When Eleanor Roosevelt and her advisers framed the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1945, they were seeking an impartial standpoint from which the various regimes and legal systems could be judged. The UN Declaration was to lay down a universal standard, which would be acceptable to everyone since it was founded in human nature alone. And the Declaration begins with a list of freedoms, in the manner of its predecessors, emphasizing that rights are limits to the power of the state and guarantees offered to each of us that we can be both governed and free. By article 22, however, the emphasis has changed from freedoms to claims, and among the rights supposedly guaranteed by the Charter are radical claims against the State – claims that can be satisfied only by positive action from government. Here is article 22: Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality. Contained within this right is an unspecified list of other rights called ‘economic, social and cultural’, which are held to be indispensable not for freedom but for ‘dignity’ and the ‘free development of personality’. Whatever this means in practice, it is quite clear that such alleged ‘rights’ can be guaranteed not by limiting the power of the state but by increasing it, and also by empowering the state to take as much of the property of its citizens as would be necessary to guarantee the ‘dignity’ of those who need a slice of it. The agenda has shifted from liberalism to socialism, without any indication of why or how. Roger Scruton
Posted on: Sat, 28 Jun 2014 03:58:09 +0000
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