Contents Author’s Note ix Introduction xi About the Author xii Part One: Identity 1. Human Reality and Rights 2. The Oneness of Humankind 3. Human Purpose 4. A History of Human Rights: From Empires to Nation-States 5. A History of Human Rights: To the Universal Declaration 6. Alternative Views of Human Rights 7. Unity in Diversity
1 3 9 13 21 46 66 80
Part Two: Society 8. Identity and Society 9. Rights and Government 10. A Global Civilization 11. The Twin International Covenants 12. Minority Rights 13. Rights and Development 14. Rights and Security 15. The Rule of Law
91 93 97 111 123 143 156 172 187
Part Three: Rights and Responsibilities 16. Creating a New Society 17. Promoting Human Rights 18. Education and Empowerment 19. Future Rights 20. Freedom and Will
193 195 207 224 228 232
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Appendixes I. Bahá’í Human Rights Promotion II. A Chronology of Selected Human Rights Documents III. Universal Declaration of Human Rights IV. International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights V. International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights
239 241 246 248 256
Bibliography References and Notes Index
295 323 363
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1
Human Reality and Rights Azlina binti Jailani and her fiancé were both Catholics living in Malaysia. Their marriage application was refused by Malaysia’s Civil Registry of Marriages, however, because under Islamic law Muslim women were not allowed to marry non-Muslim men and Jailani, an ethnic Malay who had converted to Catholicism in 1998, had a Muslim name. In 1999 Jailani tried to solve the problem by changing her name to the Christian-sounding Lina Joy. Unfortunately for Joy, this did not resolve her predicament: she was still listed as a Muslim on her national identification card. Her next step, not surprisingly, was to try to have her identification card changed. The registration department refused but it did offer her a way out. The department told her that she could go to the Sharia court and obtain an order stating that she had become an apostate. Joy went to the civil court instead. The trial court dismissed her application, explaining that under Malaysia’s constitution a Malay was defined as a Muslim. As the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty summarized, ‘Malays could not renounce Islam at all, the court argued, because they were defined by the federal constitution to be persons of the Islamic faith.’8 In Egypt, meanwhile, members of the five hundred-strong Bahá’í community found themselves denied their full range of civil rights. Access to those rights required an Egyptian identification card, and Egyptian regulations only allowed the cards to be issued to individuals who identified themselves as Christian, Jewish or Muslim. In effect, the government had decided that every citizen must belong to one of several groups, that it would determine what those groups were, and that anyone who did not comply would be prevented from obtaining birth certificates for their children, access to education and the benefits of healthcare. 3
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When the United States of America was founded, the Constitution strictly defined the value of the class of people kept as slaves: each one of them was worth ‘three-fifths of all other [free] Persons’9 for the purpose of a state census. It took 81 years and a civil war to correct this injustice but even then the authors of the relevant amendment were careful to state that they were only extending rights to ‘male citizens’. It took another 52 years for the voting franchise to be extended to that class of citizen known as women.10 All these examples are about the same three related issues. They are about human rights but they are also about our ideas of the nature of humanity and about how these ideas cause us to structure our communities and governments. As we have developed our understanding of what it means to be human, our laws and our ideas of human rights have evolved apace. The pages that follow will explore these relationships: the link between human rights, our conception of ourselves as humans and our methods of political organization. Change one and you change the others. Part One looks at how these intertwined ideas have evolved over time. Parts Two and Three consider contemporary human rights questions and how they influence other critical issues. To demonstrate the connection between human rights and human nature, the book also refers periodically to one specific model of human nature, the Bahá’í description of the human soul as a mirror of divine attributes,11 and how that model may shape the human rights discourse. The rights we recognize are based on our ideas of human identity, and our perceptions of human identity are influenced by the human rights paradigms in which we move. For example, when ruling regimes take the prerogative to grant and withhold relative rights to different groups, one of their methods is to try to control and define these groups’ identities – as has been the case with Malay Muslims, Egyptian Bahá’ís and American slaves. Professor Azar Nafisi has described the impact of this phenomenon on her and her literature students in modern-day Iran: These girls, my girls, had both a real history and a fabricated one. Although they came from very different backgrounds, the regime that ruled them had tried to make their personal identities and histories irrelevant. They were never free of the regime’s definition of them as Muslim women . . . Whoever we were – and it was not really important 4
human reality and rights what religion we belonged to, whether we observed certain religious norms or not – we had become the figment of someone else’s dreams.12
In the context Nafisi describes, the role of the state in creating and reinforcing identity is written into the law. Iran’s Law for Organizing Fashion and Clothing gives the Ministry of Islamic Culture and Guidance the mandate of ensuring that people’s clothing preserves and strengthens their ‘Iranian-Islamic culture and identity’.13 The ministry is charged with managing the design, patterns, production and distribution of clothes and is to ‘encourage the public to abstain from choosing and using patterns that are foreign and unfamiliar to Iranian culture and identity’.14 This effort at identity-building is supported by the entire weight of the government: to perform its task the ministry is obliged to oversee a committee composed of authorized representatives from the Ministry of Islamic Culture and Guidance, the Ministry of Commerce, the Ministry of Mines and Industries, the Islamic Republic’s radio and television organizations, the Planning and Management Organization and the Cultural Commission of the Majles (Parliament).15 The journalist Azadeh Moaveni writes, ‘I suppose to people living in free countries where women wear what they please, the difference between a relaxed dress code and a stern one sounds inconsequential. In fact, it mattered desperately.’ From 2000 to 2007, when women in Iran were given more leeway in their dress, ‘what in effect became acceptable was the expression of individuality’.16 One of the most notorious cases of state-imposed identity preceded the genocidal violence in Rwanda, where in 1994 a long-running struggle between the Hutu and the Tutsi for control of the country came to a climax with the murder of 800,000 people, most of them Tutsi. The firm demarcation between the two groups had not been inevitable; they spoke the same language, lived in the same villages and intermarried. In fact, they also sometimes switched their ethnic identities – until the Belgian colonizers, as part of their system of political control, introduced identity cards.17 Post-colonial governments retained this policy. Ideas about rights and identity are also influenced by less intentional social forces. Benjamin Friedman, an economic historian, argues that societies become more inclusive and sensitive to human rights during times of economic prosperity. Professor Rhoda E. Howard Hassmann states that human rights are products of the modern world, in particular 5
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contemporary theories about the nature of justice, and they are now universally applicable in principle only because of the world’s social evolution towards state societies. The recognition of human rights is characteristic of certain types of societies, Howard writes, particularly those that are liberal and/or social democratic. Howard asserts that while all societies do have underlying conceptions of dignity and social justice, most traditional societies lacked the concept of universal rights: I define human dignity as the particular cultural understandings of the inner moral worth of the human person and his or her proper political relations with society. Dignity is not a claim that an individual asserts against a society; it is not, for example, the claim that one is worthy of respect merely because one is a human being. Rather, dignity is something that is granted at birth or on incorporation into the community as a concomitant of one’s particular ascribed status, or that accumulates and is earned during the life of an adult who adheres to his or her society’s values, customs, and norms . . .18
But societies, and the perceptions of the people who comprise them, evolve. Ideas about rights evolve with them. The philosophy professor Alasdair MacIntyre writes that the transition from the ‘heroic society’ described by Homer to the democratic society of the Greek city-states was associated with a shift in how humans were viewed. In heroic society, identity came from an individual’s place within his or her community, which gave every person obligations and privileges specific to their relationships within their family and kinship networks. These responsibilities provided a shared moral code based on a common vision of the society’s purpose, and any attempt to evade them would be seen as a violation of the moral code and the social order. By contrast, the city-state (polis) was organized around the principles of equality and of citizenship engagement in politics, and MacIntyre sees within classical Greek philosophy and art a struggle to reconcile the heroic virtues of an earlier age with this new social reality.19 (The equality of citizenship, revolutionary as it was, was not open to slaves, women and metics, resident aliens who were foreigners or freed slaves.) Publisher and author Michael Shermer has discussed this conceptual evolution from a biological point of view: 6
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