Human rights universal standards—guidelines that lay out how to respect, protect, and fulfill the equality and dignity of all human beings. It doesn’t matter what gender, race, class, or situation you are born into, the idea is that you are born equal and these are the standards that you can reference to determine if your rights are being fulfilled (or not.)
In the United States, human rights are usually thought of in terms of civil & political rights—like the right to vote, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, right to a fair trial, et cetera…
Human Rights = civil & political rights+economic , social, & cultural rights
What’s with the United States & human rights?
The short version: The United States speaks about human rights from the perspective of human rights = civil & political rights… but that means that a whole section of rights are missing—which means that human rights can never be fully respected, protected, or fulfilled.
Rights are designed to be interconnected—why would you only have the “right to life” (UDHR Article 3) but not the right to “adequate standard of living” (UDHR Article 25). Likewise, what good is having the right to “own property” (UDHR Article 17) if one does not have the right to a social and political environment that makes purchasing anything possible, such as the “right to desirable work” (Article 23) and the “right to a social order that articulates this [Universal Declaration of Human Rights] document” (Article 28), how can the right to own property, as a right, promote equality?
Civil & political rights are extremely important, but they can only address individual and direct issues—that means that the social and political environment that people have to live in goes unchecked. That’s a frustrating blind spot.
On the other hand, only focusing on economic, social, & cultural rights doesn’t work either—if you have the right to “social security” (Article 22) but not the right to “participation in government & free elections” (Article 21)… that’s not going to help you very much either.
For that reason… Human rights are a complex, interconnected combination of these rights. The problem here is that the United States view of human rights comes from a long held tradition of only focusing on the civil & political aspect of human rights. This can be seen in the United States’ status when it comes to the “International Bill of Human Rights”.
On that note, a couple things to know about human rights treaties: They’re were born out of systems of International Law—which means they can be complicated… but here’s what it boils down to:
Isn’t the United States a world leader in human rights?
Sort of. We started out well… Former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was even the chair of the first Human Rights Council at the United Nations that drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But… Some things happened since then and… we currently look like this:
That’s how we look internationally. Orange. Tied with Sudan and China.
Here’s a more in-depth look at where we stand on human rights treaty participation:
Specifically, there’s two treaties stick out: the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and The Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). Mostly due to the fact that the United States is the only United Nations member state… who hasn’t ratified CRC, and it is the only country in the western hemisphere that hasn’t ratified CEDAW.
Why should Americans care about human rights… in America?
If you’ve ever been on an airplane, you know that warning about “if we lose cabin pressure an oxygen mask will drop from above… if you are traveling with a small child, please secure your own mask before you assist the child?”
