In 1948, the United Nations passed a document entitled Universal Declaration of Human Rights. All the nations of the world accepted it, including Mexico. See if you can find where it doesn't say that someone has the right to override another country's immigration policy, and give themselves amnesty in another country. No country allows this. Neither should we.
The document isn't long, although it took several years to hammer together. Eleanor Roosevelt was the biggest player on the American team.
Red China didn't sign it, because back then Taiwan was China. It wasn't until later that the nations of the world began to accept horrible Red China.
There WAS a long discussion of people asking for amnesty in another country. But no country has to accept those who ask. Immigration restrictions apply in every country of the world, and to my mind, should remain in place. Nations, borders, and police are all good things -- like the immune system of a body. Otherwise, everyone would just have to accept anyone else as a lover (comparison).
But they do not, and should not. Nations have the right to be choosey, and don't have to accept anybody that forces itself upon them.
Preamble
Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,
Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,
Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law,
Whereas it is essential to promote the development of friendly relations between nations,
Whereas the peoples of the United Nations have in the Charter reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights of men and women and have determined to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,
Whereas Member States have pledged themselves to achieve, in co-operation with the United Nations, the promotion of universal respect for and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms,
Whereas a common understanding of these rights and freedoms is of the greatest importance for the full realization of this pledge,
Now, therefore,
THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY
Proclaims this Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance, both among the peoples of Member States themselves and among the peoples of territories under their jurisdiction.
Article 1
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
Article 2
Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.
Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.
Article 3
Everyone has the right to life, liberty and the security of person.
Article 4
No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.
Article 5
No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
Article 6
Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.
Article 7
All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination.
Article 8
Everyone has the right to an effective remedy by the competent national tribunals for acts violating the fundamental rights granted him by the constitution or by law.
Article 9
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.
Article 10
Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair, and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him.
Article 11
Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence.
No one shall be held guilty of any penal offence on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a penal offence, under national or international law, at the time when it was committed. Nor shall a heavier penalty be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time the penal offence was committed.
Article 12
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
Article 13
Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each State.
Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.
Article 14
Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.
This right may not be invoked in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising from non-political crimes or from acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.
Article 15
Everyone has the right to a nationality.
No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality.
Article 16
Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution.
Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses.
The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.
Article 17
Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.
No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.
Article 18
Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.
Article 19
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
Article 20
Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.
No one may be compelled to belong to an association.
Article 21
Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives.
Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country.
The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.
Article 22
Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality.
Article 23
Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.
Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.
Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.
Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.
Article 24
Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.
Article 25
Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.
Article 26
Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.
Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.
Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.
Article 27
Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.
Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.
Article 28
Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.
Article 29
Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.
In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.
These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.
Article 30
Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein.
11 comments:
Boy that's a document that's ignored.
Muslims don't allow for freedom of religion (once a Muslim always a Muslim--or you get killed).
Unions don't believe in a right to work.
And homeschoolers don't believe education should be compulsory--what a stupid thing to put in a document anyway.
But documents like this are inane. Might as well be Kellogg.
Apparently somewhere in the Koran it says that belief should not be made under compulsion.
This is in a book by Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New: eleanor roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Random House 2002.
I'm on p. 170.
It tells of the making of this document. It shows how the outlawing of genocide was the biggest part of the reason for making the document.
But they never outlawed genocide from within a country, only when you crossed borders to do it. Stalin wanted to be able to kill the kulaks or anybody else, so he blocked that.
At any rate, the Soviets voted to abstain on the document because among other things they didn't want people to be able to leave their crummy country or else everyone would.
At least with Mexico they're showing their citizens how to get out and over the wall into America and how to parasite us to death and send the money home.
You gotta give em credit for that.
Parasite states everywhere.
The book also has the first five drafts, and shows how they changed over time.
Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen recently worked with the UN to up the ante of the last passages having to do with ability to make cultural growths on oneself, how every person is entitled to the marvelous, in surrealist terms.
It's amusing.
The bill of rights in the US doesn't talk about how everyone should be able to write a poem.
By the way, congratulations on winning the last contest.
Let's have another one. Maybe on human rights? Animal rights? Rights and wrongs?
Ideas?
But let's have a quicker turn-around time. 48 hours?
Maybe the next contest should be about boundaries of various kinds.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights isn't "legally binding," but is meant as a kind of idealistic representation from many different traditions toward what we should think about as universal human rights.
It's a neat document.
America at the time still had laws against miscegenation (Texas and a few other states in 1948 wouldn't allow people of different races to marry). There was still some discrimination against blacks in the Democratic south in which they had put in a poll tax which effectively outlawed blacks from voting -- they voted with their feet instead -- and most moved to the north where they had better rights and better working conditions.
Compulsory education for females is still lacking everywhere in the Islamic world.
Oh, a funny thing about freedom to choose one's religion. In 1948 it was illegal to not be a Lutheran in Sweden. They changed that. Now, membership has fallen to about 80% in Sweden, and the goofballs of Wicca are multiplying exponentially.
i may not be reading this right but it would seem that the first article colors the rest of the document
arizona police i guess must be exempt in fact the whole sate is exempt from seeing mexicans as brothers and sisters in need no they are to be seen as enemies people without definite boundary sense thus being relegated to the status of animals wild dogs a lesser species because they aren't living under the dictates of the state arizonans have basically said that it's OK to make these people suffer more
jesus basically said the govt of the human heart must take precedence over any earthly govt
eleanor doesn't say anything about the right to go shopping - isn't that the fundamental american right
seek to own more and spend more and waste more it's your right
these articles are OK in and of themselves eleanor gets an A for her class project but these rights are impossible to promote without more basic principles learned in families and neighborhoods and churches and synagogues and temples
how would these principles apply to bedouins
i know people who were given in marriage by agreement by the parents - all indications are they are happy people
natural law is a boundary we violate all the time
the america immigration policy was forged in the furnace of conquest and greed
the ever expanding playground of human presumption
tyranny becomes the mob
as it does the pretenders to authority
fear shame and anger are more vital than reason and charity in formulating modern boundaries
they've made it illegal in arizona to leave water in the desert for people
slowly with the everincreasing ubiquitousness of the credit card the notion of in god we trust is dwindling down to a quaint sentiment
the statue of liberty is flipping off her neighbors
jh
Kirby:
most moved to the north where they had better rights and better working conditions
Not true. Not even kinda true.
In fact, while southern states had legal segregation, northern states had de facto segregation which was just as, if not more, pernicious.
GM -- I may be wrong. My documentation comes from an article entitled Lynching in the United States - Wikipedia, which has in its great burly length this paragraph:
"In what can be seen as multiple acts of resistance[citation needed], thousands of African Americans left the South annually, especially from 1910-1940, seeking jobs and better lives in industrial cities of the North and Midwest, in a movement that was called the Great Migration. More than 1.5 million people went North during this phase of the Great Migration. They refused to live under the rules of segregation and continual threat of violence, and many secured better educations and futures for themselves and their children, while adapting to the drastically different requirements of industrial cities. Northern industries such as the Pennsylvania Railroad and others, and stockyards and meatpacking plants in Chicago and Omaha, vigorously recruited southern workers. For instance, 10,000 men were hired from Florida and Georgia by 1923 by the Pennsylvania Railroad to work at their expanding yards and tracks.[35]"
I think the map that you gave doesn't give us a comparative map (what it was like in 1870 versus what it was like today).
so therefore it's hard to extrapolate anything bearing on the argument from the map.
There's a well-known account that during WWII, Henry J. Kaiser, the steel magnate of the Bay Area in the 20th Century, single-handedly arranged for the movement of tens of thousands of Southern "Negro" workers and their families here during the War Years, when the Hunter's Point, Oakland and Alameda Shipyards were booming producing war materiel. All of these folks stayed on. They formed the core of a new segment of the population, which we know today in the large African American ghettos of Oakland, Richmond, San Francisco and Vallejo (where Mare Island was).
But the "migrations" in America have all been of the "internal" variety, unlike the border-violations of the Central Americans in our time.
I'm always amused at these illegal immigrants and their advocates, trying to make the case for an historical justification for the "re-taking" of the American Southwest. Sorry, folks, that argument won't fly. America's borders are clearly drawn. There are no disputes about who owns what, and which laws apply. We are a sovereign nation, and no amount of rationalization is going to change it. We aren't going to "give America back" to the Indians, or give the Southwest back to Mexico. As long as we own it, and control it, we get to say how it's managed, and who gets to join the party. No exceptions. No amnesty.
Kirby,
two points:
If you look at the relevant Wikipedia page you can see that 1) it was about 1/3 of the population and 2) many have moved back.
Interesting.
Anyway, my main point is that I don't cotton to Yankees pretending that they treated black folk any better than Southerners. In many cases the treatment was as bad, if not worse (as lynchings were rare--if exceedingly public--events and the segregation in the North was arguably more destructive).
tl;dr the North was just as bad as the South for black folk--all regions are culpable.
GM --I don't know how you would go about the difficulty of deciding comparative rates of hostility.
The lynchings stopped in about 1960 -- roughly equivalent to when the white Democrats were no longer in the ascendancy in the south and Republicans took over those states.
But aside from lynching, what other forms of hostility still matter? Is the hostility going both ways?
In To Kill a Mockingbird, you have de facto apartheid. Even the wonderful family with the wonderful father and daughter who are such nomophiliacs with regard to blacks never invite any blacks over, except to work in their homes.
They also hate poor whites.
Are race and class boundaries more permeable in the north?
Is permeability what we should look for, or would it be income levels, or what?
I wouldn't know how to establsih this. I do think that the north is rough, but I had black friends in high school (still in touch with one guy).
Did that happen in the south?
Clarence Thomas' book My Grandfather's Son indicates almost NO CONTACT between black and white in his southern town (rural Georgia).
His father had moved north to Philadelphia, leaving him with grandparents.
Thomas himself moved north when he went to college, and now has, I think, a white wife.
Does intermarriage rate matter?
What about other groups? What is the intermarriage rate between Asians and blacks, Asians and whites, Asians and Hispanics?
It seems to me that there are of course enormous black ghettos in the north -- Detroit, for instance.
But is it the fault of whites to not go in there very often?
Harlem in NYC is still mostly black.
There is an area of Brooklyn called East New York where no one that I know would dare to set foot.
It was apparently seen in that recent film with Richard Gere called Brooklyn's Finest, or something. A police story. I didn't see it, as it left in only one week.
At any rate, I don't know how to think about "kindness" or "meanness" in any kind of statistical way that would make any quantifiable sense. Maybe Stu could propose a criterion.
As for Curtis' note, about the boundaries, and not giving up turf that was after all purchased or fought over from Mexico, and the legal rights of illegals, I found this recent video quite interesting. It was originally posted on law professor Ann Althouse's blog:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDlutO0KK7g&feature=email
It features a Hispanic woman claiming that unless illegals are made legal, they will use pickaxes and shovels to kill those who oppose them.
It's probably not a video you will ever see on MSNBC. Does anybody here watch MSNBC?
Fox has four times the viewers of CNN.
Which in turn has ten times the viewers of MSNBC.
I occasionally turn on MSNBC.
It's like a high school news program from the former Soviet Union.
Bussing in Boston is a good place to start.
Also, most Northern churches would not admit blacks.
Again, not saying the South was better, just that the North was as bad, albeit in a different way.
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