On Human Rights and Politics

I reserve the right to digress.

It's really not healthy lying on your tummy (or really chiseled and hard pecs) on your bed with your laptop/Apple and think the proverb really went 'an Apple a day keeps le medecin away!'

En Contraire...

anyway

Human rights cannot be divorced from politics.

Politics is the vehicle by which we futher human rights. Political action leads to legislation, which in turn serves the larger human rights cause by either protection or enforcement.

Activists are what they are because they are attempting to influence the public, and are hoping that enough public pressure would spur politicians on to adopt their positions and translate them into policy. It's therefore really hilarious when a human rights activist tells you he 'hates politics and politicians'. No 'human right' can be enforced without politicians, but politicans, definitely, can do without human rights activists. That is the nature of relations between the two.

Human Rights are a human invention and creation. Nothing is self-evident about it.

Rights can be understood in various levels and degrees. Underneath the culture of every society lies certain very very broad commonalities. Every culture has an idea of 'good', 'bad', 'the moral', what should be protected, what should be treasured, so on and so forth. Go up higher those levels, and the differences become more stark and evident. Thererein lies the problem of enforcing a 'universal' standard of Rights.

The embodiment of Rights in legal documents itself raises a set of legal, linguistic, and historical problems. Legal documents are open to interpretation. The Common Law system is premised upon the continual building-upon on a tradition - particularly with reference to past judgments, and the creation of new norms with new cases. The use of law to protect or enforce rights therefore engenders change and evolution. The interpretation of those rights therefore can change.

The abuse of interpretation is however not always avoidable, given the problems of linguistics - semantics, in particular. Meaning changes with context. The problems of a 'universal' definition triple-fold.

Then there's the issue of 'freedom to' and 'freedom from'.

IS freedom necessarily about positives? The freedom to have sex with animals or the freedom to live a frigid and virginal life?

We give 'things' which are unable to speak for themselves 'rights' too. We say that children have the right to be protected. But why shouldn't children be given the right to choose their own parents or their own school? why should the forest have a 'right' from destruction and us humans the right to use its resources at our will?

Who told us that we 'know better' and that we therefore have the right to decide about the fate and lives of others?

Should the parent in a polygamist sect have the right to make her 14 yr old daughter marry a 40 yr old man?

Given the myriad of opinions and views, we need politics. Political parties advocate positions and sort out the mess. They simplify things, giving us debatable but generally discernible principles and policies. Otherwise nothing would be decided.

WE need activists to remind politicians not to get too presumptious. A govt should be scared of its people, not the other way round. But activists nevertheless do not make for a good govt.

balance balance balance.