The discourse of human rights: drawbacks and opportunities
Many people on the left (mainstream or otherwise) align relatively uncritically with the pronouncements issued by neutral-seeming human rights NGOs. These organisations present themselves as “independent”, “apolitical”, just conveying value-free information to the public. The paradigm seems to be close to that of Consumer Reports. In order to avoid bias, “civil society” creates its own honest, neutral organisations, beholden to nothing but their principles, with no more power than their reputation to effect a change. While this paradigm may work out for Consumer Reports, it certainly doesn’t for the many organisations claiming to defend our human rights.
Human rights are political. Nature, for good or ill, hasn’t endowed man and woman with any rights beyond what they can conquer in struggle, and what may be utopian dreaming one day, becomes the bare minimum of decency a few decades later. Rights are not generally granted, but won; and this is the case whether the struggle is covert and violent, or overt, under the guise of law or debate.
The reason why this matters is, first of all, that neutrality in the field of human rights is all but neutral. At best, and assuming an olympian lack of bias, it becomes the relentless defence of a limited status quo. When such equanimity does not apply, which is all too often, the results are considerably worse.
