Anti-American Protesters

[gagged_Louise]

http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html

I draw your attention to Article 29(3):

"These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations."

If your exercising your rights is contrary to the purposes of the UN, you can't do it. I find this abhorrent.

It's the argument of natural vs. granted rights. The US Constitution does not grant rights, it grants power to government. The enumeration of rights is considered a recognition, not a grant. The difference is that a granted right may be revoked by the granter, whereas a natural right is inherent in the individual.

The UN takes a wholly granter approach to human rights, with no recognition of natural rights. Therefore, the UN reserves to itself the power to violate the rights of the individual if their exercising that right is contrary to the UN's purpose.

*excusing myself for keeping on this side of the topic, but it seems vital and this is my last post in the thread*

About the UN Declaration, well, nobody denies that it's hard to create a declaration of human rights - whether it's as a "bill of rights" or more generally stated, philosophical - one that's easy to issue and interpret, with sharp lines and easy to use in political reality. Americans are still arguing passionately about the essence of the Bill of Rights written more than 200 years ago, and about its relation to the power machinery of the constitution and to universal human rights. The law codes of many countries have some of the kind of "limit clause" you cited.

The UN was formed by countries with very different ideas of law and how to use the law - even Afghanistan was one of the founding members I think - so there was a need for that kind of clause to make the declaration viable. Both Truman, Hubert Humphrey (who was instrumental in working on the declaration) and Stalin understood that. The declaration isn't legally binding by itself really, but it managed to get a majority in the UN at the time (1948) - the countries who put themselves behind it by virtue of that vote - pledging to accept it - included China, Afghanistan, Britain, Soviet Russia, the USA and Turkey. Not an easy bunch to unite on the issues of human rights!

The UN declaration wasn't written to be used for any politically unified state, and the chances of getting to anyone who violates any of those rights if they are not tried under national law has always been an issue under fire. The new league of nations came about under the principle that every state is sovereign on its own territory and that you can't normally drag a state to court outside its own territory, except in a tribunal of War crimes, genocide and so on (the Nuremberg court, which was put in the deep freeze during the Cold War and emerged again as a plausible idea only in the 1990s as the International Court at The Hague. The other week that court received one of the most notorious warmongers of modern European history, Mr. Radovan Karadzic.

I think we're a bit to the side if we start arguing about whether the rights of US citizens are always natural rights; in practice, many Americans tie them in to the status of citizenship, of being an American. And the risk that some of those rights can be revoked at a time that's judged to be an "age of emergency" is all too clear from what's happened under Bush (Patriot Act etc). They can also be restricted so they won't apply to everyone (earlier racial segregation, which went unopposed for many many years).

The USA is certainly not the only country where people believe in inborn human rights - and that's part of the foundation for what those people at Santa Barbara were doing.