Human Rights

Nov 23, 2011 Editorial

It has been our hope that the issue of Human Rights would have been ventilated by the politicians during this period of debate and discussion. There have been many instances in which there were claims that the human rights of citizens were violated – and not only by the state.

Regarded as the foundation of international human rights law, the Universal Declaration on Human Rights (UDHR) is said to be the first universal statement on the basic principles of inalienable human rights, and a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations. Guyana is a signatory to the UDHR. Over the years, a whole network of human rights instruments and mechanisms has been developed to ensure the primacy of human rights and to confront human rights violations wherever they occur

It is salutary to remember, however, that in the initial vote by the then fifty-six members of the UN on the declaration, eight countries abstained. In stating the rationales for their position, the latter group, including Saudi Arabia and the then USSR, remind us that the premises undergirding the UNHCR arose out of a particular history in the west and that there may be competing visions of what constitutes ‘human rights’ in the world around us.

The USSR, guided by its Marxist ideology, insisted that the UDHR’s stress on the political rights of citizens without a complementary position on their economic and social rights, made the document deficient and flawed. Saudi Arabia pointed out that their state was ruled by Islamic Law – the Sharia – derived from the Koran and founded on a specific conception of man, whose aim is to fulfil God’s purpose on earth. This was missing in the UDHR.

For us in Guyana, we also had our debates on the nature and existence (or suppression) of human rights in the pre and post independence eras. But we now accept that fundamental to our conception of human rights is an emphasis on the liberty of the person: the right to physical security and the protection of basic intellectual beliefs. The notion of the person as having rights against an always threatening Leviathan state, was derived from 17^th and 18^th century European Enlightenment philosophical concepts.

The several Bills of Rights promulgated, articulated a clear dichotomy between the individual and the state. From this point onwards, legitimate government meant limited government – government that did not go beyond certain boundaries regarding treatment of its citizens. There were great struggles to put this concept into practice.

The culmination was the creation of a legal vehicle for controlling the powers of the state, which came to be known as ‘due process of law’. In many respects the greatest contribution of the west to legal theory, due process of law simply requires that the state be subject the rule of law. Simple but profound in its effects: the state may take no action not in accordance with its own established procedures. Implicit in the concept of due process is the necessity for a judiciary free from the insinuations of state control or influence.

The courts serve as the arbiter of the law and thus have the power and the duty to enforce the law against the state. Within this formulation lies the presumption of democracy. In elevating the rule of law to a position superior to the state, circumscribing state activity vis-à-vis the individual, and grounding the legitimacy of the state upon a consensual base, the groundwork for a democratic ethos was laid.

Today, as cries are raised – and citizens always retain this right – about possible infringements against their human rights, we must be reminded that the whole edifice is premised on a reciprocity between citizen and state. The state is subject to the law – but so is the citizen: the penumbra of the rule of law encompasses all. When citizens break that covenant and declare war against the state, they throw us back into anarchy. There are human rights, but there are also human duties.

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