JCTR Bulletin 48 - Human Rights & Human Wrongs

In this article about human "rights and human wrongs,'' John Carroll, S.J., starting with an anthropological perspective shows us that affirming human rights is not a clear cut matter and points out that upholding one right may mean the repression of another.

My thoughts go back to my graduate days, at an American University, in the late 1950s. Many of my fellow students were anthropologists, steeped in what was termed cultural relativism: they had been taught not to judge other cultures from their own ethnocentric perspectives.

Hence, if they found that a tribal people whom they were studying exposed unwanted infants and allowed them to die, they were only to comment, ''Well, that is part of their culture, of their way of doing things; it helps to maintain the balance between population and resources. We do things differently, but Who are we to say that they are wrong?''

Yet many of their generation found such easy answers totally inadequate to the horrors of the holocaust in which millions of Jews that had been put to death by the Nazis in Germany and the occupied countries during World War II. It would have seemed obscene to argue that killing Jews was part of the Nazi culture, and ''who are we to say that they were wrong?''

The Allied powers after the defeat of Germany had struggled with the same issue, made more acute by the fact that the killing had been legal according to the laws which the Nazis themselves had made. Thus in the Nuremberg trials the judges had come up with the concept of ''crimes against humanity,'' which need not be based on any written law.

It was on that basis that some of the Nazi leaders were punished (readers may recall the scene in ''Schindler's List'' in which the brutal commander of the prison camp is finally hung) and the search for others still goes on. My friends agreed with the action taken at Nuremberg, although some saw the weakness of the argument about ''crimes against humanity.'' If all the non-Jews should agree that Jews should be killed, would that make it right?

Instinctively, they saw that the real issue here was the dignity of the human person. One of my professors, herself a secularised Jew, put it bluntly, ''I can't prove it. I just feel it in my gut.'' Others recalled the more elegant expression of the American Declaration of Independence: ''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; and that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.''

The basic insight on human dignity goes far back on history. In the Old Testament, for example, the human person is seen as the image of God (Genesis 1:26f); respect is due therefore also to the alien and the stranger (Exodus 23:9; Leviticus. 19:34). In the New Testament, Christ again and again enjoins concern for the weak, the out-cast, the stranger (Matthew. 25:31-46).

Interestingly -- and -- this can be a lesson for us today-the practical consequences of this basic human dignity came to our consciousness only very slowly. The early Church did not question the institution of slavery; in the culture of the time it seemed ''natural'' and an economic necessity. St. Thomas Aquinas saw basic rights as those to life, liberty, and property; others added freedom of thought and association. The enlightenment saw human dignity as fundamental and absolute. Yet Thomas Jefferson who wrote the Declaration of Independence and detested slavery, owned slaves, as did the Jesuits living in Maryland.

Implicitly, the good of the economy and society were preferred to the rights of individuals. The Church itself was cool to human rights from the time of the French Revolution and its Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, which could be interpreted to mean that human freedom was absolute and subject to no moral law.

Nevertheless, the experience of Nazism was overwhelming, and the great Catholic lay philosopher Jacques Maritain influenced the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as did the future Pope John XXIII. The document stressed that human rights come before the State and are not dependent on it; they are universal and apply to every human being.

Yet this did not end the discussion: the document established no clear priorities among rights, and strong differences remained over the relationship of individual to social rights and the common good. The social nature of the person and his or her obligations to society are recognized. But exactly where the balance is to be struck when individual rights and those of society seem to be in conflict is not specified. Thus authoritarian governments to this day accuse it of trying to impose western individualism on the world.

In fact the point where the balance may be struck may depend on the culture in question. Let us take one example: the tension between freedom and equality especially in the economic sphere. One cannot, it seems, have total freedom without sacrificing equality; for some are always more intelligent and industrious than others, and they will move ahead.

Nor can one have perfect equality without sacrificing freedom, as radical socialists have long realized. The question then seems to be: how much freedom and how much equality? As long as neither is done away with completely, this may legitimately be left to the culture and historical circumstances of each nation.

Pope John XXIII, in Pacem in Terris (#9), strongly affirmed human rights in a form close to that of the UN Declaration. The same is affirmed by the Second Vatican Council in its declaration on religious freedom and again by Pope John Paul II in Centesimus Annus, (#44). Moreover, in his address to the United Nations in 1995 the same Pope argues that the drive for freedom that propelled the liberation movements of the previous decade bespeaks a universal awareness of human dignity and human rights, an awareness that they are in fact universal. In other words, they are the birthright of every person born on this earth.

The UN Declaration was followed in 1966 by two international covenants: one on civil and political rights, and the other on economic, social and cultural rights. Unlike the Declaration, these covenants provide procedures for monitoring their implementation, including in the case of civil and political rights a mechanism by which citizens may bring a complaint against their own government before an international body.

This was in fact done by a group of NGOs in the Philippines in 1995, and resulted in set of ''Concluding Observations of the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights'' of the United Nations, sitting in Geneva, dated 19 May 1995.

These observations are very critical of Philippine government performance in several areas: preventing the economic and sexual exploitation of children; the practice of detaining juvenile offenders together with adults; the situation of Filipino overseas workers; and particularly the use of criminal law (PD 772) in dealing with the people of ''squatting.''

Although not widely publicised in the Philippines, they constituted an international black eye for the nation and may have contributed to the eventual repeal of PD 772.

The real issues today involve the relation between different rights, the priority among them, and between individual rights and the common good, between ''universal'' rights and cultural norms. Some examples: how much education and social formation is necessary before one can properly exercise the right to political participation?

Where is the dividing line between the individual rights of parents and the good of the family? What about religious tolerance when this runs counter to a particular religious tradition? The suspension of civil rights in time of emergency? And close to home, what about ''spray-painting'' the houses of suspected drug pushers? And finally, national sovereignty and outside intervention in cases like Kosovo, Chechnya and (in future, perhaps) Mindanao?

The questions are real and there are no easy answers. But as we begin the new millennium, we carry with us not only the burden of massive wrongs of the past century but also the great advances made in recognizing the basic dignity of the human person who ''as the visible image of the invisible God, is therefore by his very nature the subject of rights which no one may violate-no individual, group, class, nation or state'' (Centesimus Annus, #44).

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