Harry Targ : The United States Violates The Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Eleanor Roosevelt viewed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as her
greatest achievement. Image from Creative Commons.
Numerous international human rights documents firmly establish the principle that no human being can be “illegal” or outside the protection of the law. Yet despite the clearly established principle that discrimination and abuse based on immigration status are violations of human rights, U.S. government policies continue to sanction human rights violations against migrants and immigrants.
Federal immigration
enforcement policies, including border enforcement measures by Customs and
Border Protection (CBP), have led to an increase in racial profiling, border
killings, and denial of due process rights. Immigrant workers are often
abused, exploited, and have become scapegoats and ictims of racism and
stereotyping. (See The American Civil Liberties
Union, “Human Rights and Immigration,” aclu.org).
Nameless People
The world is observing a massive violation of human rights
being perpetrated at the United States/Mexican border today. And the human
tragedy has many historical parallels.
Over sixty years ago Woody Guthrie wrote his famous song
“Deportees” in 1948 decrying that “All they will call you will be ‘deportees.’”
And “they chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves.” He wrote
at a time when the US political economy depended upon temporary immigrant
labor.
Since the 1940s particularly, the globalization of the
economy, increased violence and repression within countries (largely involving
United States interference), growing income and wealth inequality and
poverty, and the rise of repressive regimes everywhere, emigration has
increased. Some estimates indicate that 37 million people left their home
countries (some 45 countries) between 2010 and 2015 for humanitarian reasons.
Many more people were forced to flee their homes and communities to other
locations within their own countries.
One of the ironies of world history is that capital in the
form of investments, trade, the purchase of natural resources, the
globalization of production, and military interventions have been common and
necessary features of capitalism since its emergence in the sixteenth century.
But, paradoxically, and except for the global slave trade, the movement of
people has often been defined as “illegal.” The idea of national sovereignty is
been used to justify branding some human migrants as “illegal,” while others
receive legal status. If capital is and has been global, the movement of people
should be respected as well. It makes no sense, nor is it humane, to brand any
human beings as, Guthrie’s term, “deportees.”
The
Universal Declaration of Human Rights
The horrific atrocities of World War II led nations to
commit themselves permanently to the protection of basic rights for all human
beings. Eleanor Roosevelt, the widow of the wartime President, Franklin
Roosevelt, worked diligently with leaders from around the world to develop a
document, to articulate a set of principles, which would bind humankind to
never carry out acts of mass murder again.
In addition, the document also committed nations to work to
end most forms of pain and suffering.
In December, 1948, the year Guthrie wrote his
song, delegates from the United Nations General Assembly signed the
document which they called “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” It
consisted of a preamble proclaiming that all signatories recognized "the
inherent dignity" and "equal and inalienable rights of all members of
the human family" as the "foundation of freedom, justice, and peace
in the world."
The preamble declared the commitment of the signatories to the creation of a
world “in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and
freedom from fear and want...”
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights consisted of 30 articles, with
varying degrees of elaboration. The first 21 articles referred primarily to
civil and political rights. They prohibited discrimination, persecution for the
holding of various political beliefs, slavery, torture, and arbitrary arrest
and detention.
Persons had the right to speak their mind, travel, reside anywhere, have a fair
trial if charged with crimes, own property, form a family, and in the main to
hold the rights of citizenship including universal and equal suffrage in their
country.
The remaining nine articles addressed what may be called social and economic
rights. These included rights to basic social security in accordance with the
resources of the state in which the persons reside; rights to adequate leisure
and holidays with pay; an adequate standard of living so that individuals and
families had sufficient food, clothing, shelter, and medical care; and
education, free at least at the primary levels.
In addition, these nine articles guaranteed a vibrant cultural life in the
community, the right to enjoy and participate in the arts, and to benefit from
scientific achievements.
While each article in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights provided a rich
and vivid portrait of what must be achieved for all humankind, no article
speaks to our time more than Article 23. It is one of the longer articles,
identifying four basic principles:
· Everyone
has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favorable
conditions of work, and to protection against unemployment.
. Everyone, without discrimination, has the right to
equal pay for equal work.
· Everyone
who works has the right to just and favorable remuneration ensuring for himself
(or herself) and his (her) family an existence worthy of human dignity, and
supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.
· Everyone
has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his (her)
interests.
Using the language of our day, the principles embedded in
Article 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights constituted a bedrock
vision inspiring the global 99 percent to rise up against their exploiters from
Cairo to Madison, to Wall Street, to cities and towns all over the world.
The global political
economy is broken. The dominant mode of production, capitalism, increasingly
cannot provide work, fair remuneration, rights of workers to speak their mind
and organize their own associations, and the provision of a comfortable way of
life all because the value of what they produce is expropriated by the top 1
percent of global society.
Data about the world, data about the United States, and right now the
experience of emigres from Central America seeking their human rights, make it
clear that there has been a 30-year trajectory in the direction opposite to the
rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Global
inequality is growing. The rights and abilities of workers to form unions are
shrinking. Standards of living of most of humankind are declining. The ability
of most workers everywhere to acquire secure jobs is declining. And, in the
case of people fleeing their own countries in desperation, they experience
incarceration in brutally inhumane camps.
Fundamentally, the world is witnessing a denigration of the vision articulated
after World War II that “never again” would sectors of humanity be victimized
by economic injustice, political repression, and state violence.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights must now become
the standard by which national policies are judged. Anything short of the
principles embedded in the Declaration constitute a crime that must be opposed.
