Universality of human rights

On June 22, we held a presentation in one of the open Belarusian spaces dedicated to the topic of political prisoners as part of the International Week Against Torture. One guest asked the question: how relevant is it to require a country to comply with the points of this declaration if the government of the country has not ratified the treaties or agreements under which it undertook to comply with the points of a document related to the UDHR ( note, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights )?

In fact, this is a good question, the answer to which determines how close you, as a person, are in your values to the concept of “human rights defender”. But first, let's look at what the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (hereinafter referred to as the UDHR) is.

First, the UDHR was a response to the horrors of World War II, which showed how far the paths of nation-state ideologies can lead from humanity and humanity. After all, mass persecution, murder, and even genocide were legal under the laws of the Nazi regime. Also, however, as well as the horrors of mass persecution of dissenters in the USSR.

Diagram from 1935 explaining the German Blood and German Honor Law and the Reich Citizen Law.

The world community decided to turn to the concept of Natural Human Rights given to us from birth, as human beings, and fix them in the form of a document (UDHR), which eventually acquired the status of a recommendation for the UN member countries, and in the future - for all of humanity. Subsequently, on the basis of the UDHR, the participating countries adopted two binding treaties: “ International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights ” and “ International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights ”.

The government of the Republic of Belarus, in particular, denounced (terminated) the optional protocol of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights at the end of 2022. Does this mean that the state has the right to decide which of the natural human rights to observe and when, and that we should not complain that certain forms of law are not observed in countries that have not signed the relevant treaties?

Without a doubt, the answer is a resounding NO ! The very concept of Natural Law implies its primacy over any laws enacted within the nation-state. And the main distinguishing feature of natural human rights is their universality with respect to any human being anywhere on the planet or in space. Moreover, there is not a single country where national legislation is fully in line with the UDHR. Even if we imagine such a hypothetical country, then any state machine is unlikely to cope with the task of ensuring the inviolability of all natural human rights and most likely will make mistakes, if not at the level of legislation, then at the level of law enforcement. That is why human rights organizations that deal with the rights of women, children, migrants, representatives of the LGBTQ+ community and others can be found even in the most progressive country.

Thus, a human rights defender is the bearer of supranational and extrastate morality and values , whose task is to notice injustice within the framework of state-human relations, and do everything possible to restore the observance of human rights given to him by birth, relying on non-violent methods and tactics.