Human Rights Day 2014

Happy Human Rights Day! (Details here.)

I'll admit that I had no idea it was human rights day today until I happened to come across a mention online. Although it celebrates a particular document -the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights- it provides an opportunity for all of us to reflect more widely on human rights.

Catholic teaching on human rights is centred firmly on the dignity of the person. (A helpful page summarising some key points of this teaching can be found here.) The question of how to express this fundamental good in national and international law is rather trickier: given the inevitable compromises and difficulties in getting agreement between people (and peoples) of different backgrounds, inevitably the depths and details of such teaching are almost impossible to institutionalise completely and satisfactorily. However, the Church has been broadly supportive of the UNDHR. As St John Paul the Great stated in Pacem in Terris [here]:


143. A clear proof of the farsightedness of this organization [ie the UN] is provided by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights passed by the United Nations General Assembly on December 10, 1948. The preamble of this declaration affirms that the genuine recognition and complete observance of all the rights and freedoms outlined in the declaration is a goal to be sought by all peoples and all nations.

144. We are, of course, aware that some of the points in the declaration did not meet with unqualified approval in some quarters; and there was justification for this. Nevertheless, We think the document should be considered a step in the right direction, an approach toward the establishment of a juridical and political ordering of the world community. It is a solemn recognition of the personal dignity of every human being; an assertion of everyone's right to be free to seek out the truth, to follow moral principles, discharge the duties imposed by justice, and lead a fully human life. It also recognized other rights connected with these.

So let's celebrate the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights as a 'step in the right direction'. But let us also be mindful of the fact that these rights are binding not just because (in various ways) they have been taken into the body of international law, but because they rest on truths about human nature and its worth that remain true whatever any particular country or individual or international body thinks. And let's also remember that this vision of true human dignity is often countercultural, both because it is based on timeless truths about human nature often disregarded by particular ages or cultures, but also because it takes account of the supernatural end of human life in the Beatific Vision after death. It can, for example, as in Masaccio's painting of the Crucifixion of St Peter (above), find an image of the height of human dignity in the violent death of a man hanging upside down.


Further reading:

The following paper isn't an easy read (if you're struggling, skip ahead to sections III and IV (starting at p.53)). But it gives a good account of the understandings of human dignity in the works of St Thomas Aquinas and St John Paul:


Aguas, J.J.S. (2009) 'The Notions of the Human Person and Human Dignity in Aquinas and Wojtyla', in Kritike, vol. 3, no 1 (June), pp.40-60.


(PDF downloadable here.)