Jeune Street

Chamonix, France

Human rights, as a concept, has become a fixture in our discourse about a more hopeful future -- it is right up there with democracy, participation, and social justice. After all, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights emerged from an ongoing public debate during World War II about what the Allied coalition was fighting for. What values did they represent? The answer to this question became enshrined in the Declaration, one of most influential documents in the modern world.

The debate over human rights was complex, and it often revolved around the role of the nation state in protecting rights. Hannah Arendt famously argued that the existence of human rights needed a state that was willing and able to provide specific rights within a legal framework.

In reflecting on this debate, I found it fascinating to read the contribution of the Baha'i International Community to the first session of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. The preamble of the document titled "A Baha'i Declaration of Human Rights" focuses on the subject of state sovereignty, and the necessity of augmenting the meaning of sovereignty for human rights to be fully actualized. Here is one section from the document:

The obligation and right to live in a moral society has become crucial, a test of our will to survive. The modern struggle which employs nations as its instruments is not a war of peoples nor of dynasties: it is a war of values. The dispute about values resolves itself into a struggle between those human beings who would and must unite in a common humanity and a common social body, and those who would and must remain separate, diverse and autonomous. The national state is itself torn and divided in a struggle which involves primarily the conscious attitudes of individual human beings. But to the degree that the national state can act as a united body, it is unable to avoid participation in the decision. No person and no social body is immune from destiny.

The true destiny of the national state is to build the bridge from local autonomy to world unity. It can preserve its moral heritage and function only as it contributes to the establishment of a sovereign world. Both state and people are needed to serve as the strong pillar supporting the new institutions reflecting the full and final expression of human relationships in an ordered society.

In many ways, the argument laid out anticipated the events of the late 20th century where the obsession of sovereignty has permitted the loss of lives and livelihoods, because it has provided states with a convenient excuse to avoid intervention (not necessarily military) into the affairs of other states.

Sovereignty, as the document notes, is only worthwhile insofar as it connects the moral value of humans with a world order capable of providing full expression to the concept of human rights.