Highlight 51/2022 – Fiction meets reality: A human rights invention based on historical exclusion
Juan Pamplona, 6 December 2022
During the movie Avengers: Infinity War, Thor responds “all words are made-up” while planning a visit to Nidavellir where he would later build Stormbreaker with the help of Groot, Rocket and Eitri. That phrase might seem irrelevant and even absurd when related to human rights at an international level; however, what if the son of Odin was actually accurate? In other words, what if human rights’ poor enforcement mechanisms, lack of global coverage and illegitimacy are the result of its fictional nature?
Initially, and to attempt to prove this idea, it is crucial to recall the city of Valladolid, Spain. This city hosted the debate of Valladolid from 1550 to 1551. The core of the discussion was whether Amerindians could be attributed intelligence and, thus, be categorized as humans entitled to rights, such as waging war against the Spanish empire because of colonization. This example briefly demonstrates that, originally, human rights did not conceive a universal coverage in its inception.
Contrarily, human rights aimed at covering a set of specific individuals (white Western men, with property, wealth and education) and symbolized the perfect moral, ethical and legal cover to achieve their interests (colonization, slavery, etc.). Eventually, human rights’ limited range faced serious challenges regarding other populations that obliged them to enlarge their scope e.g. the controversy caused by slavery, deliberations on women’s rights, and advocacy on children’s rights. Recently, the dispute about rights has transcended humans and spilled-over to whether non-humans like animals, rivers, natural reserves, can be protected or not by this regime.
Nevertheless, this tendency to expand after traditionally neglecting populations because of their race, sex and age can be interpreted by other non-Western States and communities as a strategy to prevail rather than as a genuine interest to empower different populations. This is clearly revealed when some groups, in an attempt to justify certain decisions, behaviors and actions, de-humanize their counterparts to impede any reference to human rights; also, with regard to the double-standard by Western States in the cases of Guantanamo and drone strikes killing civilians in the Middle East. More recently, on 24 November 2022, these double standards were again raised in the special session of the Human Rights Council on the human rights situation in the Islamic Republic of Iran, when Iranian delegates underlined that the same Western States that accused Iran are also breaching human rights in their own territories but were not being named-and-shamed at the UN level.
Consequently, many communities around the globe approach the issue of human rights as a construct that, rather than sincerely recognizing equality in diversity and empowering the whole of humanity, embodies an ethical, moral, social, legal, economic, and political instrument at the service of Western interests. Therefore, predictably, the targeted States and communities object to human rights enforcement mechanisms, use consensus-based voting at the UN as a possibility to obstruct and voice their complaints on alleged human rights issues and call attention to the political treatment of the Human Rights Council and the Security Council of the United Nations when touching on human rights violations from non-Western States or regions, such as the Iran case.
Ultimately, applying Thor’s logic to the concept of “human rights”, these are “made-up” words that were not intended to benefit all human kind.
Juan Pamplona, Highlight 51/2022 – Fiction meets reality: A human rights invention based on historical exclusion, 6 December 2022, available at www.meig.ch
The views expressed in the MEIG Highlights are personal to the author and neither reflect the positions of the MEIG Programme nor those of the University of Geneva.