In Peace As Well As In War by FROGGIE

In April 1943, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote, "At all times, day by day, we have to continue fighting for freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and freedom from want – for these are things that must be gained in peace as well as in war.” True to her word, after the end of World War II, she became one of the US delegates to the United Nations, and the chairwoman of the draft commission for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And on December 10, 1948, she was in the Palais de Chaillot, in Paris, participating in the United Nations General Assembly that unanimously adopted the Declaration.

Fifty years later, the Declaration is still not being enforced completely in any country in the world. Fifty years later, human rights are still being violated all over the planet. Fifty years later, human rights activists are still fighting "in peace as well as in war," for the respect of their own rights and of the rights of their fellow human beings. Some people see them as "sweet lunatics," or "philanthropists," especially if they happen to live in a so-called "First World" country. But human rights activists are neither crazy nor selfless. Having been a human rights activist during most of my life, I intend to demonstrate that the violations of human rights, wherever they happen on the planet, have an impact on our daily lives, and specifically that they have an enormous impact on the daily lives of American citizens. I also intend to demonstrate that we, human beings, have the power, and even the duty to promote global respect for human rights.

The first step on the path of the defense of human rights is to understand as clearly as possible what human rights are. For Malcolm X, "Human rights are something you are born with. Human rights are your God-given rights. Human rights are the rights recognized by all of the nations of this earth.” What is the content of those "God-given" rights? According to the French jurist Karel Vasak, there are "three generations of human rights." "Inspired by the three normative themes of the French Revolution, they are: the first generation of civil and political rights (liberté); the second generation of economic, social and cultural rights (égalité); and the third generation of relatively newly called solidarity rights (fraternité).” The Universal Declaration proclaims all three generations of human rights.

Articles two to twenty-one of the Declaration set forth the first generation of human rights:

The rights to life, liberty, and security of person; to freedom from arbitrary arrest; to a fair trial; to be presumed innocent until proved guilty; to freedom from interference with the privacy of one's home and correspondence; to freedom of movement and residence; to asylum, nationality, and ownership of property; to freedom of thought, conscience, religion, opinion, and expression; to association, peaceful assembly, and participation in government.

In articles 22 to 27, the declaration also explicitly cites the rights, of the second generation, " to social security, work, rest, and a standard of living adequate for health and well-being; to education; and to participation in the social life of one's community." And article 28 states, "Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this declaration can be fully realized," thus implicitly proclaiming, at least in part, the rights of the third generation.

The human rights defined by the Declaration are being violated on a daily basis all over the earth. And each of these violations has a direct impact on the lives of American people, since, as the British writer Thomas Hardy stated, "The human race is one great network which quivers when one part is shaken, like a spider's web when touched."

What do companies like Nike, Disney, and Phillips-Van Heusen have in common? They all import into the US goods produced for them by Third World country contractors. These contractors want to offer their American partners the best economic conditions, without losing any part of their own profit. Therefore, they employ in their sweatshops workers whose human rights, more than violated, are being completely denied. For example, on March 4, 1999, the National Labor Committee wrote, in a letter to Walt Disney company:

The longstanding systematic violations of human and working rights at factories in China working under contract with Disney include: excessive forced overtime, up to 16 hours a day, seven days a week, amounting to 112-hour work weeks; pitifully low wages (…); no benefits; even being shortchanged legal overtime premiums …; workers being housed in primitive, crowded dorms …; workers illegally forced to pay an "entrance fee" to secure their job.

At first sight, American people, although moved by the situation they are being presented with, may think that the working conditions in overseas sweatshops have no influence on their personal lives. But the existence of these sweatshops and their utilization by major American companies endanger many American jobs. It also contributes to keeping American salaries low and to exacerbating the ratio between American workers' average salary and the average pay of company executives. According to Jeff Faux, president of the Economic Policy Institute, this ratio has jumped from 34 times to 180 times in the past twenty-three years.

Just as overseas sweatshops have a negative influence on the economic rights of American workers, sometimes the governmental use of American tax-money has a negative influence on other people's human rights. The best example of this kind of situation is the School of the Americas, also called, in South America, School of Assassins.

The School of the Americas was founded in Panama in 1946 and moved to Fort Benning in 1984. During these years, it has trained almost 60,000 "military elites" coming from dozens of countries in the Caribbean and South America. After receiving this training, dozens of those "elites" participated in military coups against civilian governments in their own countries. The list of graduates of the School includes some of the most notorious dictators, assassins and torturers of South America, like Argentines Leopoldo Galtieri y Roberto Viola; Panamanians Manuel Noriega and Omar Torrijos; the Peruvian, Juan Velasco Alvarado; the Salvadoran Roberto d’Aubuisson; the Guatemalean Lima estrada; the Ecuadorian, Guillermo Rodriguez; and the Bolivian, Hugo Banzer Suarez. “The Salvadoran soldiers cited by a United Nations Truth Commission for the commando-style massacre of six Jesuit priests and their women co-workers had just completed the SOA commando course.”

In 1992, a report on the School by the American Department of Defense concluded: "For record purposes, the Department of Defense should retain copy of each of the seven manuals along with a copy of this report. All other copies of the manuals and associated instructional materials, including computer disks, lesson plans and "Project X" documents, should be destroyed." In 1995, Representative Joseph Kennedy introduced a proposition of law (HR 2652) "to close the United States Army School of the Americas and establish a United States Academy for Democracy and Civil-Military Relations;" the law did not pass. In 1998, a similar proposition was rejected in the House by 212 to 201 votes. It was not until May 18, 2000 that the US House of Representatives voted, by a 214 to 204 margin, to close the School of the Americas. Unfortunately, they approved, in the same vote, the Pentagon proposal to immediately open a clone, called the Defense Institute for Hemispheric Security Cooperation, also located in Fort Benning. According to recent Pentagon figures, the School of the Americas used to cost the American taxpayers almost twenty million dollars a year. Chances are the new Institute will cost at least the same yearly amount.

Violations of human rights in any country of the world have an impact on the daily life of citizens of other countries. Similarly, the violations of any American citizen's human rights have an impact on the daily lives of his or her fellow citizens.

On March 3, 1991, some members of the Los Angeles Police Department beat up an African-American man named Rodney King, violating his "right to life, liberty and security of person." On April 29, 1992, a jury acquitted the policemen who had assaulted King and thus violated his "right to an effective remedy by the competent national tribunals for acts violating the fundamental rights granted him by the constitution or by law." As a result of these violations, the rights of many American citizens "to life, liberty and security of person," as well as their "right to own property" were violated. In three days’ time, in Los Angeles alone, 38 people were killed and more than 1200 were injured. In San Francisco, 1,400 people were arrested. In Las Vegas, 200 people engaged in riots and started fires. In Seattle, 45 people were arrested, five were injured and firefighters responded to 28 fire calls. In New York City, 80 people were arrested and several police officers were injured. In Atlanta, 300 people were arrested and 57 were injured.

Even when the violations are less visible and their consequences are less violent, any violation of the human rights of any human being has repercussions on the lives of many other people. When, as the National Census Bureau says it happened in 1995, "21 percent of American children under age 18 [live] in families with incomes below the poverty level," their "right to special care and assistance" is definitely not being respected. The same report shows that their poverty makes those children more likely to drop out of school and, for the girls, to give birth to and live with a child. Therefore, the violation of those children's human rights is very likely to have, in the future, an influence on American taxpayers' lives.

All over the planet, human rights are being violated on a daily basis, and the real victim of this situation is mankind as a whole. As Daniel Cohn Bendit said in Paris in May 1968, "We are all German Jews." But history proves that the power to change this situation lies in our hands.

On June 28, 1914, American suffragettes marched on the Capitol to demand voting rights for American women. In 1919, the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution was approved and sent to the states for ratification. On August 20, 1920, women's suffrage was proclaimed.

In the 1960s, the civil rights movement mobilized America against racial discrimination. In 1961, Charlayne Hunter-Gault desegregated the University of Georgia. In 1963, Fanny Lou Hamer registered to vote in Mississippi and Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech. In 1964, the Civil Rights Act was passed by the American Congress.

In 1986, more than 1.5 million South African black people went on strike to protest apartheid. Simultaneously, in the rest of the world, South African products were being boycotted by an ever-larger number of international consumers. In the early 1990s, the South African government was forced to dismantle the legal basis of apartheid and Nelson Mandela was released from prison. On May 10, 1994, Mandela was sworn as the first black President of South Africa.

Currently, Argentine torturer Cavallo is in jail in Mexico, and Argentine torturer Oliveira is in jail in Italy. Both are awaiting extradition and will hopefully be tried for their crimes. In Argentina, more and more high ranked militaries, including ex-Dictators Videla and Massera, are in jail; they will have to account for the disappearance of hundreds of children during the last dictatorship (1976-1983).

But since we have the power to make things change, we also have the duty to do it. Human rights activism is not a choice; it is an obligation for any human being on this planet. This obligation is written in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights itself. The General Assembly proclaimed the Declaration "as a common standard of achievement for all people and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms." It is also our obligation vis-à-vis our ancestors. We owe it to all the people who gave their time, their energy and often their lives in order to give us the rights and freedoms we are enjoying now. And, last but not least, we owe it to our children and the generations to come. As Edmond Burke said: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." It is our responsibility, and, I believe, the major reason for our presence on this earth, to make sure this planet will be, at least slightly, more friendly the day we leave it than it was the day we arrived on it.

Finally, even those who believe that they are under no obligation to defend other people's rights might want to enter the fight, lest they end up like the protagonist of Martin Niemoller's poem:

First they came for the Communists,

and I didn't speak up,

because I was not a Communist.

Then they came for the Jews,

and I didn't speak up,

because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for the Catholics,

and I didn't speak up,

because I was not a Catholic.

Then they came for me,

and by that time there was no one

left to speak up for me.