Reclaiming social rights: international and comparative perspectives

Abstract

All the great advances in human rights have been-and will continue to bemade at that critical moment of moral judgment when men and women confronted with abuse react with outrage and make a decision.They decide that despite all of the tradition, prevailing assumptions, pressures from vested interests, and resistance aligned against them, they will no longer be willing to simply accept things as they are, no longer be passive, and no longer be silent.They become willing to risk their families, their friendships, their jobs, their reputations, their security, and sometimes even their lives on behalf of those who suffer.Once they became aware of the unspeakable suffering of the Middle Passage across the Atlantic, for example, Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce determined to commit their lives toward ending the slave trade.The personal experience of holding wounded soldiers writhing in agonizing pain without medical attention led Henry Dunant to create the International Red Cross.Witnessing the terrible plight of thousands of helpless people fleeing their homelands in the wake of war and revolution in order to save their lives convinced Fridtjof Nansen to devote himself to protecting the rights of refugees.The realization of the unimaginable genocide of the Holocaust convinced many in the world, like Eleanor Roosevelt, of the need to work tirelessly on behalf of establishing international standards of human rights.The arbitrary arrest of students for toasting "to freedom" moved Peter Beneson to launch a letter writing campaign that eventually became Amnesty International.All of these actions, and countless others by those known and unknown from the globe to the grassroots, flow from decisions made at moments of moral choice.This essential element in understanding and appreciating the historical evolution of human rights is captured in all of its drama, pain, and courage by Adam Hochschild in his blistering book, King Leopold's Ghost, and appropriately subtitled A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa.At the end of the nineteenth century, King Leopold of Belgium became obsessed with seizing control of territory in Africa.Like many other Europeans and Americans of his day, he viewed the continent as if it were without Africans: a vast expanse of uninhabited space, just waiting with unlimited possibilities for prestige and profit.The Congo appeared ripe for the taking.With charm, seductive rhetoric, political guile and deviousness, propaganda and sham organizations, bribes, hidden accounting, manipulation, the ruthless use of the military power of the state, and boundless greed, Leopold set out to make the Congo his personal fiefdom.Brutal exploitation and the forcible extraction of tons of ivory, and then shiploads of rubber, soon brought him staggering wealth.Like all oppressive regimes, of course, the success of Leopold's operation

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