Lessons From The Law
Author is Senior lecturer at KCEF Law College Pulwama
The context and validity of the new enthusiasm for the human rights is well articulated in the Human Development Report. It says:
The 21st century’s growing global interdependence signals a new era. Complex political and economic interactions coupled with the rise of powerful actors, open new opportunities. They also call for a more visionary commitment to building institutions, laws and enabling economic environment to secure fundamental freedom for all: all human rights, for all people in all countries.
While this optimistic contextualisation of human rights provides a sense of hope, it also raises certain questions: Who are these ‘powerful actors’ and what is the nature of the ‘enabling economic environment’? The corollary questions would be: To what extent are the new powerful actors different from the hegemonic regimes in the global north? To what extent is the ‘enabling economic environment is different from the neo-liberal economic prescriptions? Such uncomfortable questions become a thorn in the flesh for our desire and struggle for the realisation of human rights.
Rights are considered as legitimate claims that give rise to correlative obligations or duties. Human rights are understood as those rights which are inalienable and inherent to the very ‘being’ of a human being. International obligations and the human rights law, consisting of international treaties. International customs and general principles’ of international law, legally guarantee them. Though the emergence of the international rights regime can be traced back to the establishment of the UN system in 1945 and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948, the history of human rights discourse has to be located in various struggles for freedom, justice and equity in different parts of the world, rooted in diverse cultural and political contexts.
The UN Charter reaffirms faith in fundamental human rights, promotion and encouragement of respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all,
without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion. The UDHR adopted by the UN General Assembly on December 10, 1948, inaugurated a new phase; and led to a relatively more international discourse on human rights. The 26 Articles clearly articulate the basic charter principles of equality and non-discrimination (Articles 1-2), Civil and Political (CP) Rights (Articles 3-21) and Economic, Social and Cultural (ESC) Rights (Articles 22-26). The politics of passing UDHR was an indicator of the ideological and-cultural contestation very much constituted in the modern human rights discourse.
Though the UDHR was a remarkable moral and political achievement, it did not impose international legal obligations on the states. The protracted process of negotiation was a site of cold war power politics. It took decades of negotiation and debates before adopting the International Bill of Human Rights [comprising of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (196 and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966} was and finally came into force in 1976.” Over a period of fifty years, a coherent international human rights framework has emerged through a series of international covenants and conventions.12 The Vienna World Conference on Human Rights adopted the key principle that ‘all human rights are universal indivisible, and interdependent interrelated”.
Author is Senior lecturer at KCEF Law College Pulwama
