Disappearing human rights

September 9, 2024

KATHMANDU – For most of human history, human rights did not exist. The struggle to secure them arguably began in 1215 with the Magna Carta in England, which promised protection from illegal imprisonment as a right. But it took another 733 years and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights for those rights to be enshrined for all.

Now, just 76 years later, they’re at risk of being lost.

Amid an ongoing and very public massacre in Gaza, to which the countries of the West remain mute spectators or enablers, the moral distinction between the liberal democracies of the West and the illiberal democracies and dictatorships among the rest is disappearing.

An estimated 40,000 Palestinians, many of them babies, children and women, have been killed in the Israeli massacre in Gaza, which began after a terror attack by Hamas that killed 1,478 Israelis, most of them civilians. The victims of Israel’s attacks include 113 journalists and 224 humanitarian aid workers, of whom 179 were employees of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees. There are also credible accusations of sexual crimes by Israeli forces.

The Western and especially the American response to all this, ranging from silent nods to standing ovations for the Israelis, may enable other governments around the world to justify all manner of human rights violations in the name of national security.

The rise and fall

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent collapse of totalitarian regimes across Eastern Europe and in the former Soviet Union ushered in a new era of freedoms, rights and democracy in those parts of the world.

The United Nations organised a series of world conferences in the post-Cold War period, starting