The Rights Revolution Read Online Free Page A

that when persons depend for their lives on the pity of others, they are uniquely defenceless.
    In the destruction of European Jewry in the Holocaust, one of the essential techniques of dehumanization was to strip everyone of their possessions, their clothing, their glasses, even their hair. A concentration camp could be seen as a demonic machine whose purpose was to take historical individuals in all their particularity and pound them on the anvil of suffering into pure units of humanity. When these pure units of humanity then appealed to the pity of their captors, they discovered that their captors regarded them as so much meat. When those responsible for this crime had reduced each individual to the terrible equality of nakedness, they could do anything to their victims that they wished. In such a state of equal and radical humiliation, victims would even go unresistingly to their own deaths.
    Not all went unresistingly, of course, and those who survived best were those who held on, against all the odds, to such fragments of personality, faith, humour, or intransigence that distinguished them from the horrible equality of all the others. This is not to say that this tenacious insistence on difference alienated them from the rest. Rather, it was by holding on to their individuality that people pulverized by suffering could acknowledge others, care for them, and resist together as best they could. 12
    The function of human rights, then, is not to protect the abstract human identity of nakedness, or to express in juridical language our instincts of pity for denuded human suffering. Its function is to protect real men and women in all their history, language, and culture, in all their incorrigible and irreducible difference. The purpose of human rights is not to make those in danger the wards of conscience of those in zones of safety, but to protect, defend, and restore the agency of the defenceless so that they can defend themselves. 13
    Human rights are not just for those who have lost all other rights. They also serve a vital function for those who live in developed civil- and political-rights regimes. Since Roman times, the European tradition has developed an idea of natural law, whose purpose is to provide an ideal vantage point from which to criticize and revise actually existing law. There has always been a deep tension between those who take the law as it is — rough and ready, precedent-driven — and those who want the law to be the ideal conclusion of a single rational mind. Natural law arose from a desire to bring order to the jungle of law, and to remedy its injustice by reference to a universal standard. Natural law has provided a vantage point from which to criticize laws as they were, and to uphold a right of resistance when they could not be changed. 14
    Our idea of human rights descends from this tradition of natural law. In the contemporary world, human rights have provided an international standard of best practice that has been used to upgrade and improve our civil and political rights. So in Europe, for example, when citizensof Britain have a grievance and their laws provide no remedy, they can take their case to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. Often, this court will find against British law, and when it does, the British usually, though not always, revise their statutes accordingly. 15
    Let’s not suppose that the British are always happy about this procedure, however. Many believe it to be an affront to national sovereignty. What right do “they” — meaning the judges of Strasbourg — have to alter national laws?
    This takes us into an important issue of principle. Many people feel that any such override by an international body interferes with the rights of national cultures to define their own laws. In Britain, the override has legitimacy because the European Convention on Human Rights draws on legal traditions that the British recognize as similar to their own. But in many