Linda Hogan is Professor of Ecumenics at Trinity College Dublin (@tcddublin) and a scholar in the fields of inter-cultural and inter-religious ethics, social and political ethics, human rights and gender. She is the author of Keeping Faith with Human Rights (Georgetown University Press, 2015).
This essay continues our series of pieces exploring the relationship between Natural Law and Human Rights in light of the State Department’s recently convened Commission on Unalienable Rights.
The Commission on Unalienable Rights has already generated significant criticism, much of it from human rights advocates concerned that its conceptualisation is flawed and its composition limited. Its stated purpose — “to provide fresh thinking about human rights and propose[s] reforms of human rights discourse where it has departed from our nation’s founding principles of natural law and natural rights” — worries critics who see the new Commission as but another salvo in the culture wars, and not as an opportunity to advance human rights around the world.
When announcing the details of the Commission, Secretary Mike Pompeo explained that he hoped that it would “revisit the most basic of questions: What does it mean to say or claim that something is, in fact, a human right? How do we know or how do we determine whether that claim that this or that is a human right, is it true, and therefore, ought it to be honored? How can there be human rights, rights we possess not as privileges we are granted or even earn, but simply by virtue of our humanity belong to us?”
These are important questions, to be sure, questions to which there are a variety of answers, including amongst champions of human rights. Indeed, the global resonance which human rights enjoys is precisely because it can incorporate a variety of complementary answers to the question of the foundations of human rights, instead of locating the answer in one particular tradition exclusively.
The charter establishing the Commission explains that the recommendations on human rights are to be grounded “in our nation’s founding principles and the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” However, this framing of the parameters of the discourse of human rights makes problematic assumptions about the historical development of human rights categories and, consequently, about the basis on which human rights claims are established. Certainly, the United States Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights in its Constitution represent crucial milestones in the articulation of the fundamental principle that all human beings are equal and endowed with certain unalienable rights. However, they did not afford equal dignity and rights to women, children or slaves. More than a century later, the 1948 United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) took another important step with its recognition of “the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family” and the enumeration of the rights to which all human beings are entitled. Read more via Canopy Forum