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This is KZSU Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison
and we're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
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The topic of our show today is human rights in the 21st century.
Human rights is obviously a solemn, consequential, and crucial issue
when it comes to how we understand ourselves as individuals and as a society
or how we envision the future of our internationalized world.
Yet I'm not sure how to frame my lead in today
because when it comes to human rights I find myself well, perplexed.
Part of my perplexity comes from the fact that everything that the founding documents
have upheld as an inalienable human right is imminently alienable.
Human rights are ontologically defined by the possibility of their violation.
My life, property, happiness, my equality before the law,
my freedom of speech, freedom from fear,
not only can these be taken away from me at any moment,
they are forever being taken away.
If not from me personally, then from a vast number of my brothers and sisters at home and abroad.
Even more perplexing to me is the fact that the French and American revolutionaries
spoke of the rights of man as an endowment on behalf of nature or God to man.
In other words, as permissions and privileges derived from some transcendent source,
whereas it seems evident to me that man is the one who posits the rights of man,
posits them as things which derive from God or nature and have an absolute value for man.
As I see it, but maybe my guest today will correct me on this score,
the rights of man are natural or God-given only where man declares them to be so.
That speech act, the act of declaration, first brings into existence what is declared to exist in natural or divine law.
Human rights obtain not only where there is some human agency that declares them sacrosanct,
but also only where there exists a legal body with the power to enforce their protection.
Without a revolutionary army to back up its gesture, the declaration of independence is feckless.
Where there is no sovereign state or courts with adequate force, reach and authority to uphold my rights,
the endowments that come to me through God or nature cease to exist,
or exist only in their violation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal,
that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights,
that among these are life-liberty and the pursuit of happiness,
that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men,
deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
Beautiful sacred words,
yet what could be less self-evident when one looked empirically at history,
nature or human society in the 18th century,
than the equality of men or government by consent of the governed?
No, Thomas Jefferson, nothing is self-evident, let alone such truths.
It's the we who hold these truths to be self-evident, who make them so.
Our declaration is an act of affirmation.
Indeed, it's an act of faith.
After all, is that not the Pauline definition of faith,
the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen?
I have other perplexities regarding the whole issue of human rights,
but I will save them for my discussion with a very special guest who joins me in the studio today.
Her name is Helen Stacey, and she teaches in the law school here at Stanford.
She is a scholar of international and comparative law, legal philosophy, and human rights.
She has recently finished a weighty and very impressive book.
Human rights for the 21st century, sovereignty, civil society, culture,
which will be appearing with Stanford University Press in February.
Helen, welcome to the program.
By having me, but it's nice to be here.
Well, let me start Helen by invoking a thinker who is especially dear to me, Hannah Arent,
who in 1950 published a book called The Origins of Totalitarianism,
which contains a short section called The Proplexities of the Rights of Man.
That's where my word "proplex" comes from.
And in my view, that section is among the most powerful pieces of political philosophy that I have read.
In those dozen or so pages, Hannah Arent shows how in the wake of the Jewish experience under the Nazis it became,
painfully clear that rights are thoroughly dependent on citizenship,
and then when the latter is stripped away, the former also disappear.
She ends up arguing that Edmund Burke finally was right when he criticized the French Revolution's declaration of the rights of man,
as positing an altogether abstract concept of rights.
So if I may quote her, "Not only did the loss of national rights in all instances entail the loss of human rights,
the restoration of human rights, as the recent example of the state of Israel proves, has been achieved so far only through the restoration or the establishment of national rights."
The conception of human rights based upon the assumed existence of a human being as such,
and that would be, I suppose, the abstract conception of the French and American revolutionaries.
This conception of human rights broke down at the very moment when those who profess to believe in it were, for the first time,
confronted with people who had indeed lost all other qualities and specific relationships,
except that they were still human. The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human."
End quote.
And in your book Helen, you reference a geography bent them,
and his rejection of a normative order of human rights and quote him to the effect, one more quote,
Right is the child of law from real laws come real rights, but from imaginary laws, from laws of nature,
come imaginary rights, a bastard brood of monsters.
Now you're especially interested in human rights in the international sphere, especially as they're promoted by bodies such as the United Nations.
I've looked at the United Nations General Assembly's universal declaration of human rights,
we can discuss some of its specifics later, but is it fair to say that for many people around the world,
most of that declarations stipulated rights are a bastard brood of monsters.
In other words, that they are imaginary rights without the proper legal institutions to give them reality.
Jeremy Bentham, quote, the bastard brood of monsters.
And what Bentham was getting at there was that to have a right by virtue of being human is only as good as the champion who will help you achieve the thing that you claim.
And Bentham was a great law reformer. He was resisting the idea of his day and his time in the England of the 19th century,
which wanted to rely on judges making the law upon their benches in the courtrooms,
rather than legislators producing law in the parliament.
Bentham pointed out that judges were captives of elites.
They only pursued their own interests and used rights terminology as a slight of hand to really pursue their own commercial and property interests.
Bentham was a reformer. He was a man who believed in rights for women, rights for children. He wanted to end slavery.
And he wanted parliaments to produce institutions that wouldn't just leave rights as imaginary figures,
but in fact have acts of Congress or parliament and police forces and courts to which people could put their governments to the test.
So is it his quote that I read to you something that you find persuasive, namely that rights come from law,
and to speak about imaginary rights is to speak about a brood of monsters?
Oh, I want to back up for a minute.
Yeah, let's back up. Let's go right back to what we're talking about here, which is human rights.
The sorts of legal rights or moral rights that we might want to claim that we have by virtue of being human.
Bentham, by the way, also believed that animals have rights, but we're talking about human rights today.
So if there's one thing that we all share, it's the humanness of what we are as Homo sapiens.
Remember, Emmanuel Kent was one of the modernist philosophers who pointed out that to be human is to have the potential to be not just good but also evil.
And when we claim human rights, whether we claim them through aspirational documents like constitutions,
or when our whining children claim they have a right to watch the television past their bedtime,
all that any person is really doing is saying to their persecutor, whether it's a parent or a government or the next-door neighbor,
"Listen, I feel I'm entitled to do X and you're trying to stop me. I'm going to make sure you can't."
And when it's a legal right, you can take that claim to a court.
So yes, in a sense, I agree with Bentham. I'd much rather have the courts on my side than just an abstract document,
because unless I can push that document in front of my government or my parent, then what's the point in making the claim?
I want to be able to back the claim up with some sort of institutional mechanism.
Isn't it also the case that that government which normally recognizes what is agreed upon as rights reserves under certain circumstances,
the right to take them away? So the right to liberty, for example, is taken away from prisoners,
or even the right to life is taken away from soldiers when they're conscripted and sent off to war and many of them not returning at all.
Sure. So here's the real perplexity. If I were you Robert, I would preserve my perplexity for the misbehavior of power and governments much more than
being too worried about aspirational documents. The perplexity of human rights is that we as people, whether or not we're a citizen, we place our faith in our government as the bottom line to produce our rights.
But the sad reality is that governments are often the worst perpetrators of human rights violations.
That's a real problem if you're someone living within that country and your government is the end of the line. If they're the only game in town, and the only game in town is taking your rights away, then you really have a problem.
And that's where international human rights come in. That's where there's a set of international documents don't get to hang up on the French and the English.
And the American use of flowery language of several centuries ago, there's a set of international documents agreed by governments. Remember these are international, you in documents that governments sign on to.
And see them by way of being something of a promise, a promise that a government makes to the international community, other governments, in other words, about the way they undertake to treat their own citizens back home.
But that promise is only as good as the machinery that that government puts in place back home for the citizens. If that government doesn't put that stuff in place for its people, then those people have to appeal to another forum. Today, they can appeal internationally.
Well, I would like to ask you several questions and having a hard time putting them in some sort of priority. The first is when you say that governments are the biggest perpetrators of the abuses of human rights.
In certain cases that is certainly true, would you not also say that in other cases it is the absence of government or let's say very weak institutional foundations of certain governments that enable certain conditions of anarchy and chaos to reign where, for example, Darfur, as we speak, it does not have a strong enough government
to actually institute the law that is the role of government to protect, to uphold. And that in some cases it's precisely the absence of government or the weakness, fragility of governmental institutions that brings on these abuses.
Sure, I think there are three broad categories where governments misbehave or under behave that can be equally problematic. One is governments that hurt their own citizens.
That can be governments that people up off the street and fling them into a prison without any sort of arrest procedure without charging them. And that person is a disappeared person.
That's category number one, category number two might be governments that have effective control of their country. Maybe they even have effective control of their institutions, but they don't care about a certain category of human rights violations.
For instance, let's say there's a practice of marrying off eight-year-old girls for marriage. And there might be a law in that country that says no child can be married, but the government doesn't enforce that law.
So that's category number two.
Number three is where the government really isn't a government. It simply is a failed state and there are no institutions. Now in each of those cases an individual isn't going to have much joy if they appeal to their government because the government either isn't listening or doesn't want to listen or can't listen.
Well, you used a very crucial word there. That's the individual. Is it? Well, the individual is where human rights finds its ultimate irreducible embodiment.
Well, human rights are the package. I mean, we're human and we're the repository of the self-conscious reasoning process that tells us as sentient beings that we wish
we have desires. We want a certain environment. We want certain relationships. We want a certain lifestyle. So yes, we're the package that human rights rest within.
Say we as individuals. Well, that's a philosophical debate. If we were having this debate in Africa, for example, the African court of human and people's rights has documents that would suggest that rights originate in community.
And that's the right in communities and groups and that the individual is the product of that group right. And that swaps the dynamic of how the right might be claimed by the group to the nation state.
Well, this entails another issue about the history of human rights and the extent, the tension between the universalist claims that the international bodies that you've been referring to seem to be committed to.
The Western Enlightenment legacy from which much of modern concepts of human rights derive, which is clearly something that arose historically.
I think it even raises the history of the very phenomenon, if not concept of government, when you're talking about a government as being the ultimate foundation of the enforcement and upholding of human rights.
We have a very Western concept of what a government is. And I think more often than not, we are assuming that it's a representative government elected by the people, fair elections and so forth.
The specificity, Western historical specificity of the emergence of a concept of human rights, and we can talk about a manual counts importance in this emergence.
In combination with the expectation that all world governments now must conform to a Western model of government.
Is there not something here that is, where we're in danger of amalgamating the concept of man and so far as we're speaking about the rights of man or to say the human.
With something far more culturally and historically specific than human being in a universal sense.
And you're putting your finger on a debate that's probably long overdue in international legal circles and certainly in Western philosophy.
That is, is the Western concept of human rights. So overburdened with a bad baggage, bad historical legacy of being connected with cutting out women, cutting out slaves, mistreating those who don't have property.
And that's only in the West. Let's get to the rest. What about the historical legacy of colonialism under the banner of bringing Western civilization and civil and political rights to the colonial world.
Europe managed to do some pretty horrible stuff, stuff that's still reverberating through Africa and Asia. So one important objective of my book has been to acknowledge this serious, serious flaw in the historical story of human rights in the West.
But to also make the claim that there's something inevitable and beautiful in the concept of each individual person having a claim to dignity and concern and respect and integrity from their governments, from their fellow human beings, from their family, from their community.
I'd like to resuscitate that that core idea, at least make sure that it's disaggregated from some of the worst history. And I believe it can be disaggregated. I think it's possible to look at the baggage of human rights, acknowledge that some of it has been a misapplication of a beautiful idea.
But then to pick that beautiful idea out of that baggage and bear it aloft and carry it forward.
What do you, how do you respond to how noirance comments that I quoted earlier about the priority, absolute priority of citizenship as a precondition for human rights?
And that any notion that human rights can repose upon some concept of the human, of the merely naked human being in his or her personhood is something that the experience of the 20th century has shown us to be unviable.
And that therefore one needs citizenship if not nationality in terms of the nation state in order to presume any sort of guarantee of human rights.
I think she's making a powerful descriptive point that without a champion, without a champion that in the modern world is most effectively the nation state, most effectively government.
It's virtually impossible for the individual to make good their claim because who do we claim our human rights to, but our government because it's our government that either will or won't respect them.
I do think though that Arent is becoming dated in his way. Today with the rise of civil society by which I mean non government organisations and the use of electronic communication like the internet like the photographs on our cell phone when we saw the men, monks being beaten up literally seconds after they were being beaten up last September.
It's not that the nation state is disappearing as some theorists, probably before 9/11 claim, but rather that there are now other additional champions of the individual like non government organisations that are able to make claims before international for where it whether it's the world trade organisation, whether it's before you and human rights committees, whether it's just before the world media, frankly.
And there are now additional ways for individuals to find champions.
The sad reality though is that most governments still have their hands on the arsenal of the world, although don't let's forget that terrorist organisations are non government organisations too, and they sometimes champion the rights of individuals.
Look at secessionists. Susessionists are making a claim against their fellow citizens if you will, against their shared government, but they use arms to pursue their claim to have their own territory and their own right to self government.
So, her point is that in order to make a claim against another, unless you have a gun, you're going to seek a champion and it's governments that have the most likelihood of upholding your claim and being your champion.
Well, sure, and therefore the people who are suspicious of international or let's say super national courts, or international courts of law, do they have a point when they insist that absent any notion of sovereignty in the nationalist's extent, these courts are feckless.
And they're fine as long as one's dealing with certain cases, but when things get extreme, and I think the Jewish experience in Germany was a revelation of this for at least for our own.
You find that a stateless person has no place where he or she can make an appeal. So to deprive someone of nationality or citizenship is really to reduce that person to his or her naked humanity, and then you find that that humanity is not the bearer of any rights, and no one can come to the aid of such a person because they almost don't have a legal definition.
It's not an either/or position, it's not that you either do have human rights because you have citizenship and a government or you don't, and the post-9/11 environment has made that very clear.
So, arriving here in the United States on an overseas passport, I've found that my experience travelling even domestically was very, very different until I got a California driver's license, post-9/11.
There are places on the spectrum where you can be to have citizenship of a country which is powerful, is politically, legally the safest place to be.
The very worst place to be is at the other end of the spectrum, but there are spots in between. It's not either you do or you don't. It's contextual, and it's contingent, and it's environmental.
Great. Let's take a quick break, Alan, and we'll be right back with you in about a minute.
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We're back with Helen Stacey on entitled opinions. My name is Robert Harrison, and we're talking about human rights in the 21st century Alan.
You just finished this book on that topic. I want to read you something from that book and get you to respond to it and light what we've been talking about.
And I want to press this point of to what extent the whole debate about human rights has a very specifically Western underpinning.
You ask, you say that a question has been put squarely on the table for those who promote international human rights, like yourself.
Can Europe's Enlightenment philosophy of individual rights survive present day culture wars and can thrive to provide legitimacy for international human rights institutions and courts?
Or has the justification for a universal system of rights been extinguished because Enlightenment ideals of respect for culture religion and political organization simply cannot engage with systems that are not built upon the same foundations.
This strikes me as a crucial query in your book. And would you like to succinctly summarize where you come down on that question?
I come down in the middle. I'm a great driver through the middle person.
And I guess that comes from... it comes from feeling that theory has to inform practice that ideals need to inform institutions.
I can't, whilst I speak as an international human rights lawyer and philosopher, I can't help myself thinking as a practical lawyer.
Someone who practiced law for 10 years in different countries with pretty serious horrible crimes, had serious consequences for defendants on the one hand.
And yet on the other hand wanting to feel like there are principles that drive the whole system.
So where do I come down on this? Really the question of our times, the question of whether or not the systems of government and justice and law as we in the West know them can possibly have any traction with say the Muslim will.
I think the short answer is yes, but that the West has to give up some idealised version that the world can be a mini West.
And the way I approach this is to suggest that we in the West ought to be a little more flexible about what it is to be human in other countries.
The key deciding point for me is that I believe in agency. I guess I'm a cantian through and through.
I believe that there is something fundamentally beautiful about every person having their own head on their shoulders, their own gestalt, their own reasoning processes.
And it's that reasoning process of each and every one of us that needs to be able to engage with our environment and choose our world, choose our future.
And we would call it agency in the West. It's called different things in different places, but I think it's something that does bind us as humans, much more than that high-filling language of what it is to be an alienable, a lie Jefferson.
Instatritionally as a lawyer, I would like to see international human rights and international courts acknowledge that they're a pretty clumsy mechanism for making people's lives better on the ground.
Not just because they're a long long way from people geographically and economically, but because of this question of cultural transposition of values.
I think the international system is great as an umbrella, it's great as an overarching aspirational hope for us all.
On the other hand, it has some real flaws. Do I want to sheet everything back to governments?
No, for the reason that we just mentioned, governments either can't be trusted or can't be relied upon or are just unwilling to be the backstop for the beauty of individual right.
My argument is that regional courts and regional institutions can be something of a log jam to break that problem to act as an interlocutor between the nation state and the international system.
It's not a complete answer, but it's a way of trying to acknowledge the problems at both ends of the spectrum, the international community and the nation state, to have something that's in the middle that's located closer to people in their own place.
And yet acknowledging that there is something shining and wonderful in those UN documents that their governments have signed on to and that have really been, have really stood for something very special in the wake of the Holocaust.
Let me respond, I agree with you, there is something beautiful and shining as you put it in those documents and there's something that I believe in in terms of the fundamental dignity of the human person and some of these fundamental freedom from fear, freedom of expression and I certainly like the middle road that you're proposing between what you call in your book, a reality and aspiration.
Without aspiration, reality remains static and reality is not transformed.
The transformation of reality to make it conform more to the aspirations is something that does require human agency and I agree with you entirely that human agency is what the Enlightenment is really also all about in terms of what I was saying in my monologue lead in the declaration of human rights to dig into the human rights.
To declare is an act of affirmation, it's an act of agency and if I can step outside of the legal political sphere, in philosophical terms I also see it, there's a perhaps a sinister underside to this because my lingering high-to-garianism has it that the rights of man are connected also with this very aggressive self affirmation of man in quotes.
In a new age of humanistic triumphalism where now man is the ambition is also to more and more take over the role of God or in the absence of God or the withdrawal of God from the picture, now the human comes in with an extreme willfulness in order to reshape the world and refashion the world according to its aspirations according to its concepts of right.
And therefore we have all the convulsions and uprooting that we associate with modernity on behalf of this kind of progressivism in order to bring greater justice to societies and so forth.
And we know that there's been a lot of victims and casualties in the kind of uprooting of traditional based Western societies in this history.
However, that might be the price that one has to pay in order to bring about, if only in a partial way, these beautiful and shining rights which we enjoy and have enjoyed not perfectly but at least imperfectly in the West for a while.
And I'm fore sponsoring that.
I believe there's also a history however to the concept of things like the dignity of the human person and the freedom to live without fear and so forth.
And I think that it's a Christian prehistory.
How can I, I don't know how to say it otherwise except that to say that the absolute value of the individual is something that I find the seeds for or let's say the, the, the, the,
for the original conceptions in a Christian tradition.
So much so that when I quoted there the Pauline definition of faith,
as the evidence of things unseen.
And I think that the self-evident truths, nothing sounds more rationalistic
than a truth which is self-evident, yet at the same time nothing was less self-evident
than what was being posited as life, liberty in the pursuit of happiness
and government by the consent of the governed.
So man posits a faith.
I believe that in human dignity, I believe in these fundamental rights
and I'm going to make it happen through agency.
It's taking responsibility.
And perhaps bringing about something in the secular sphere
which in the Christian prehistory of these concepts
was left to the jurisdiction of God
and a kind of divine justice, not a human justice.
So I'm all for agency, but at the same time, I sometimes worry
that it's also a part of a larger picture of this unrestrained will,
what Nietzsche called, "the will to will."
Yeah, look, I'm certainly with you in being anxious about any sort of extreme messianic
declaration that my view of seeing the world ought to be everybody's view of seeing the world
and arguably, when there's been some scholarship that suggested that human rights is the new religion,
it's just instituting rationality as the central organizing belief.
It's taking, pushing God to one side and just putting the eutectloration in its place.
Anything that is pushed as the single answer is a form of extremism
and human rights could certainly be pushed to an extreme,
which I would not be in favor of.
Whilst my political view is that agency is an important aspect of my humanity,
I'm very happy to make that claim simply as my value system
and I'll make it on the basis of a nation will to power, if you like,
rather than saying that it's premised on something deeply spiritual that we'd find in us all
if we're any looked hard enough, Allah, and then you'll count.
I don't see the need to do that.
I can see that it's possible for me to claim that I'm lucky enough to have access
to a political system that's premised on values of human agency.
I believe that promotes good for me as well as good for other people.
Do I have the right, if you will, to impose that on others?
Well, absolutely not.
I don't have the right to impose rights on others.
Do you have the right to come to the defense of women who are subject to
the clear directives in the third world?
I have the right to say, I think women would have a better life if they didn't have to
go through that procedure and if they had means of economic survival without having to go
through that procedure in order to have a husband.
I can say that I believe I have a better life without the procedure than their life.
I don't have the right to say they're wrong for living in a society that practices it
and that culture is somehow less than my own.
I don't have the right to do that.
That's another form of extremism that I would absolutely not advocate.
Well, that's good.
I don't know where I come down on that either because not just that example, but any
examples where cultural relativism comes into the picture and then you say, well, I find
something goes beyond the limit of human toleration.
And therefore, in the name of my basic humanity, I will rise up and protest against it wherever
it occurs.
On the other hand, there are cultural practices which are so have such a long history in
particular traditions that I say, well, maybe in the West we do live in a particular island
of self-understanding, which is in no way exportable in all of its particularities.
So I like the idea that you don't want to go to the extremes.
It appeals to me a great deal.
So that's where politics comes to our rescue.
Remember, politics suggests that there are institutions through which people can direct
their opinions.
I would like to think that a good political system is one that can listen to my dissent or
my opinion.
And if I have enough who agree with me, then that might even become a majoritarian view
and that might over time change practices in my community.
That doesn't address practices of a minority that I might think are so way out that they
just need to be stopped.
But remember, you're conflating here Robert, the domestic and the international.
Domestically, we can change politics in a country, remember that has institutions that
will listen to us.
That's different from me sitting here at Stanford having an opinion that I back up with
a gun in another country.
That's completely different because that's taking the political boundaries of my country
and saying that they don't, they can extend to your country.
That's not okay.
That's where sovereignty is important.
That's where national boundaries do mean something because national boundaries.
Ideally, also delimits a political community where people can have disagreements and can
affect changes within their own political communities.
You have amnesty and international, for example, which does not know those boundaries,
at least in terms of its investigation, it doesn't interfere, it doesn't intervene.
But if it's a question of the torture of prisoners or the other sorts of abuses, it reports
some end to nounism.
Is there a, where does the domestic differ from this other order of basic human rights?
When human rights are produced through the barrel of a gun, then human rights are overstepped
the boundary.
What Amnesty International do is advocate, they use words, they use paper, they don't
use bullets, they don't use guns, they don't use armies.
There's this, there's a lot of difference between those two things.
Sure.
Oh, I know, I'm aware of that.
I'm wondering whether there are certain cultural practices that for us would be equivalent
to something like the torture of prisoners, whereas in the societies in which they occur,
they're not seen as abuses of human rights at all.
Well, sure there are.
Remember back to cyclone Katrina when we saw images of people standing on top of their
roofs waving and the helicopter's not picking them up.
Well, all you had to do was pick up newspapers in Europe and see a debate about whether
or not the United States committed terrible human rights abuses by not rescuing parts of
its population.
Was there an invasion proposed?
No, but that's a product of economic and political might and military might.
Yes, yes, there are different practices in different countries and what all I can ever do,
all I can ever do is advocate my preferred system.
I don't think it's the right thing to march into another country with an army and say,
well, you've got to stop practicing the threat of the system.
Is it different when people are being killed?
Well, maybe humanitarian intervention when it's truly going to save hundreds of thousands
of lives and there's a likelihood that that intervention is going to make things better
in the future.
That's probably an arguable case.
Going back to a random which I quoted and let me re-quote, he says that from imaginary
laws come imaginary rights, a bastard brood of monsters.
This phrase came to my mind when I was reading the United Nations Declaration, Universal
Declaration of Human Rights quite often.
I'd like to read you a few of the articles, but actually before that, in the preamble,
the very first sentence of that declarations, I was bewildered by it because it says,
"Where as recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights
of all members of the human foundation is the foundation of freedom, justice, and peace
in the world."
I said, what's gone on here is, yeah, they're looking for a foundation for human rights,
but they've taken nature out of picture.
They've taken God out of the picture, so the French and the American decorations don't apply.
And it's completely solipsisical or circular.
Recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of members
is the foundation of freedom, justice, and peace in the world.
I don't understand how the recognition of this inherent dignity can be the foundation
of things where you first have to find a foundation for the inherent dignity and equal
inalienable rights of people.
And so I think that this paranoia, to keep God out of the picture, keep nature, keep any
kind of notion of the sacred order of things and to try to found something as consequentialist
human rights on a purely human foundation, I think leads to this kind of fecklessness.
And I think, I hope it's not too strong a word, but let me read you some of those articles.
I mean, I could read a number of them, but everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including
reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.
Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being
of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing, and medical care, and
necessary social services and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness,
disability, widowhood, old age, or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his
control.
Everyone who works has the right to just in favorable remuneration, ensuring for himself
and his family in existence, supplemented if necessary by other means of social protection.
Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment.
I can go on.
I mean, for someone who believes that human rights should be universal and minimalistic,
this kind of proliferating series of a welfare concept of a state which provides for all sorts
of entitlements, calling them human rights in such an August context as the United
Nations, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, I think leads to the kind of laughter that
conservatives of our own day who would be the descendants of a Bethan would say this
is indeed a brood of monsters, imaginary rights that don't have any foundation in any
kind of reality.
And you can just about see Bentham exposulating.
He was a quintessential 19th century English gent whose embalmed body is at University
College in London.
I was at work.
He's in a glass cupboard and they've had to put a wax head on his embalmed body because
the students kept on taking his head out.
At one point his head was being apparently kicked around the courtyard by the students.
It's embalmed body by the way still goes to meetings that's wheeled into meetings at
University College.
So you've got that same turn of indignation.
Well, I think.
I think at a certain point.
I have the right to any one of my desires.
I think that one...
It's classic overclaiming.
You're making a deep point here that is one that is made, especially in the United States
where there's a minimalist vision of rights as negative rights.
In other words, the idea that government should stay out of your business.
And the concern is that the very notion of human rights gets cheapened when it's loaded
with all of these whims and fantasies that at the end of the day, a large checkbook
to fund even on this subject and everybody would want them.
Back up from minute, remember the UN declaration was...
It's a committed decision.
It was a document drawn up at the end of World War II when it looked like it was going
to be impossible to get any agreement from the nations of the world.
At the time it was negotiated, it was absolutely critical to keep religion out of it in
order to get the nation's states of the world to sign to it.
So it's the ultimate committed decision.
It's the lowest common denominator.
But here's the other thing to remember.
All of the UN documents and declarations are there for governments to sign on to it if those
governments believe in those aspirations.
They don't have to sign on to it.
Governments can make what are known as reservations to it.
And they do.
So the convention on the elimination of discrimination against women is signed by every state
of the world except to the United States is one of those who might be interested to hear
it is amazing.
But you could argue that the United States is simply following through this principle
that says it's better to only make international promises if there is a strong commitment
to each and every aspect of the international contract.
So I can respect that intellectual position.
On the other hand, other countries sign on to what's known as a seed or convention.
And it's clear they have no intention of putting those international obligations into domestic
frameworks.
And so you could argue that they cheapen the whole concept of international human rights.
You know, I don't often agree with many of the libertarian positions in the United States,
but I do agree with that intellectual position that says, "far better to make a promise
and intend to carry it out than to cheapen the whole promissory note by signing it with
your fingers crossed behind your back."
So you know, it's a fair point and I'm with you on it.
Are you a fan of the United Nations?
I am a fan of a single international organization that urges us to be our own best self.
I'm a critic of the United Nations overly bureaucratic institutions.
I'm a critic of its glacially slow processes.
I'm a great critic of the Security Council, which has its five permanent members as a historical
overhang of who the Allies happen to be at the end of the Second World War and the way
that China and Russia can use their veto powers in the Security Council.
Do I think the consequence of that criticism ought to be?
Well, I think what it requires is for creative thinking about how other institutions can better
administer some of those grand visions.
There are grand visions, there are grand schemes.
The worst thing you can do is put a grand vision into the hands of a committee, because
we've seen what happens when that takes place.
Yeah.
Well, thank you, Helen.
We've had a fascinating conversation with Helen Stacey who teaches law here at Stanford
and whose book Human Rights in the 21st century will be appearing in February with Stanford
University Press.
I'm Robert Harrison for entitled opinions.
If you want to listen to our previous shows, just log on to the Stanford's French and
Italian department, click on entitled opinions and you'll get our entire archive, or else
just go to iTunes, search for entitled opinions in the iTunes store and you'll find
all our past shows there as well.
Thanks again for coming on, Helen.
Thanks for having me.
For all you listeners, we'll be with you again next week.
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