cultural rights, which are essential to the development of his personality, but that these rights can only be realised through the efforts of society and through international co-operation. In other words, by acknowledging that these rights can only be achieved through the efforts of us all, it is saying something very simple and very beautiful. It is saying we belong together.
In the words of Eleanor Roosevelt, "I don't believe that greed and selfishness have gone out of the human race. I am quite prepared to be considerably disappointed many times . . . but I want to try for a peaceful world. The ratification of the treaty . . . I think, makes easier every step we take in the future."
ARTICLE 22:
Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to
social security and is entitled to realisation, through national
effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the
organisation and resources of each state, of the economic, social
and cultural rights indispensable for their dignity and the free
development of their personality.
This is one in a series of 30 stories and essays by leading Irish writers marking the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The series was created by Sean Love for Amnesty International and continues next Saturday. www.amnesty.ie