China and universal human rights standards
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Note: Footnotes Omitted
Part
I. The Evolution of the Universal Human Rights
The International
covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights
notes that human rights ¡°derive from the inherent dignity
of the human person.¡± In western disciplines, human rights are,
by definition, the rights one has simply because one is
a human being¡ªdroints de l¡¯ homme, Menschenrechte,
¡°the rights of man.¡±
The concept of human rights is
rooted in westen civilization. The concept has existed under several
names in European thought for many centuries, argubaly since
the time of King John of England, who was forced by his
subjects to sign the Magna Carta, or Great Charter
which enmerates a number of what later came to be thought
of as human rights.
It is also said that human rights are one of the
monumental legacies left by the Enlightenment.
In the seventeenth to nineteenth ceturies in Europe
several philosophers proposed the concept of ¡°natural rights,¡±
right belonging to a person by nature and because he was
a human being, not by virtue of his citizenship in a particular
country or membership in a particular religious or ethnic
group.
During the American-European revolution
period, the two famous declarations, the 1776 U.S. ¡°Declaraton
of Independence¡± and the 1789 France ¡°Declaration
of the Rights of Man,¡± turned scholarlistic concepts
of human rigthts into offical statements, holding that people
by their nature were entitled to life, liberty and property. At the same time the concept of universal
rights took root.
Philosophers such as Thomas Paine, John Stuart Mill
and Henry David Thoreau expanded the concept.
The Industrial Revolution created
a tention between downtrodden working class and capitalism,
drawing people¡¯s attention to the issues of economic and
social rights. In
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries conference
were held at the Hague, in St. Petersburg and in Geneva
in an effort to limit the new industrial capacity for destruction
of human life. The
conference gave birth to the modern version of humanitarian
law, but failed to stop the carnage of World War I and World
War II, during which the behaviors of Nazis, Japanese and
sometimes of the Allied Powers convinced the world that
human rights might be related to the subsistance of mankind. The modern human rights thereafter
started its first step at the end of World War II. U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt raised the war against Japan
and Germany to a moral level in his 1941 speech to Congress,
articulating the well-known four freedoms: freedom of speech
and expression, freedom of religion, freedom from want,
and freedom from fear. In January 1942, the Allied Powers claimed
that complete victory over their enimies was essential to
defend life, liberty, independence and religious freedom,
and to preserve human rights and justice in their own as
well as in other lands.
After the World War II, the involvement
of the United Nations folstered the human rights progress.
The United Nations was founded on the premise of
¡°faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and
worth of human persons, in the equal rights of men and women,
and of nations large and small.¡± In 1948 the United Nations passed the
Univeral Declaration of Human Rights, which prescribes
that all human beings are entitled to all human rights and
fundamental freedoms set forth in the declaration.
This is the most fundamental of all U.N. instruments;
most subsequent human rights statements are based on its
tenets. in
1966 the United Nations passed the International Covenant
on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the International
Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the Optional
Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political
Rights. This documents, known collectively as
International Bill of Human Rights, form the basis
for all other human rights instruments.
The United Nations also established institutional
mechanism such as the United Nations Commission on Human
Rights (CHR), the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and
the High Commissioner for Refugees, to watch, discuss and
oversee human rights situations around the world.
To summarize, the Western concept
of human rights is literally built on the fundamental priciples
of (1) protection under law; (2) genuine popular participation
in government, that is, democracy; (3) economic greedom
of choice, which provides material base for personal and
political freedom; and (4) freedom of the mind, spirit,
or will.
Many believe that, with the enactment
of the International Bill of Human Rights, and other regional
and national human rights intruments, the universal standards
of human rights obligations, which encompass a wide range
of personal, legal, civil, political, and other rights,
have been farily established.
Although states in the world refuse to allow
much international enforecement, or even monitoring,
of their performance to in living up to these obligations,
and although domestic practice regulaly falls far short
of international profession, these rights are widely accepted
as more or less binding international standards.
Notwithstanding the above optimistic
view, it is a matter of fact that the issue of universal
human rights in a diverse world is probably the most profond
philosohical issue facing the human rights movement today. There are, at least, three dichotomies
challenging the concept of universal human right, namely,
the civil-political versus economic-social dichotomy, the
unversality versus cultural relativism dichitomy, and the
International obligations versus state sovereighty dichotomy. The traditional human rights concept enuciated
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries focused on political
and civil rights.
In recent years some human rights theorists have
referred to the economic and social rights as ¡°second generation
rights.¡± The second dichonomy demonstrates the
debate between advacates of universal rights and advacates
of the ¡°cultural relativist¡¯ school of human right.
The latter presents the argument that human rights
are a ¡°Western conctruct with limited universal applicability.¡± With respect to the third dichonomy, developing
countries, especially big members among them like China,
repeatedly assert that human rights could never be raised
over state sovereighty. As a matter of fact, all the three dichonomies
have been employed by China in refuting international critizism
on its human rights records.
