Human Rights Interventions Throughout Human

Human Rights Interventions

Throughout human history, the existence and extent of natural, universal human rights has been a central question in ethics, moral philosophy, and government. Rationales have been created to excuse horrific tortures, mass genocides, invasions, conquests, enslavement, and practically anything else that can be imagined as growing out of the worst parts of human nature. For as long as such atrocities have been occurring, however, others have questioned the rights of the perpetrators and the victims, and have even used force to prevent what they determined to be violations of basic human rights. It is not really until the modern era, however, and really only in the past century, that the topic of human rights has become a global issue. News services are now able to instantly inform one part of the world about occurrences in another, and the global economy is often hugely affected by conflicts and human rights violations in resource-rich and conflict-laden parts of the world. Southeast Asia had a series of despotic and totalitarian regimes that regularly abused and murdered their citizens. South America, too, has its own set of similar, ongoing problems in the aftermath of the 19th century's colonization practices. Such problems also persist in Central and Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Just the factors that lead to such large-scale and officially sanctioned human rights violations are diverse and complex, so too are the responses by other parts of the world to the abusers and the abused. As the world community grows smaller, the question of authority and rights becomes more important. Intervention by outside people and countries in perceived human rights violations have become quite commonplace, increasing the number of conflicts between people with opposing or at least disagreeing views in the world today. The question of what exactly are the rights of humans, if they exist, and when and how intervention may be deemed proper, is of utmost importance in our modern world.

It is easy to say, as John Locke did, that all humans are entitled to life, liberty, and property (or, as the small cadre of landed gentry that were our Founding Fathers would have it, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness). It is far more difficult -- impossible, actually -- to develop a rational proof of these entitlements. Though our moral sensibility might agree with these sentiments, the premise that these are "unalienable rights" is intellectually unsustainable. Even more difficult, if this premise were to be accepted, is determining the meaning and extent of liberty. John Stuart Mill's "harm principle" is perhaps the most widely used and inclusive definition of liberty; basically, he believed that humans should be able to act and think in any way they wished that did not prevent anyone else from doing the same -- people are free to do anything that does not harm anyone else. Of course, the question of what constitutes harm is also a matter of debate, and even if that were settled, Mill's position is in no way a reflection of global consensus. Due to the rational disagreements with every step of establishing human rights, it would be foolish, arrogant, and despotic to claim that any system of human rights could be universally applied.

E.B. White, remembered more today for Charlotte's Web than his moral philosophy, famously addressed this concept by saying, "When a man hangs from a tree it doesn't spell justice unless he helped write the law that hanged him." This is not meant to be an apology or explanation for the consistent violation of these "rights," however; Robert Jackson, Chief Prosecutor for the United States at the Nuremberg Trials for Nazi war criminals after World War II, claimed general consensus of every civilizations published laws against murder as justification for charging high-ranking Nazi's with international crimes. Though the world failed to act on -- in fact, willfully ignored -- the first hints of the Holocaust and Hitler's Final Solution, it intervened via an internationally sanctioned judicial process after the fact, punishing many of the men responsible for the atrocities of the death camps. Still further debate was carried out in the establishment of the Untied Nations, which has adopted a Human Rights charter and established a permanent international court, the Hague, to deal with large-scale human rights violators. Though it is still naive to think of these rights as naturally granted and indisputable, if the concept of human rights and intervention to prevent and end encroachments upon them is to carry any real meaning or weight, it must come from as broad and complete a consensus of the international community as possible.