Human Rights don’t grow on trees and are not discovered by science; somebody has to make them up according to their own idea of what is right. Every right is also, and perhaps primarily, a restriction on the freedom of others to prevent or discourage actions that would infringe on that right. Can one human decide what is a right for all others? Probably not. Can all but one human decide what is a right for that one dissenting human? That is an ideologically, culturally and morally tempting conclusion, but it does not logically follow that the voice of the majority is morally right or objectively correct just because it is a voice of the majority.

In lieu of universal agreement, the dissenting minority has only one reason to comply with the judgement of the majority: awareness of the unequal capacity for violence. But if recognition of universal rights is reducible to violence in defence of what we value then perhaps the rhetoric of rights is just an euphemism for the threat of violence. In the context of human rights we justify violence in the name of what we all supposedly need or value, but as pointed out by Joseph Raz (“Human Rights Without Foundations”, Working Paper 14, University of Oxford Faculty of Law, 2007) “scant attention is paid to the difference between something being valuable, and having a right to it.”

The doctrine of human rights is a relatively new addition to the political discourse, with its first explicit appearance in the French ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man’ 1789. The first legally binding international formulation was implemented by the United Nations in 1948. Since then, substantiated violations of human rights became a legally justifiable reason for military intervention.

“Human rights define a set of entitlements that individuals are said to hold against states as a result of some fundamental need, interest or vulnerability common to all human beings.” (Guy Aitchison, ”Are Human Rights Moralistic?”, Human Rights Review 2017) The State is typically the only party empowered to adjudicate and enforce such entitlements, ”with the effect of obscuring its own role in sustaining exploitative, unjust structures.” Aitchison concludes that human rights entail establishment of a relationship of dependency on the agent who most threatens us, what in turn obscures the broader economic and social processes causing abuses and deprivation (human rights are myopic), and that formal recognition of human rights by the political elite presupposed the right to impose this judgement on All of humanity (human rights are paternalistic).

The later worry has a further consequence of providing any interested party with the means of exploiting these a priori pronouncements (or their creative interpretation) to advance their own agendas at the expense of others, without the need for further justification of the underlying claim of right. A recent example of this was a very successful LGBTI campaign in Australia, insinuating that refusal to allow same-sex marriage constitutes a violation of human rights, despite the fact that this claim was evidently false (Joslin et al. v New Zealand, Communication No. 902/1999, U.N. Doc. A/57/40 at 214, UN Human Rights Committee 2002; Chapin and Charpentier v. France (no. 40183/07), European Court of Human Rights 2016) and that same-sex marriage may itself constitute a technical violation of human rights (Michael Kowalik, “Same-Sex Marriage and Human Rights”, Quadrant, September 2017).

According to Raz (Ibid.) “International law is at fault when it recognises as a human right something which, morally speaking, is not a right or not one whose violation might justify international action against a state” but this line of reasoning can be extended to human rights activists and interest groups as well. Anyone who would attempt to limit the freedom of another on the basis of human rights must also bear the responsibility to verify and demonstrate that the alleged right is in fact, morally speaking, a universally binding right. Failure to engage in deliberation whether a claim of right is morally or otherwise rationally binding on others may therefore constitute a violation of the alleged human right to live free from oppression.

Taking account of the recent history of human rights, expansion of freedoms and protection for formerly persecuted minority groups does correlate with the development of the human rights apparatus, although a causative relationship is not evident. On the other hand, the security apparatus is more or less overtly stripping our traditional rights (right to privacy, to bare arms, freedom from medical coercion) while curious new ‘rights’ are being promoted (right not to be offended, right to die, to same-sex marriage, to equal opportunity and pay without regard for differences in personal capacities, to Sunday trading and personalised number plates).

The doctrine of human rights may well reflect the established moral sentiment and moralistic prejudices of the majority, but it also serves to subvert sovereignty of nations. Furthermore, thanks to public consciousness of human rights and the formal apparatus for intervening against human rights abuses, parties engaged in armed conflict have gained a strategic reason to commit war crimes against their own people in order to blame their adversary and thereby elicit military support from other nations on humanitarian grounds. The doctrine of human rights implicitly motivates false-flag terror and attrocity propaganda.

Is there another way to guard our freedoms and rights that would not be subject to the arbitrariness and political risks associated with the human rights doctrine? I suggest that robust sovereignty, respect for the national character, customs and values is perhaps the closest we can get to grassroots protection of what we value. And if some of our values are indeed objectively deficient then our economic and cultural expression is bound to reflect that deficiency, we therefore have a reason to continuously deliberate, in the interest of international standing, economy and culture, about improving who we are and how we relate to one another. Living with more objective, realistic value-commitments increases our chances of being effective and productive in the real world. Conversely, living according to ungrounded, fanciful ideology is bound to result only in illusory advances and material depreciation. Reality is normative precisely in the sense that it punishes delusion and rewards realistic intentions. Instead of depending on mysterious workings of the human rights apparatus we could just take responsibility for our own actions and conditions of existence, do the best we can under the circumstances without pleading for benevolent dependency or blaming others for profit.

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