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TechnoratiThinking Internationally - Acting Locally
Americans ignored Martin Luther King when he urged that the civil rights movement broaden to become a human rights movement just as the nation earlier ignored FDR when he proposed a bold human rights framework for the US. Human rights are not part of the American psyche, are not part of our laws, are rarely mentioned in the media, and they are not in the US Constitution. To be sure, Civil and Political Rights are part of our Constitution, but these are citizens' rights, not human rights. America had a short flirtation with human rights, in the disorienting post-World War II period. Europe was in ruins and America was magnanimous. Shortly after the UN was founded in 1945, a small committee was formed to draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The US was supportive and the committee was chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt. The US signed the 1948 UDHR, not a legal treaty but a document of great international significance, still today.
The initial idea in 1948 was to redraft the UDHR as a treaty and send it out to states for their signatures and ratification, but the United States became increasingly adamant as the Cold War dragged on that it would not ratify a treaty that was such a bold challenge to the rights of capitalists. The UDHR advances civil and political rights as well as property rights, but it also encompasses social security, freedom from discrimination, and spells out certain rights - the right to work, to an adequate standard of living, to adequate food, to medical care, to assistance in old age, to special protections for mothers and children, and to education. The stalemate was finally broken when the UDHR was divided into two: International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). The truth of the matter is that the US is party to neither. It uses a legal loophole so that its signature on the ICCPR is not binding ("not self executing").
Students in my two classes this semester read the constitutions of other countries. In one class the focus was human rights (housing rights, gay and lesbian rights, rights of indigenous peoples, rights to peace, healthcare rights, rights of women, and so forth). In the other, the focus was labor rights (collective bargaining, decent pay, maternity leave, vacation with pay, and so forth). University of Richmond Law School provides online access to almost all state constitutions with English translations. Remarkably, most countries have recently revised and expanded their constitutional human rights provisions along the lines of international human rights law.
Empowered, the students decided to have a Mock Constitutional Convention where they would ceremoniously unfurl their nearly 60 Amendments they had written during the semester. We invited a few local leaders to join the conversation and to briefly speak - the Mayor of Chapel Hill, the Mayor of Carrboro, labor organizers from the University of North Carolina, NAACP members, and local activists. The two mayors are justifiably proud of their progressive cities. They have collective bargaining whereas the state and university do not. The residents of Carrboro recently voted to impeach Bush. Chapel Hill is one of the nation's leading cities on green energy, and both mayors are pleased their municipalities advance the rights of gays and lesbians. Both mayors described their towns as having (their words) "human rights orientations."
Is there a problem? You bet there is. Like all American cities Carrboro and Chapel Hill are plagued by human rights abuses: homelessness, inadequate health care, food insecurity, inadequate labor protections, low wages, long work hours, migrants who live in terror of raids, discrimination, obscene gaps between black and white incomes, and growing numbers without health insurance. Protection of farmers' rights is incomplete as is realization of equality for African Americans and other minorities, and since human rights and environmental protections go hand in hand, it is imperative that the two cities cut carbon emissions, reduce reliance on private automobiles, and have race- and class-neutral policies for waste sites.
We have come full circle. Chapel Hill and Carrboro cities are situated in capitalist America, a nation where the gap between the wealthy and the poor is greater than any other industrialized country, a nation with the highest child poverty rates among all the OECD countries, and, indeed, the US has not ratified a single human rights treaty. Is it hopeless? Set this aside for a moment and consider that countries around the world, all mostly poor, all much poorer than the US, have revised their constitutions to embrace human rights. My next point has astonishing implications. An international network, People's Movement for Human Rights Education, is assisting cities around the world to become Human Rights Cities. Most that have started pilot projects face far more complex challenges than any American city does, including deep, structural poverty (Timbuktu, Mali) and one, decades of civil war and genocide (Musha, Rwanda). Others in the network are in capitalist countries, including Winnipeg, Canada, and one American city, Eugene, Oregon is not in the network but models itself along similar lines.
Before we shrug and toss off the idea that American cities do not have the democratic capacity for such projects, we should recall that when Tocqueville came to America in 1831 he found communities to be animated, inclusive, and highly participatory. Because many American cities are still today potentially democratic, we can turn to them again to advance deeper forms of democracy and to propose they be Human Rights Cities. This requires building broad coalitions and partnerships, and beyond that, reaching out and involving all citizens as economic and social security expands and becomes universal, and as cultural and social pluralism more securely anchored.
Judith Blau teaches at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and is president of the US chapter of Sociologists without Borders.
18 Comments so far
Show All@ heiderose1 refers to an example of voluntary community action to correct abuses called "environmental racism", in which the more privileged members of a community dumped their crap in the less privileged neighborhood. The underdogs rose up in defense of their civil rights and privileges as co-equal members of the community. They defended their "human rights" and demonstrated the effectiveness of real democratic community.
But this is not what Judith Blau is talking about. Ms. Blau wants to rewrite the Constitution. "To be sure, Civil and Political Rights are part of our Constitution, but these are citizens' rights, not human rights." She would amend the Constitution to correct this failure to address universal, international, human rights.
What Ms Blau would have the Orange County Commissioners do is implement a local version of the universal declaration of human rights, that is to say, make environmental racism unlawful, because among our smorgasboard of universal human rights is the right to a clean and healthy environment. The success of voluntary community action described by heiderose1 would not satisfy her.
Ms Blau ascends her soapbox and declaims: "Is there a problem? You bet there is. Like all American cities Carrboro and Chapel Hill are plagued by human rights abuses: homelessness, inadequate health care, food insecurity, inadequate labor protections, low wages, long work hours, migrants who live in terror of raids, discrimination, obscene gaps between black and white incomes, and growing numbers without health insurance."
Ms. Blau does not like capitalist, voluntary America. She has in mind a utopian vision of a socialist Amerika in which "human rights" are the LAW. And what agency will oversee the enforcement of this declaration of universal human rights? The STATE, friends, the all-powerful STATE, to which you will sacrifice your liberty in the name of the GREATER GOOD.
Judith Blau is the latest incarnation of Carrie Nation who brought us Prohibition, but the latter day Ms Blau has her sights on grander goals. She not only wants to protect us against alcohol, but against any and all violations of our universal human rights. She will save us from drug abuse, smoking, and child abuse, and wrap us in seat belts and helmets, and prevent us from saying bad words ("hate speech") and in general stand over us like the Holy Mother of God and make sure we always do the right thing, or face fines and or imprisonment by the benevolent STATE.
Live Free or Die.
sign and circulate thank you http://www.PetitionOnline.com/2021456/
A worrying trend in the UK is the campaign by the right (the right wing media, led by the Sun, the Mail and so on, the Tory party, NuLabor) to repeal our essential Human Rights Act and replace it with a highly unsatisfactory copy of the US notion of "citizens' rights". Whose rights will then be excluded by such a substition reveals its true motivation. It's part and parcel of the right's drive to make us ever more American and ever less European.
Community activism works! Here is great example from Chapel Hill/Carrboro in Orange County, NC, of how a determined group of local groups and individuals overturned a 'done deal' decision by the Board of County Commissioners that reeked of environmental racism.
For 35 years, the historic predominantly African-American neighborhoods on and around Rogers Road and Eubanks Road have been used as the county's dumping ground. Initially, the residents were promised that the landfill would be closed after 10 years. Not only did the landfill not close, it was expanded several times and has turned into an "industrial waste super park" that includes not only the solid waste landfill, but also a construction and demolition landfill, a solid waste convenience center, a hazardous waste drop-off point, a yard waste drop-off and mulch center, and a leachate pond.
Every time the waste facility was expanded, residents were promised that they would get 'amenities' such as a park, sidewalks, and--most importantly--water and sewer hook-up for their contaminated wells. These promises were not kept.
When it became clear the that the existing waste facility would not be adequate to deal with the county's waste beyond 2011, it was decided that Orange County needed to build a transfer station and ship its waste out of state. The site for this station: the Rogers and Eubanks Road communities. Enough's enough, said the residents, and decided to fight this latest assault on their communities: http://www.carrborocitizen.com/mill/2007/09/21/rogers-road-presentation
The Rogers-Eubanks Coalition to End Environmental Racism (CEER) was organized by neighborhood residents ably led by Rev. Robert Campbell and Neloa Jones; the Chapel Hill Carrboro Branch of the NAACP; the Environmental Justice Network; the West End Revitalization Association; the Women's International League of Peace and Freedom; the Orange County Progressive Democrats; members of the UNC-CH student body, faculty and staff; and local churches.
As more and more Orange County residents have become educated on this issue, the greater the public pressure has grown for municipal and county officials to reconsider. The County Chair of the Democratic Party, Jack Sanders, has spoken eloquently and passionately at City Council and BOCC meetings about the need to live up to the values of environmental justice that the party professes in its platform. http://orangepolitics.org/2007/10/local-dems-support-rogers-road-neighbors/
On November 5, 2007, the Orange County Board of Commissioners voted to reopen the search for a place to site the waste transfer station! The Rogers/Eubanks area is not excluded from the search, but this is a great victory for the coalition. And believe me, they intend to win the next round as well!
MiMiCcs,
I love your analogy about Democracy as a marriage between socialism and capitalism, and how we need a "marriage counselor" or even "alimony" (presumably to be paid from capitalism to socialism.)
Please pardon this takeoff, but this somehow reminds me of why I'd sure like to see a bunch of new Democrats to be "counselor" with more hearings, or "lawyer" to get the alimony flowing better. I think there could even be a case made for how capitalism has recently gone wild and started domestically abusing it's partner, socialism.
With property prices plummeting most cities will soon have to stop collecting the garbage let alone provide more social servies.
The days where the US was a republic and the states had the power and money ended with the income tax established in 1913. Since then, we have went from a republic democracy to a corporate state controlled by a central government with a private central bank (Federal Reserve Corporation).
The corporations and state work hand in hand with each other to maximize corporate profits, while the Fed inflates the money supply and creates inflation which they profit from w/o congressional oversight, and they arrange loans for the US Treasury to pay their bills when there is a
deficit (none of this is free). The government fights wars and engages in covert actions that we pay for to protect our corporations access to resources and profits in other countries. The citizens wealth is plundered by the conspiracy. Mussolini called this Corporatism, otherwise known as Fascism.
A Democracy is a marriage between socialism and capitalism, with the state helping balance the needs of citizens and corporations. Today, the state is 100% on the side of corporations over the citizens, their motto is whats good for business is good for the people. We need a marriage councilor, or better yet, a divorce lawyer and alimony.
Capitalism continues to rear it's ugly head at the world, and while the rest of the world recoils I feel like the people of the United States (perhaps present company excluded) are still being duped. I teach university freshmen and am astounded at the number of students who believe that sweatshops in the third world, notorious for human rights violations, are actually helping people. As long as they don't see it first hand, it's hard for them, I think, to feel attached in any way.
On the flip side, I think researching other constitutions and drafting new amendments is a brilliant idea for an in class activity.
Among the very useful and relevant chunks of information, one of the ideas promoted in this essay, explicitly or not, is that we can't look to Washington for leadership, but should instead work around Washington when it builds hurdles against people. Of course, we've witnessed a great acceleration of capitalist hurdle-building in Washington over the past seven years. It's been a hideous advance by the class war aggressor. The whole world is aghast. US liberals were caught with their pants down. They are still down.
One of the things that has changed is that capital can no longer hoodwink the people like it did before. The spell is broken. The scruffy hair on the back of the beast has been exposed. No amount of psychological warfare is going to cover it back up.
Capital can't get along with people. Capital plays only the zero-sum game of domination. While goals such as universal human rights appear to be the most positive manifestation of the popular will, the ease of achieving those things is most dependent on the level to which we reign in capital, push capital back down into its harness to take orders, like a beast of burden, from the people. Orders of, by and for the people.
Our National Government is corrupt and oppressive. I'm not sure it can be fixed absent a Constitutional Convention.
A principle of the 21st Century is "decentralization." The internet drives decentralization. It lessens the power of Government, Corporations, and other centralized entities. Power flows to the extremities, we the people.
It only makes sense that Democracy would decentralize as well. Local and State Government is much more likely to respond to it's Citizen efforts. Local change will eventually drive State and National change. This makes good sense and it allows substantially more flexibility in policy making to reflect the differences between the States and Localities.
A reverse approach might be as effective, considering where we are (profit at any cost)....Meaning, let's have the capitalists get together and declare THEIR rights: "the right to exploit, rape and even destroy whatever is in the way of our ever-increasing advantage over the vast majority of human beings," etc. Maybe if we could get THEM to say it all aloud, everybody worth a damn on the planet could share a moment of solidarity in throwing up in revulsion from these failed human beings....And then we could start rediscovering what it is to be alive without a "profit motive"...http://ancientgreece-earlyamerica.com
Probably the first thing to do is to make most Americans aware that the UDHR even exists. Part of our brainwashing from schools and corporate media is that we are somehow the shining leaders in all things related to Human Rights and democracy. Many Americans accept this unchallenged, and don't even know that something like the UDHR even exists.
Just teaching people that much of the rest of the world has taken the concepts of Human Rights further than America would be a step in the right direction. And pushing to make American cities 'human rights' cities as described above might be a start.
PS ... its the spirit of Eleanor Roosevelt that we really need to invoke.
it'll only get worse and never get better. this country is circling the drain, and unless someone can invoke the spirit of FDR kiss it all goodbye.
While it is true that concerns about "the rights of capitalists" was a factor in the failure of the United States to formally ratify the covenants designed to implement the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the political opposition to US ratification rallied behind a right wing legalism campaign that in the 50's and early 60's was pushed by the American Bar Association.
The Bogeyman most fear mongered about was that ratification of the covenants would result in American state and federal courts recognizing a whole new laundry list of individual rights that went beyond the Bill of Rights guarantees already in the US Constitution. As fate would have it, just when the Senate was gearing up to debate ratification, a California trial court issued a decision (the Sei Fuji case) that in fact treated international human rights as a source for enforceable individual civil rights claims.
The ABA proclaimed the California case was proof positive that ratifying the covenants would create a radical and unpredictable set of new individual rights that could be seized upon by liberal judicial activist judges (Bogeymen II). The Senate backed off on formal ratification, and years later ratified only the ICCPR with the "legal loophole" mentioned in Judith Blau's article added on, sort of like one of George Bush's signing statements.
All in all, there are some sad parallels between the fate of the League of Nations and the fate of the UN-sponsored human rights movement that took off in the aftermath of World War II. Both were products of American idealism, and both fell far short of achieving their respective goals when the United States backed off on ratifying the very treaties that our government had been so instrumental in drafting. The opponents were institutionally organized. The proponents had no institutional base, and were largely disorganized.
It's certainly good to see that folks like the
People's Movement for Human Rights Education are keeping some of the dream alive a half a century later.
Bill from Saginaw
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A program to adopt human rights without labor rights is empty nonsense. Without some degree of egalitarianism, the haves will mercilessly bully the have-nots into misery and despair.
Thanks to this author for asking us to pay attention to the constitutions of other countries. Most of us Americans want to imagine we lead the pack on freedom and human rights. But to a similar extent that we're now losing on education progress, we're also losing on having a proper appreciation of the wisdom (in some cases, anyway) of our worldwide neighbors.
This bottom-up strategy is important for organizing people at the local level and making local American societies strong and independent so that others will not easily roll over them. Upon these strong, networked, grassroots, and deeply democratic societies, we can build a nation that not only respects human rights and engages in deep democracy, but one that returns to the forefront in nurturing our rights.
as above-so below....until we get rid of the criminals on the very top of our nation..things will not get much better on a local level..but bless those that take on the burdens at the local level..one on one..one by one...it takes small pebbles pounding away relentlessly to even begin to makes a mighty wave.we all need to do what we can.