It is not unusual
for human rights to polarize opinion and political leaders. The
U.N Commission on Human Rights, controlled by exquisite human
rights violators, is a case in point. In the Western Hemisphere,
we know only too well how the issue of human rights can be caught
up in an ideological crossfire that is of little help to those
who suffer at the hands of brutal state security apparatuses or
even of some democratic governments for whom majoritism is a convenient
cover under which they persecute, incarcerate, maim, or kill minorities
and critics.
With notable exceptions,
the left and the right have tended to espouse a “hemiplegic”
notion of human rights (to borrow French writer Jean-Francois
Revel’s apt adjective). The left denounced Augusto Pinochet
in Chile and Alfredo Stroessner in Paraguay, but fails to do the
same with Fidel Castro. The right points a finger at Castro’s
appalling human rights record but turned a blind eye to the elimination
of thousands of people at the hands of the Argentine junta in
the late 1970s and early 1980s, and backed Alberto Fujimori in
Peru while the “Colina” death squad went around killing
students and ice-cream vendors for suspected links to Shining
Path that turned out to be untrue.
To make matters worse,
the issue of human rights usually gets mixed up with the question
of foreign policy towards the country suspected of violating them.
Again, inconsistency is the norm. On the right, most opinion leaders
and politicians back the U.S. embargo against Cuba but supported
Margaret Thatcher’s refusal to apply sanctions against apartheid
with the argument that capitalism is a better way than isolation
to generate those middle classes that will eventually pressure
despotic regimes to allow civic and political participation. The
left, as we have seen in Spain’s summit, continues to decry
the embargo against Cuba and calls it “a blockade”,
and yet that same left was at the forefront of the calls for sanctions
against Pinochet.
The consequences of
all this is the relativization and the blurring of the issue of
human rights—and of the truth—to the detriment of
people for whom violence at the hands of the state is not an academic
matter. However, we should not be surprised that intelligent people
cannot agree on the apparently simple question of what constitutes
a violation of human rights, regardless of the political colors
of the perpetrators. And the reason is that the issue of human
rights is no different from the issue of liberty, perhaps the
most fundamental and disputed issue of our civilization.
The concept
of human rights arose at the time of the French Revolution, and
even then it bitterly divided opinion because in many ways that
political event substituted one form of authoritarianism for another.
The leaders of the Revolution themselves violated human rights,
prompting critics like Edmund Burke to decry the “armed
doctrine” that was used as a justification for invading
countries (a sort of humanitarian interventionism avant la
lettre). The German Welfare State (the right) later introduced
the idea of “social justice” and Roosevelt’s
New Deal (the left) further diluted the idea of individual rights
and justice by taking up the banner of “economic”
and “social” rights (as opposed to the classical liberal
notions of individual rights and justice).
The discussion about
human rights, therefore, is a discussion between those, on the
left and the right, for whom the end justifies the means and therefore
legitimizes the use of state force against peaceful individuals,
and those for whom the rights of an individual take precedence
over the government’s aims and interests. If you think individual
liberty is paramount, you do not justify Castro’s human
rights violations on the grounds that U.S. foreign policy against
Havana is unjust, and you do not justify Pinochet’s elimination
of 3,000 Chileans on the grounds that his free market policies
were ultimately beneficial for the country.
One essential problem
with the issue of human rights has been the difficulty, on the
part of the left, to understand that property rights are at the
core of that very notion. Ultimately, the “right”
a person has not to be violated is the property he or she exercises
over his or her body (by extension, a person should enjoy the
“right” not to have his or her possessions expropriated
through outright violence or distributive compulsion). And the
right has had a hard time understanding that notions such as “free
markets” and “free enterprise” are meaningless
if the government concentrates power around it to such an extent
that society is no longer a “spontaneous order” (in
Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek’s famous phrase) but
an autocratic command system in which human rights are conditional
on the government’s plans.
Sadly, Ibero American
leaders at the summit seemed quite unconcerned with these important
truths.
