Rights are recognition

The existence of human rights should be uncontroversial. While there are scholarly treatises that attempt to provide foundational proof, I believe that we humans have an intuitive grasp of “human rights.” We understand it in its absence, when we feel that we are denied something that we ought to be allowed to do, or that we ought to have. I think that’s something that we’re all familiar with: when someone cuts in front of us in line, when we don’t receive what we paid for, when our parents tell us we can’t stay out late. Whether justified or not, that negative feeling is only possible because we understand that we were denied wrongfully. Even as infants, we cry when the bottle is taken from us. This is an act of instinct, but I believe this only goes to show that our bodies themselves have evolved to fight for that most basic of our rights. Even before we are capable of conscious thought, we humans want to survive.

Human rights are the rights human beings have by virtue of being human. They should not depend on any authority, political or religious, for their existence; nor must we conduct ourselves in a certain way to somehow earn or qualify for them. Human rights are inherent in us, universal and lifelong… at least, in theory.

But we all know that it’s not that simple. Having a right to something is no guarantee that we will receive it, or that another will not take it from us. For much of human history, slavery was not only legal but ethical. In many cultures, women were not allowed to have a say in the way their families or communities were run, nor to even hold property. While leaders began to speak about the universality of the rights of man in the 18th century, in documents such as the American Declaration of Independence or the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, the reality on the ground was very different.

It took the horrors of the two World Wars to awaken mainstream political consciousness to the idea that there were thresholds in our treatment of our fellow humans that should not be crossed. In two days, the world celebrates International Human Rights Day, to commemorate the adoption by the United Nations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on Dec. 10, 1948. The UDHR and subsequent rights instruments such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights are important, not because they created these human rights, but because they signify something essential to their enforcement: Recognition.

Recognition of human rights by national governments is what makes those rights real on the ground. Every right we have is at the same time a claim against others not to deny that right, and it is the State that is in the best position to either defend those rights or violate them. It is this need for recognition that drives the movement for laws such as the SOGIE Equality Act, as well as others that seek to remedy gaps in the current status quo. It is why the work of civil society and human rights groups continues to be important, to provide a broader perspective for a government that represents a varied and intersectional population. And for those like myself that work in public service, we must remember that caring for that population is the essential task of the government.

In fact, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the purpose of government is to guarantee human rights. And it falls to the people, as human beings, to keep the government on the right track. The people, as human beings, recognizing the humanity of others.

For it was never the idea of “rights” that has made the concept of “human rights” so contentious throughout history. It was the “human” part – the inability of people to see others as people, equally deserving of respect and dignity. Slavery was allowed because people of other races were not seen as “people,” or at least not of the same order of personhood as those who belonged to the race of the slavers. Women were inferior, incapable of the same level of reasoning as men. And so it went, whenever there was a reason to separate “us” from “them,” whenever we needed to justify war, or oppression, or getting more than our fair share. Differences in religion, political affiliation, ethnicity, gender identity, economic means… all of these have been used as excuses to dismiss the humanity of other human beings.

There can be no human rights without recognition of the humanity of others.

In a world where it is incredibly easy to connect with others and to learn what is happening on other shores, we yet remain at risk of becoming more divided than ever before. As the pandemic has raged and raised borders between neighbors, many of us have gotten used to seeing people represented by numbers on the screen: this number of positives, that number of recoveries, this number of dead. If we are, as the Human Rights Day theme states, to “Recover Better” from the COVID-19 scourge, it is going to take more than vaccines. It’s going to take a commitment to seeing other people as just that – people.

This doesn’t mean we need to agree with our detractors or love our enemies – recognizing someone’s humanity isn’t the same as believing they are correct, or good, or harmless. What it means is that we must recognize a baseline of treatment that must be granted to another, and recognize that just by their very existence they have a claim on us to respect their most fundamental rights – to live, to not be tortured, to not be enslaved, to have freedom of thought and faith. It means that we accept that it is only by recognizing those rights in others that we create a world that respects those rights in us.

It means seeing past the accidents of circumstance – differences of birth, or place, or faith – and seeing ourselves in other people.