Ideals fall short at UN

Editorial

Among the magnificent ideals represented in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are the right to equality of dignity and rights, including the right to life, liberty and security of the person, regardless of race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.

Among the various tragedies of the declaration is the misuse of its intent for political ends. This tragic abuse has allowed perpetrators of violence and discrimination, and their allies, to cloak themselves in the language of social justice even as they inflict injustice. The most egregious example of this took place at Durban, in 2001, when a conference ostensibly dealing with human rights and discrimination in fact transpired into a fantasia of discrimination and hatred.

Do the tragedies and shortcomings of the declaration diminish or neutralize its magnificence? Yes and no. Probably no one, even in the moment of moral triumph when the declaration was adopted 60 years ago this month, thought that this document would end the panoply of crimes and offences it catalogues. But probably most of the people involved in its creation thought that, 60 years on, we would be doing better than we are. Imagined from the ashes of the Holocaust, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has sadly failed to prevent successive genocides or, for that matter, billions of less catastrophic affronts to human dignity.

Yet, at the very least, the declaration provides a common understanding of the rights of humankind, so that we can make certain statements about right and wrong, about acceptable and unacceptable behaviors, on the part of nations.

Well, sort of. The Muslim world has expressed discomfort with some aspects of the document and some subscribe instead to the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam. As the Iranian representative to the United Nations stated in 1982, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is "a secular understanding of the Judeo-Christian tradition," which could not be implemented by Muslims without trespassing on Sharia, Islamic law.

This is especially concerning as a criticism, raising as it does doubt about the very first adjective in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Is this a fundamentally Judeo-Christian document? Or are Islamic countries just fundamentally at odds with universal concepts of human rights?

Despite the alleged "universality" of these values, and in spite of the stated reservations regarding their universality, the document has provided at least a common vocabulary for discussing human rights. So, even when people and nations who reject the premises of the declaration seek to criticize, say, Israel, they do so in the context of this vocabulary.

Ironically, because the declaration is a direct reaction to the Jewish experience in the Shoah, the spirit of the declaration is often turned against the Jewish state, which is individually and uniquely cited for transgressions even as far worse perpetrators go unrecognized.

In some ways, this inconsistency and hypocrisy is a product of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights itself. Those who condemn Israel most harshly in the international arena tend to be Islamic states or countries with majority or large Muslim populations. It is these countries who also have the worst record imaginable on human rights, so we have the phenomenon of the blackest pots calling kettles even blacker, even when the kettles are demonstrably not.

This makes marginally more sense when one considers the reservations expressed by many Islamic states, coupled with the reality that the Jewish state is perceived as a product of the same United Nations apparatus that gave us the declaration. Moreover, while the Muslim world has reserved its disagreement with the document, Israel prides itself as an upholder of universal values of human rights. And Israel is perceived by the Muslim world as the embodiment of Western (Judeo-Christian) values. Therefore, if they needed an excuse for criticizing Israel while ignoring the exponentially worse human rights records of their own countries, they can do so by, on the one hand, comparing the ideals expressed in the declaration with Israel's imperfect implementation of them, while, on the other hand, reminding the world that universal values do not apply to their governments' policies, since they are bound by something more holy and less mortal – Sharia.

To read the declaration now, with its optimistic and determined language, evokes a sadness created by the failure of the idealism of 1948 to reduce or eliminate the tragedies of 2008. While we celebrate the declaration's ideals, we recognize the shortcomings of its implementation. To read this magnificent document today is sad as well because we cannot get beyond the first word – universal – without encountering a debate.

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