From: wcs@anchor.ho.att.com (bill.stewart@pleasantonca.ncr.com +1-510-484-6204)
Date: Mon, 4 Apr 94 09:32:02 PDT
To: wd6cmu@netcom.com
Subject: Re: THOUGHT: International Electronic Declaration of Rights
Message-ID: <9404041630.AA27374@anchor.ho.att.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


> Doesn't the U.N. have some kind of list of basic human rights?  (Un-
> enforceable, of course.)  I thought I saw it in a story about Elanor
> Roosevelt.

I don't have the UN rights stuff handy, but most of it's non-useful,
and is a good example of what happens when you let a committee of
governments "define" your "rights" for you.  I've spent more time looking
at the UN treaty on the Rights of the Child (my church was lobbying our
senator about getting the US to sign it, which I had problems with.)

Typical "rights" included the right to free speech, subject to the
needs of a society to preserve public order, the right to freedom
of religion, subject to the needs of a society to preserve public order,
the right to free compulsory education through 5th grade, without
any particular identification of who would be forced to pay for "free",
or acknowledgement of the more important right not to be compelled
to be indoctrinated in whatever the government wants to force you to
believe (e.g. South Africa forbidding public school students to use
their native languages leading to Soweto massacre or France forbidding
female public-school students to wear traditional Arab head-coverings),
the right to national identity cards, etc.

It's a mixture of "rights" that apply unless the government doesn't
want them to, "rights" to have other people do things for you,
rights that are too watered down to be worth the name, and rights that
don't really include enforcement when governments don't honor them.
It did have some meaningful parts - forbidding execution of children,
forbidding drafting children under some age (I think it was 15 or 16) -
and for many governments it would mean positive changes in spite of
all the concessions to letting governments do whatever they want
in the name of "social order".

We can do better than that.

		Bill Stewart