"To what extent has the Universal Declaration of Human Rights provided the basis for contemporary political movements for social change?"
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UHDR) was formed by the UN in December 1948. This agreement aimed to recognise the inherent dignity and the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family as the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world. The UDHR is now held as a common standard of liberties; the UN is trying to emphasise that all should promote respect for these rights and freedoms so that all actors are able to retain basic human rights both among the peoples of Member States themselves and among the peoples of territories under their jurisdiction. The development of the UDHR was commissioned by the UN as the basis for motivating change across a range of issues; for example, the UDHR has provided the basis for humanitarian intervention approved by the UN and contemporary international agreements are based on the values of the UDHR (eg. The Beijing Declaration of 1995 which aimed to promote women’s rights). However, the UDHR still remains a very contentious subject as many nations in the East neglect the UDHR as a basis for human rights due to cultural relativism. In addition to this, many people are not informed of the UDHR so quite a few political movements have not cited the UDHR as the basis for their objectives. In this essay, I will be ascertaining the extent to which the Universal Declaration of Human Rights actually been effective by evaluating the effect the UDHR has on the basis for contemporary political movements for social change. One could argue that the UDHR has been the basis for a multitude of contemporary political movements for social change by analysing the mission statements of said movements. Many leaders of contemporary social movements have actually referred/alluded to specific UDHR clauses in their mission statement. For example, this idea can be seen in the current coronavirus pandemic. Ever since the Rohingya Crisis in Myanmar during 2015-2018, there has been a mass efflux of the ethnic group out of militaristic Myanmar and into neighbouring nations such as Bangladesh and India. Currently, there are over 1,000,000 Rohingya refugees residing in Bangladesh with the largest number of them in the refugee camp near Cox’s Bazaar. Ever since 2019, there has been turmoil in Cox’s Bazaar as the Bangladeshi government has been attempting to repatriate these refugees because a large number of refugees were putting a strain on the economic and political order of the nation. However, violence broke out and this resulted in Bangladesh’s largest mobile network company shutting down access inside the refugee camps. There is military violence and egregious violations of human rights in the camps; when the coronavirus pandemic struck Bangladesh, it quickly spread to the refugee camp and cannot be controlled due to the lack of medical infrastructure. In addition to this, because of the network blackout in the camps, these refugees do not know the measures they need to take in order to reduce exposure and contraction of the virus. They do not have access to information (no telecommunication) so regulating the health of refugees is proving to be very difficult; this is why a multitude of humanitarian groups are intervening in these camps. Arakan Project (and many other humanitarian groups) have gone into the camps house-to-house to provide information on how to stay sanitised and healthy whilst Fortify Rights (NGO)’s founder has stated that “access to information is not only a right that extends to Rohingya refugees, (but) it’s also essential to overall public health.” Fortify Rights has alluded to Article 19 of the UDHR and is actively advocating for the Rohingya Refugees to gain access to the ability to “receive and impart information” (UDHR). Although several groups who are working towards contemporary social change through political means have cited the UDHR as the source for their mission statements, there are still a large number of political groups who have developed independently of the UDHR whilst many grass-root members of contemporary social movements have never even heard of the phrase ‘UDHR’. For example, ISIS is a contemporary political group (with a strong political movement and motive) that has neglected a multitude of human rights. Its entire foundation is not based on the UDHR (rather it is based on a fundamentalist approach to human rights) and the members who are radicalised and who join the group would have also never heard of the UDHR. In addition to this, the contemporary group for social change has violated nearly every article of the UDHR by actively causing harm in the West so it would be next to impossible to claim that the UDHR has provided the basis for their mission. In addition to this, many contemporary social movements (such as the Arab Spring of 2010) were spontaneous and have not referred to the UDHR in their development at all. The Arab Spring, which began in Tunisia, was a series of anti-government protests around the entire Arab World. It consisted of non-violent protests and then violent uprisings whilst some nations even had armed rebellions; it began in response to oppressive regimes and a low standard of living. A lot of political and social movements which are situated in the East do not even know what the UDHR is (as evidenced by the Arab Spring and ISIS) as they hold their own cultural values. The large pressing issue with the UDHR is that it attempted to create universal moral laws: it worked in a moral absolutist sense and failed to neglect the ideas of cultural relativism. Cultural relativism is the approach to moral philosophy stating that there are no universal standards; it is the view that morality is relative to the norms of one culture as the same action may be morally right in one society but wrong in another. There are large implications of this theory as it essentially means that there can be no common framework for resolving moral disputes or for reaching agreement on ethical matters amongst different societies. Many Eastern nations have their own values and norms which would be considered as violations of the UDHR (eg. in Yemen, girls as young as ten years old are forced into marriage with men triple their age) but are morally permissible in their culture. Because all nations follow their own adaptations of culture and moral norms, many contemporary political movements for social change in the East will most likely not source the UDHR as the basis for their movement. To synthesise my points, it could be argued that the UDHR has provided the basis for contemporary social movements as it has led to many contemporary treaties and has been cited as the inspiration for many humanitarian groups. But I would not say that it is largely considered the basis for all contemporary social movements around the world. For example, the UDHR is dated and does not fully relate to the demands of many contemporary movements (such as climate change), it fails to acknowledge the different cultures around the world and fails to acknowledge that extremist groups often overlook basic human rights as they have their own extremist, fundamentalist approaches to human rights. This is why I have to conclude that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights provided the basis for contemporary political movements for social change to a very little extent because many movements in the East neglect the UDHR and we cannot ignore this fact.