Human rights and governance

Dec 12, 2024 Editorial, News

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Editorial…

Kaieteur News- Guyana joined the global community in observing World Human Rights Day on Tuesday under the theme;’ Our rights, our future now.’

Human Rights Day is observed annually around the world on 10th December. It commemorates the anniversary of one of the world’s most groundbreaking global pledges: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). This landmark document enshrines the inalienable rights that everyone is entitled to as a human being – regardless of race, colour, religion, sex, language, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.

The Declaration was proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in Paris on 10th December 1948 and sets out, for the first time, fundamental human rights to be universally protected. As a “common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations”, the UDHR is a global blueprint for international, national, and local laws and policies and a bedrock of the 2030 Agenda for sustainable development.

Regarded as the foundation of international human rights law, the UDHR is said to be the first universal statement on the basic principles of inalienable human rights, and a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations. Over the years, a whole network of human rights instruments and mechanisms has been developed to ensure the primacy of human rights and to confront human rights violations wherever they occur.
It is salutary to remember, however, that in the initial vote by the then fifty-six members of the UN on the declaration, eight countries abstained. In stating the rationales for their position, the latter group, including Saudi Arabia and the then USSR, remind us that the premises undergirding the UNHCR arose out of a particular history in the West, and that there may be competing visions of what constitutes “human rights” in the world around us.
The USSR, guided by its Marxist ideology, insisted that the UDHR’s stress on the political rights of citizens, without a complementary position on their economic and social rights, made the document deficient and flawed. Saudi Arabia pointed out that its state was ruled by Islamic Law – the Sharia – derived from the Koran and founded on a specific conception of man, whose aim is to fulfil God’s purpose on earth. This was missing in the UDHR.
For us in Guyana, we also had our debates on the nature and existence (or suppression) of human rights in the pre- and post-independence eras, led by our Marxist-influenced politicians against the colonial power. But today, decades after independence of the former colonies and the experience of the new citizens with their newly constituted governments, few would scoff at the UDHR formulation that derives from the Western experience.
Fundamental to the Western conception of human rights is its emphasis on the liberty of the person: the right to physical security and the protection of basic intellectual beliefs. Although traceable to the Old and New Testaments, which form the basis of Western law, the notion of the person as having rights against an always threatening Leviathan state was derived from 17th and 18th century European Enlightenment philosophical concepts.
The several Bills of Rights promulgated articulated a clear dichotomy between the individual and the state. From this point onwards, legitimate government meant limited government – government that did not go beyond certain boundaries regarding treatment of its citizens. There were great struggles to put this concept into practice.
The culmination was the creation of a legal vehicle for controlling the powers of the state, which came to be known as “due process of law”. In many respects, the greatest contribution of the West to legal theory, due process of law, simply requires that the state be subject to the rule of law. Simple but profound in its effects: the state may take no action not in accordance with its own established procedures.
Implicit in the concept of due process is the necessity for a judiciary free from the insinuations of state control or influence. The courts serve as the arbiter of the law, and thus have the power and the duty to enforce the law against the state. Within this formulation lies the presumption of democracy. In elevating the rule of law to a position superior to the state, circumscribing state activity vis-à-vis the individual, and grounding the legitimacy of the state upon a consensual base, the groundwork for a democratic ethos was laid.
At a forum to mark the day earlier this week, Minister of Governance, Gail Teixeira was quick to point out that all of us as citizens, government, private sector have a responsibility to promote, protect and preserve democracy and human rights, and most of all, to make sure that everyone is treated equally. She said “our democratic governance has become better, more inclusive, more participatory than before” we do not disagree, but our government has also become more stubborn and heartless towards its struggling citizens- a major blot on its human rights record.

On the other hand, citizens’ right to public information is also being suppressed with the withholding of key data and information on spending of the country’s oil resources. The government continues to influence print and broadcast media and continued to exert heavy control over the content of the National Communications Network, Guyana Chronicle and some private media outlets, giving government spokespersons extended coverage, while limiting participation of opposition figures.

(Human rights and governance)

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• citizens, Human rights and governance, Marxist ideology, political rights, Saudi Arabia, UNHCR

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