The universal basis of human rights

On December 10, 2023, we will mark the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) proclaimed by the General Assembly of the then-nascent United Nations Organisation. This truly universal document received contributions from brilliant people worldwide, including P C Chang (Zhang Pengchun), Hansa Mehta from India, Shaista Ikramullah from Pakistan, and others from Iran, Egypt, Lebanon, etc.

Former head of the Gender Unit at Amnesty International, Gita Sahgal, wrote in the London-based online publication openDemocracy some years ago, “Two of the most important drafters were Hansa Mehta of India and Charles Malik of Lebanon, who was Committee Rapporteur. Hansa Mehta, an extraordinary activist and brave member of the Constituent Assembly in India, was responsible for the wording of Article I, ‘All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights,’ arguing that if the word men was used, it would not be regarded as inclusive but rather taken to exclude women. She was the key figure who ensured gender equality in the document.”

Current UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said: “Hansa Mehta of India … without whom we would likely be speaking of the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man rather than of Human Rights.”

While Hansa Mehta did not insist on gender-neutral pronouns in the rest of the document, her influences extended to parts of India’s Constitution, as historian Ramachandra Guha notes in his book India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy. He quotes her: “We have never asked for privileges. What we have asked for is social justice, economic justice, and political justice. We have asked for equality, which alone can be the basis of mutual respect and understanding and without which real cooperation is not possible between man and woman.” In contrast, the late US President Ronald Reagan’s UN ambassador, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, once characterised the UDHR as “a letter to Santa Claus.”

The UDHR was expanded later into the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, the three together known as the International Bill of Rights. Further elaborated in other treaties, such as the Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, and the Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, among others.

All the UDHR articles have been copied in other global treaties, as noted above, and even in the constitutions of decolonizing states. For instance, Article 19 of the UDHR reads, “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” (Note the prescient use of the words ‘through any media’.) It finds an identically numbered article in the Constitution of India, but with restrictions added.

The UDHR inspired the constitutions of decolonizing countries, especially those the UN had a say in drafting, such as post-Apartheid South Africa’s, Cambodia’s, and East Timor’s. While in the late 20th century, the rise of “Asian Tiger” economies such as Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Taiwan, as well as China’s rise under Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s, led leaders such as Singapore’s late leader Lee Kuan Yew and Malaysia’s Mahathir Mohamad to challenge universal values with “Asian Values,” the rise of South Korea as a vibrant democracy under President Kim Dae-jung and Taiwan under President Lee Teng-hui debunked this notion.

Each right mentioned in the UDHR has a UN special rapporteur looking into their observance. Periodically, these special rapporteurs seek to visit countries to examine the observance or lack thereof of the particular rights they oversee. No prizes for guessing how many requests to visit on the part of these special rapporteurs are being ignored by the Indian government.

Article 13 of the UDHR—1) Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state; 2) Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country—becomes poignant when considering millions of Palestinians, the real Semitic people, are denied this right, whereas settler-colonial Europeans, North Americans, and others claiming Jewish ancestry can get to occupy vast parts of Palestine under an Apartheid regime and unleash continuing reigns of terror against its residents. Non-Jewish critics of Israel get labelled “anti-Semites,” and vast numbers of Jews and Israelis opposing Apartheid are “self-hating Jews.”

(The writer is a senior journalist)