Human Rights, Revisited
Alvaro Vargas Llosa. The
Independent Institute, CA, October 20,
2005.
The recent Ibero American summit in Spain
(a gathering of Spanish and Portuguese-speaking
leaders) has been dominated by discussions
about Cuba and, more widely, by the issue
of human rights. An official statement was
put out condemning the U.S. "blockade"
of Cuba. Cuban critics have reacted furiously,
denouncing Castro's human rights violations
and the summit's failure to address this
question.
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.
Alvaro Vargas Llosa is a Senior Fellow
and director of The Center on Global Prosperity
at the Independent Institute. He is the
author of Liberty for Latin America.
Copyright
2005 The Independent Institute
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