Rights as habits of human conduct

At the current rate, there will come a time when the people who require the greatest protection on grounds of the universality of human rights will begin dismissively forging alternative pathways to justice, peace, freedom, and equality.

In my view, generally muted national, regional, and global observance of Human Rights Day last Sunday signalled a state of cognitive dissonance induced by cynically routinised breaches in the letter and spirit of enshrined rights of all varieties.

I would like to think that when the world assembled in 1948 to declare the universal, inalienable nature of human rights and to prescribe their tangible expression it was expected that the ravages of global conflict at that time would have provided an impetus that was urgent and seen to be indispensable.

Alongside the civil and political rights eventually came a vast suite of economic, social, and cultural rights. National constitutions and laws were codifying them. Systems of justice were being crafted to interpret them. Civil society was inculcating rights as foundational values for advocacy and change. More than 60 international human instruments have been created and adopted.

Our leaders were all over the planet signing pieces of paper and delivering speeches and press releases. We were seeing some as exemplars and others as reckless violators and pariahs. There was the institutional entrenching of values deemed to be important pillars of true development –intangibles that belong as much to statute as to stature and status. 

Yet, four days ago, some of the loudest state voices on such imperatives were found, when thin outer coatings were stripped, to be actively presiding over violations of the rights of children, military non-combatants, the poor, the displaced, the different, and the weak.

This is no esoteric parable. Genocide, invasions, threats to territorial integrity, systemic discrimination, state-sanctioned murder and violence – all there in real time before all our eyes.

Despite this, our Caribbean region, whose peoples have been collectively victimised through historical antecedent by the issues frontally addressed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has been slow to consider recognition of human rights as being the stuff of official instinct and habit.

Witness active resistance to the notion of all rights as an entitlement of all people. Our countries neither officially nor informally recognise such a truism.

Had the contrary been the case, current attitudes toward the LGBT community, migrants, reproductive rights, freedom of expression, and the rights of the vulnerable among us would have been settled matters of public policy and life.

It would have also helped us come to terms, far less painfully, with current regional and global developments that require an understanding of territorial integrity especially as it relates to the rights of inhabitants, deadly aggression at times of illicit collective punishment, discrimination on account of race and ethnicity, and the more stringent application of civil and political rights as preconditions to the achievement of economic, social, and cultural rights.

We could have told there would have been this difficulty with countenancing such difficult terrain. There is a sprinkling of special interest activism but too few national umbrella organisations in our region (I think our Bar associations should lead this, but they don’t) to capture these obligations within the context of developmental objectives.

The Sustainable Development Goals provided important pathways to understanding the connections, but our countries have not yet taken the hint. For example (and I raise this yet again), SDG 16 speaks to the promotion of “peaceful and inclusive societies” for sustainable development through “access to justice for all”.

A key target (16.10) promotes public access to information and the protection of fundamental freedoms. The Global Forum for Media Development, of which I am a part, put up a stout fight to have this target expressed. Caribbean countries (not T&T so far) have also signed on to the Escazú Agreement on access to information and public participation in environmental matters.

I am unaware of a single political organisation in T&T that put Sunday aside to remind their devotees about these things. Additionally, how many sermons in holy places addressed them?

It seems to be hardly a necessary annoyance at this time to let people know that there are terrible things in the world today that could have been so much different had people resolved to convert rights into durable habits of human conduct.