WILL HUMAN RIGHTS IMPROVE AROUND THE WORLD

Will Human Rights Improve Around the World?



Will Human Rights Improve Around the World?

Introduction

Human rights improvement in the twenty-first century is developing in the midst of world wide debate about which institutions should predominate globally in the governance of human organizations. Innumerable actors are involved in these interrelationships national, sub national, and transnational representing widely varied views. These actors also have widely varied capacities and commitments regarding the exercise of personal example, peaceful persuasion, manipulation, coercion, or even overwhelming violence toward those people appearing to oppose them. In significant ways, current conditions for human rights improvement are similar to those in which the human rights movement first greatly expanded at the end of World War II. Widespread horror at recent spectacles of mass human suffering and organized cruelty led many people then, as now, to determine that all humans deserve the rights of freedom, dignity, and safety because they are human and that these rights must be asserted around the world. More world leaders were concluding also that if there is to be hope in this increasingly interdependent world for long-term humane conditions of life for people anywhere, there must be worldwide-agreed goals, standards, institutions, and enforcement for how all people must be treated. Influential people were beginning to believe that for there to be peace in the world, the world must build human rights(Krippner, 2003).

Discussion

By the twentieth century's end, however, political leaders had begun more publicly expressing regret after failing to counter ongoing genocide. U.S. Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, in leading military interventions, in, respectively, Kosovo (1999) and Iraq (2003), justified those actions to some extent in regional security terms, citing the countering of genocide as a grave, related matter. Governmental and nongovernmental political and human rights leaders do not yet agree on what scale of human rights atrocities within a sovereign state justifies outside military intervention. Some observers at the time believed the United States to have less-principled reasons for the Kosovo and Iraq interventions. Other observers believed that less-principled reasons in other world capitals helped explain why U.S.-led military intervention in those cases received less than the clearest U.N. authorization. Transnational and small groups now more easily can cause massive damage to human rights and national security in the same blows. Therefore, as when modern national security structures were developing after World War II, the most serious contemporary challenge for human rights improvements to improve human rights in a worldwide context of intensely increased focus on national and international security. The present security context amplifies sovereign state responsibility to prevent small or transnational groups from instigating international violence from within their borders(Bouchet-Saulnier, 2002).

Human rights leaders, therefore, first must continue to demonstrate to world leaders how decreases in human rights have initiated downward spirals in which reciprocal damage to security and human rights has led to armed conflict, chaos, and finally to major security threats from seriously dysfunctional and failing ...