Protecting human rights
Editorial
Haaretz, December 10, 2003
Today, December 10, is International Human Rights Day. The date was set by the United Nations in 1948, when it formulated the Universal Declaration of Human Rights for everyone in the world. In the shadow of the darkest period in the history of the Western world - the Nazi era and the Jewish nation's Holocaust - the declaration drew its inspiration from modern humanism, which places the individual at the center of political thinking.
By that approach, it is not the regime that grants people their rights, nor the government that can take the rights away. It's in that spirit that the declaration's first article begins, "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights" - the right to security, freedom, equality and dignity.
Those four principles include, among other things, the right to freedom of religion and freedom from religion, the right to marry and create a family without limits due to race, citizenship or religion, the right to a fair trial, the right to social welfare, and the right to demand that these rights be guaranteed through national and international efforts.
In the 55 years since the festive ceremony at the UN, a chasm has grown between the lovely declarations and the events and processes around the planet.
The liberty, dignity and security of people in many countries has been trampled. Tyrannical regimes slaughter the citizens of their own countries, millions of refugees lose their lands and property, women are bought and sold as sex slaves, and children grow up sick, hungry and degraded.
From year to year, the situation of civil rights in Israel worsens, as do the rights of people for whom the state is responsible. The ongoing occupation is unceasing in its creation of injustices and harms all the basic human rights of the residents of the territories. Right now, the International Court of Justice in The Hague is deliberating, at the request of the UN General Assembly, the separation fence that Israel is building, which is corraling thousands of Palestinians between it and the Green Line.
Inside Israel, as well, human and civil rights for all are not self-evident. The rights of foreign workers are violated when their passports are taken away as a deposit and they are employed under near slave conditions; hundreds of foreign workers' children born in Israel are denied their basic rights; liberty is denied to thousands of foreign women imported by pimps who trade in them; there are violations of the rights of the Bedouin residents of unrecognized villages, which have yet to be connected to even the water and electricity grid, while children are denied decent basic education and proper medical care; there are violations of the rights of tens of thousands of people unable to form families as they wish, marry as they wish or be buried as they wish, because of the Orthodox monopoly; there are violations of the rights of Israelis who want to marry and live in Israel with their foreign spouses and their children.
Two Basic Laws promulgated by the Knesset are seemingly meant to protect human dignity and freedom and the right to a livelihood, but important Basic Laws are still missing to complete a constitution in the spirit of the UN declaration. Years of violent conflict here have created a culture that demeans the value of human life and is indifferent to their natural rights.
