The Rights Revolution Read Online Free PDF Page A

Canada, governments do not always respect our civil and political rights. They may even suspend them sometimes, as happened with the War Measures Act in October 1970, when the federal government, believing there was a civil insurrection in Quebec, used military power to arrest more than 500 individuals suspected of terrorist sympathies and hold them without trial. When the emergency passed, basic rights were restored. But what if they aren’t? What if governments take them away for good? These things happen. Germany of the 1920s was a democracy, with a constitution and the rule of law. But the Great Depression and the ensuing economic chaos drove millions of German voters into the arms of Hitler. It cannot be repeated too often that when Hitler came to power in 1933, he enjoyed vast popular support. So did the reforms he subsequently put through: abolishing the rights of certain citizens to marry, acquire property, and vote. These Nuremberg Laws, which abrogated the rights of citizens who happened to be Jewish, were enforced by lawyers and judges raised in the best traditions of European law. One terrifying aspect of Nazi Germany is how gross and immoral injustice was given the semblance of legality, and how these injustices basked in popular support. Indeed, had Hitler died in 1937, he might have gone to his grave as the most esteemed German since Goethe. The lesson of this story is that even a Reichtstadt, even a lawful society, can lend its support to measures that turn fellow citizens into pariahs. From the denial of civic rights to the obligation to wear a yellowstar in public was but one step. And from the yellow star to deportation to the east was but another. And with deportation to the east, as far as most Germans were concerned, the problem simply disappeared.
    This terrible story tells us that there must be some higher law, some set of rights that no government, no human authority, can take away. The purpose of this higher law is to rouse the individual conscience from its slumber. When that happens, perhaps an ordinary citizen, watching his neighbours being taken away, will have the courage to think, This may be legal, but it is not right. Then he or she may say, out loud, “This must stop. Now.”
    Such moral courage is always a mystery, but we know that it springs from example, from what our mothers and fathers taught us was right, and also from what our culture tells us we should believe. The cultural resources of the German people were immense: from Schiller’s “Ode to Joy,” which celebrates the deep oneness of all mankind, to Beethoven’s “Fidelio,” with its unforgettable ode to freedom. Yet we know that these great works did not inspire ordinary Germans to see the abomination that was before their very eyes.
    In the face of the insufficiency of Europe’s existing cultural resources, the Allies were determined to create a new language capable of strengthening the capacity of ordinary people to refuse unjust orders and to stand up when fellow human beings were taken away. The central idea was indivisibility — that is, that no one’s rights are separate from anyone else’s, and that if they come in the night to violate the rights of Jews, they are violatingthe rights of everyone. This is the deeper context, I think, in which we should understand the emergence of human rights after the Second World War. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, proclaimed by the United Nations in December 1948, was the first of a spreading canopy of laws whose essential function was to give ordinary human beings the capacity to recognize evil when they see it, as well as the authority to denounce and oppose it. Human-rights legislation is thus one instrument we have devised to strengthen civic courage and deepen the capacity of individuals to stand up for each other.
    The Universal Declaration of Human Rights altered the balance between national sovereignty and individual rights. With the declaration, the rights