Modern Issues in Human Rights

Human Rights One of the major issues for the United Nations is human rights, which are defined by the organization as "right inherent to all human beings, regardless of race, sex, nationality, ethnicity, language, religion or any other status." These rights include "the right to life and liberty, freedom from slavery and torture, freedom of opinion and expression, the right to work and education, and many more" (UN.org, 2016).

A challenge with respect to human rights is that the nation-state is relied upon to safeguard or provide these rights to its citizens, and that this is far from the case. The head of Amnesty International discussed the need for people to stand up for their rights, and to hold accountable those regimes that do not respect these fundamental rights, pointing to the social media-driven events in 2011 such as the Arab Spring.

One thing that the Arab Spring demonstrated, however, is how strong a pushback there can be from those people who are in power, with respect to maintaining their power and minimizing the rights of the people. There were a few countries that saw their rights situations improve in 2011, but there have also been many failures. The events in Syria, for example, began with an Arab Spring rebellion but then turned into something worse, a civil war and the rise of ISIS.

Certoma (no date) notes that globalization is another threat to human rights. If the nation-state is responsible for ensuring basic human rights, and globalization reduces the power of the nation-state, then clearly this is a threat to the provision of human rights. Activists point to a wide variety of globalization issues. Trade agreements place legal authority in the hands of extrajudicial tribunals that operate outside national laws, for example. Worse, weak governments will naturally struggle to defend the rights of their citizens against strong multinationals.

Another challenge to human rights is that nations are not always endowed with the capacity to provide rights, in particular rights with respect to education, housing, food and other aspects. Certoma (no date) notes that the provision of these things can be a challenge for many states. Good governance is something that is a baseline requirement, for example, and not all nations possess this.

If a body had enforcement power with respect to human rights -- and none do -- then that body would still only be able to hold a nation as an abstract entity to account -- the specific government officials who have failed to deliver might be beyond meaningful prosecution. Thus, governments still lack meaningful incentive to provide human rights. Who is to be held to account in a failed state, for example? Further to the philosophical debate about human rights is the extent of the rights to be granted.

Certoma touches on this as well. The modern interpretation of human rights includes things like food, housing and education that cost money, and use resources. In the industrialized age, populations have exploded. There is an interesting ethical issue in granting as rights things that deplete resources without offering any check on how many can use those resources. There is a trade-off between the provision of resources to a rapidly growing global population, and the need to actually attempt to preserve some of this planet's resources.

The principle of human rights in terms of liberty, freedom and opportunity is widely accepted, but some of these other notions are a bit more challenging from a practical point-of-view. Even things as basic as clean drinking water and free education are problematic in poor countries and failed states, and the water issue in particular is only going to get worse. The nation-state might not be capable of delivering on the promise of clean water when there are chronic shortages.

The UN's conception of human rights also abuts culture, and this is particularly an issue when it is the nation-state that is responsible for ensuring human rights. The roots of human rights are squarely within the Western European context, views not necessarily shared or even fully understood by other cultures.

To be fair, it is reasonable that a nation that signs the Universal Declaration of Human Rights should be held to account for those rights, but ultimately not all cultures are in agreement about the philosophical underpinnings of the human rights concept. The universality of human rights, therefore, is subject to question, and in that the idea that such rights can and will be preserved by the nation-state. A fundamental reality about human rights, however, is that they are an ideal.

Nations have signed onto the idea of human rights because they represent an ideal condition to which all nations should aspire. Some.