United Nations’ “Declaration of Human Rights” (1948)

My blog posting will address two separate issues: first, the status of human rights in the first sentence of the Preamble (71); and second, the qualification of entitlement in the first part of the Article 2 (72).

I find this first sentence of the Preamble perplexing. The emphasis in this first sentence is on “recognition,” since everything hangs on it. This recognition is the “foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world” (71). But is there a difference between the recognition of the “inherent dignity” of the human person and that “dignity” itself? What constitutes “recognition” of that dignity? I would surmise that it means the legal and political recognition, i.e. by legal, political institutions, and not the recognition of John Q. Public, private citizen. But if recognition is separate from that dignity, I question if there is such a dignity and what its basis is. Is the recognition of that dignity what constitutes that dignity? Such dignity is a lovely thing for two individuals to speak about on a summer afternoon, but that conversation means little in comparison to the legislative and judicial actions bearing on that dignity. The latter is what matters for the UN.

However, I think we can come to the following agreement: that this statement in the preamble could be construed as the conclusion in the argument the Declaration advances. In other words, even seemingly innocuous political documents like this Declaration make arguments and therefore require reconstruction. The question is, what are the premises affirming this conclusion. I’ll leave that to you all, or our classroom conversation.

The second issue I wanted to raise concerned the meaning of the phrase “or other status” at the end of the first sentence of Article 2. We might ask who is the “everyone” being granted in this sentence, but the answer to that question comes in what follows, by the characteristics of what it means to be a human—we’ll address this concretely in class on Friday. But when the authors write “or other status” that seems troublingly ambiguous. For example, does this other status include an individual’s judicial condition? A person guilty of a crime and imprisoned, or worse, on death row for a crime, both imprisonment and the eventual death sentence are infringements upon an individual's human rights. And let’s consider the cases in which this would be truly problematic, such as that of war crimes. Even if “other status” does not include war criminals, it would seem that they would be covered by “political distinction,” since all agents in wars are acting for political causes.

This turns me back to the first question. What is the status of these rights? Are they something that should be recognized, as a kind of ideal goal for the international community?