Teaching about Human Rights in the United States

Once again, I am teaching about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in my first class of the semester.

The first step in this class is to define human rights. My working definition is:

Human rights belong to all people regardless of their sex, race, color, language, national origin, age, class, religion, or political beliefs. They are universal, inalienable, indivisible, and interdependent.

However, I will work with the students first to see if we can come up with a definition together. From there, we will turn to human rights doctrine.

Through a discussion of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), we discuss what human rights are, the distinction between cultural, economic, social and cultural rights, and who is responsible for upholding human rights.

To engage the students in these question, I will show an 8-minute film, called "Human Rights":

Human Rights from edeos on Vimeo.

This short film explains that the UDHR, along with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESR), make up the International Bill of Human Rights. This brief overview will provide students to an introduction to these documents.

The film also delves into who is responsible for upholding human rights - individual countries, the UN Council on human rights, and non-governmental organizations. As such, we can engage in a discussion about who should be in charge of human rights.

Finally, the film raises the question: Can human rights be universal? That should be fun to discuss as well.

Once we cover what human rights are, I am hoping we will have time to discuss this article that came out today: Human rights irony for the US and Arab world - Opinion - Al Jazeera English

In this article, Shadi Mokhtari argues that there is a growing tension in the United States between national security and human rights.

While in the past, American leaders resorted to presenting interest-driven policies as essentially meant to further rights and freedom in the world - a trend the political scientist John Mearsheimer referred to as "liberal talk, realist thinking" - the opposite dynamic has emerged ten years after 9/11. American politicians who want to pursue human rights agendas are compelled to present them as interest-driven. Thus, the Obama administration is forced to frame its calls for everything from closing Guantanamo, to the Libyan intervention, to its policy on genocide in national security terms. The space for invoking human rights on moral grounds alone has virtually disappeared in the United States.

This increased American ambivalence towards human rights stands in contrast to a rise in the human rights ideas' resonance in the Arab world since September 11th. The denials of human dignity captured in Abu Ghraib photos and Guantanamo accounts had a profound psychological impact in much of the Arab region. As they grasped for a response, many Arabs found the language of human rights gave expression to their immense sense of indignation. At the same time, activists began drawing attention to the Arab world's own "Abu Ghraibs" and "Guantanamos".

This article provides a lot of food for thought for next week's discussion of the role of the United States in the global stage.