My Critique of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Journal of Human Rights, 2004

The spirit of human rights has been transmitted consciously and unconsciously from one generation to another, carrying the scars of its tumultuous past. Today, invoking the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the General Assembly in 1948, one may think of human rights as universal, inalienable and indivisible, as rights shared equally by everyone regardless of sex, race, nationality and economic background. Yet conflicting political traditions across the centuries have elaborated different visions of human rights rooted in past social struggles. That historical legacy and current conflicting meanings of human rights are, despite the admirable efforts of the architects of the declaration, all reflected in the structure and the substance of this important UN document. Using the main keys developed in the declaration, this article engages six core controversies over human rights that have shaped human rights debate and scholarship. It also draws on the historical record in order to identify and to clarify several misconceptions that persist both within and outside the human rights community today. René Cassin, one of the main drafters of the universal declaration, classified the central tenets of human rights by comparing them to the portico of a temple. Drawing on the battle cry of the French revolution, Cassin identified the four pillars of the declaration as: 'dignity, liberty, equality, and brotherhood'. The 27 articles of the declaration were divided among these four pillars. The pillar supported the roof of the portico (articles 28-30), which stipulated the conditions in which the rights of individuals could be realized within society and the state. Each of the pillars represents a major historical milestone. The first pillar covered in the first two articles of the declaration stands for human dignity shared by all individuals regardless of their religion, creed, ethnicity, religion, or sex; the second, specified in articles 3-19 of the declaration, invokes the first generation of civil liberties and other liberal rights fought for during the Enlightenment; the third, delineated in articles 20-26, addresses the second generation of rights, i.e. those related to political, social and economic equity and championed during the industrial revolution; the fourth (articles 27-28) focuses on the third generation of rights associated with communal and national solidarity, as advocated during the late 19th century and early 20th century and throughout the postcolonial era. In a sense, the sequence of the articles corresponds to the historical appearance of successive generations and visions of universal rights. 1 Yet throughout history, the human rights projects reflected in the declaration-whether liberal, socialist, or 'third world' in origin-generated internal contradictions concerning both how to promote human rights and who should be endowed with equal human rights. For instance, while the modern nation-state was originally justified by claims that it would promote human rights, the subsequent prevalence of realpolitik and particularism inspired 19th and 20th century efforts to embody universalism in the form of a succession of

Routledge eBooks, 2017

2012

Classifying human rights according to "generations" is a form of their characterization. This approach considers civil and political rights as the first generation; economic, social and cultural rights as the second; and a new category named "collective rights" or "rights of peoples" as the third generation. The subject matter of this article is simply an attempt to reconsider the last generation. In this context, having revealed the arguments in the field of those rights, in brief, this paper will discuss whether or not the approach of "generations of rights" can contribute to the protection of human rights in general, and whether it is a natural product of evolution of the theory of human rights.

There are many reasons for the inefficacy of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but perhaps the most pertinent explanation is the Declaration is rather ambiguous in its codification of various rights. Furthermore, several of the rights afforded by the Declaration have a logically untenable wording. The goal of this work is not to argue for or provide a list of specific rights to be included in a revised Declaration, but to evaluate the logical form of the rights already listed within the Declaration and to propose how the document could be made logically effectual.

MB University International Review, 2023

The paper presents a review of human rights in the past with the aim of pointing out common misconceptions and prejudices. The author tries to prove with arguments that: 1) it is not true that human rights did not exist in the past; 2) human rights have not developed constantly and uniformly; 3) human rights did not appear and develop only in Western Europe, in order to spread from there to the whole world; 4) the homeland of human rights is everywhere; 5) developed countries i.e. political, economic and other powers have never really been real champions of human rights. His conclusion is that the acquis of human rights has always existed more or less developed, and that human rights will always exist, in one form or another, while at the same time there has also always been and will be their denial and violation. The question of the degree of their development, protection and respect is always a problem in itself and can be answered only on the occasion of a specific case, after a thorough study of not only legal regulations but also the practice of the respective society.

Routledge eBooks, 2017

2013

Unoesc International Legal Seminar, 2016