Human Rights And Social Movements
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Human rights and social movements
One of the most significant transformations in the nature of political action to have taken place over the last 50 years has been the increasing shift away from established political parties and towards issue-based campaigning organizations or social movements; away from nation- state politics towards global politics. It is generally accepted that, before the 1939—1945 war, formal politics only really took place at the level of the nation-state, within the context of a world composed of competing sovereign nation-states, which gave birth to the notion of international relations. The nation-state was, indeed, the defining feature of life in this early modern phase.. In democratic nation-states, political action took the form of allegiance to ideologically driven political parties, which competed for power on usually broad platforms and manifestos. Most of the significant desires of the citizenry could be met, theoretically, either by the nation-state government or, through it, at the international level. Most of the major social and political philosophers — Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Hegel, Mill, Marx, Weber — took the presence of the nation-state for granted, and accorded it primacy in their writings. Only Kant, with his notion of cosmopolitanism, could be considered an exception.
The experience of �total war’ shook the foundations of these assumptions at the global level. Movements emerged which took as their mandates the achievement of certain goals that transcended nation-state borders. These movements were concerned with such issues as global peace, the global environment, and respect for universal human rights. These issues had largely fallen outside the limited scope of nation-state political parties. While such parties may include as part of their manifestos a commitment to these issues, they have largely lacked the power on their own to enforce any such commitment. These issue-based campaigning movements have thus taken their demands to the global arena. Social movements thus appeal directly to the United Nations, as well as to the governments of individual nation-states.
It is fair to say that the shift away from nation-state-based politics (formal politics) towards these global, issue-based concerns (which are connected to what Anthony Giddens calls �life politics’) reflects a growing awareness among the citizens that the things which most directly affect our lives are not, in most cases, those which fall into the restricted (hitherto class-based) politics of the nation-state, but are instead those which transcend these nation-state and class barriers and impact upon the entire globe, regardless of borders. The post-1945 era has seen, for example, a decline in the memberships of established nation-state political parties and a huge increase in those joining campaigning organizations such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, the peace movement, and Amnesty International.
This is by way of an introduction to the role played by these social movements in regulating issues such as human rights concerns on the global scale. When we talk of �regulating human rights’ we cannot simply refer to formal political and legal bodies, such as the state, the United Nations, or the structures and institutions of international law. Nongovernmental organizations and global social movements are beginning to form an increasingly important sector, both as spokespersons for citizens’ demands, and as respected advisors to policy-makers. This is not to say that nation-state politics or class-based politics are either dead or insignificant. We still pay taxes to nation-state governments; we still expect or make demands pertaining to welfare standards from these officials. It is, nevertheless, in the spirit of the age that global social movements offer an alternative mouthpiece through which to voice our concerns as citizens not just of nation-states but also of the world. Social movements are not political parties; they are not democratically elected and do not have territorial constituencies. They are, however, spokespersons for issues which concern all our futures. Few organizations typify this global spirit more than Amnesty International. We will discuss this particular social movement in depth below, before turning our attentions towards a quite different organization which has similar practical aims but is driven by a wholly different philosophy — the World Service Authority.
Amnesty International
Amnesty International is a worldwide organization which acts on behalf of victims of human rights abuses around the world, in 1961 lawyer Peter Benenson read a report in a newspaper about two students in Portugal who had been sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment simply for toasting freedom. Noticing that there was a disturbing number of people around the world who were imprisoned not for committing �crimes’ but for having opinions or lifestyles with which their governments disagreed, he wrote an article in the Observer newspaper called �The Forgotten Prisoners’, and launched an appeal for amnesty for such political and religious prisoners. Initially, Benenson intended this appeal to last a year, but the response was so enthusiastic that the campaign evolved into the global social movement known as Amnesty International.
Amnesty International’s mandate is drawn from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In practice, though, it specializes in four particular areas:
It calls for the immediate and unconditional release of all prisoners of conscience. A prisoner of conscience is defined as being anyone imprisoned solely because of their religion, ethnic origin, political beliefs, sex, sexuality, language, color of skin, or lifestyle, who has not used, or advocated the use of, violence in any way. These are individuals who may have stood up for their beliefs, exercising their right to freedom of expression, and suffered the wrath of a government less than tolerant towards their opinions or actions. By raising their toast to liberty, the two Portuguese students were exercising this right, and punished because of it.
It demands that all political prisoners be granted fair and prompt trials, as in many countries political prisoners are held for long periods of time without charge or trial. Political prisoners in this sense include those who have used or advocated violence. When it campaigns on behalf of this aspect of its mandate, Amnesty International does not demand the immediate release of prisoners. It calls for governments to respect their right