Which begs a second question: What if some form of the UN Declaration of Human Rights had happened earlier, say in 1908? The rights of children and nationalities and the disabled and Indigenous people and the environment coming to us late is better than coming not at all. Their investigators who gather evidence of atrocities in all conflict regions view humanity as a process. He has given a much-needed boost to groups like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the UN Human Rights Council.
The civilian dead lie in shelters alongside the living, and only during uncertain pauses in shooting can burial parties venture out.įamilies in search of food and water are murdered for sport, or tortured and shot for their cellphones and cigarettes.Īll this has made Putin the unwitting agent of the advancement of human rights. Nuclear plants and chemical storage units are hit. Apartment complexes are blown out, as are train stations, fire halls, shopping districts, gas lines, hospitals, schools and food markets.Ĭivilians hiding in underground shelters are struck with bunker busters. Ukraine’s cities are targeted with “dumb” weapons and banned cluster bombs. Not surprisingly, in three short months every rule to protect civilians in war has been broken. It was signed by the Soviet Union in 1989, but revoked by Putin in 2019. Article 51 of the 1977 Geneva Protocols for conduct during combat forbids attacks against “civilian populations as such.” Only recently have human rights been extended to non-combatants in wartime. That we view this war as senseless is affirmation of the appeal of the UN Declaration of Human Rights for universal human rights to replace profits, demagoguery and the othering of tribalism as the organizing principle of society. Putin’s order to “righteous” Russians (his word choice and phrasing is helped a bit by the patriarch of Russia’s Church who, it is reported, has accumulated a personal wealth of as much as $8 billion) is to “spit them - the flies - out of their mouths.” They might be spared cluster-bombs to avoid marring the facades of Moscow’s luxury-goods storefronts, but they won’t avoid being stuffed in jail with all the other “flies.” Those standing in public spaces holding up imaginary signs haven’t the right even to say nothing. The envy-green eyes of that paranoiac see his own people the same way. Putin justifies the mission and its means because the people of Ukraine have no value, no agency, and therefore no rights. Watching the million-dollar missiles hunting terrified, unsuspecting families cradling their most beloved children. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Until filmmakers are able to package Ukraine as a James Bond adventure, with Putin as the mad genius stroking a most beloved Persian cat, we are on our own to ponder its nihilism. More than being brutal, war is senseless. War rationalized is war utterly misunderstood. Films entertain us with scenes of brutality and compelling stories of love, redemption, heroism, manliness, revenge. What good are such protocols to the young mother in Bucha who was raped repeatedly by a drunken Russian soldier because she reminded him of a girl he had fancied in high school? Which begs the question: What good have these ideas done for the victims of civil and international conflicts since 1948 in Korea, the Balkans, Syria, Ethiopia, Southeast Asia, Afghanistan, Sudan, Iraq, Yemen and now Ukraine? To wit: every human of every age, gender, ethnicity, colour, social class, has the right not to be tortured, summarily executed, enslaved, degraded, discriminated against every human has the right not to be denied due process of law, freedom of movement, peaceful association, expression, belief, shelter, work, education, culture, privacy, dignity and environmental health.
Since then, more than 20 conventions, covenants and protocols affirming and supplementing that document have been ratified by the vast majority of the world’s countries.
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It took a series of world conflicts, including unthinkable genocide, for humanity to find the logic of what became the UN Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.
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