Happy Birthday, Universal Declaration of Human Rights

On Dec 11, Ben de Vries sent me an email with the subject: Happy Birthday, Universal Declaration of Human Rights

First he asked that we take a look at the Wikipedia page on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human_Rights

Then he noted that the UN has stated that this is "not a legally enforceable device".

The he asked us to ponder what that actually means and why it is that way.

The UDHC is not a legally enforceable device on the surface because many of the UN members themselves are human rights viotators, including many of those western nations who most sanction human rights and may appear on the surface to support them in their own societies.

Indeed nation states reserve the right to abuse the human rights of their citizens if the citizens get too extreme in their notion of democracy. For example the Trilateral Commission an influential groups of elites from Europe, USA and Japan in the 70s said that there was "too much democracy" in many western nations and that there was a need to put forward "reforms" in these societies that would "moderate the democracy."

Hence we got the center right think tanks like AEI and Heritage Institute that put forward those reforms by cleverly playing into the irrational concerns of those of the right. They learned from the successful grassroots efforts of the left during the sixties to reverse that momentum all the while the leadership of the Left was incorporated into the system to become Clinton/Obama/Yuppie liberals - the Harvard/Princeton/Yale/Brown/Columbia/MIT/Stanford/etc... educated intellectual elite that believes only it has the right to govern.

Getting back to the global aspect of this. National secutity and protection of elite interest to maintain and govern trumps the public and invidual rights to automony and self-governance.

Thus if the "strategy of first consent" (http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=strategy+of+first+consent) does not work the strategy of "second consent" is to use physical force to pacify the public. For PR purposes it is always better for elites to focus on governance through the first because the illusion of democracy in a nation state can better be maintained.

The illusion of democracy is often used to build leverage against nations in the world stage that are not sophisticated to enact these kind of superficial democracy reforms that are basically spectator democracies. That is the idea that the nation state as it has evolved to become a modern mega state is not really designed to be accountable to the general public.

So the reality is that real reforms in global governance is not a peicemeal approach, it is something holistic that can consider the kind of issues we talked about the Global Summit and also makes the governance system real from the inside out. Ecological, degradation, economic injustice and inequality, lack of adequate health care and education, adequate social safety net for all citizens as well as human rights and authentic democratic process, all figure in this more holistic approach.

Without considering all of the above a society or world is not really truly considering what needs to be done in terms of promoting and forwarding humans rights among its people. Thus all this really becomes is lip service to values and indeed is a PR event that makes us feel better in supporting but in truth achieves little and that in a nut shell describes the impotence and stagnacy that the UN forwards on the world stage.