After a few posts addressing the absurdity of the way the UN handles human rights, I’m starting to think that I was wrong about the UN after hearing their most recent announcement.
A recent UN report has declared that internet access is a human right.* While my immediate reaction was one of shock and dismay, I realized that I may be looking at it incorrectly. If internet access is a human right, and human rights must be granted to every human, then everyone has the right to read this website and all of my ideas that are posted on this website. So instead of the UN trying to undermine me, they’re actually trying to help my ideas get out to the rest of the world, although the cost of transmitting my ideas appears to be the correctness and defensibility of my dissertation.
So, dear readers, should I be thanking the UN for their help in the long term, or criticize them for their attempts to undermine my dissertation in the process?
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*I am capable of carefully reading the article and noticing that they were claiming that you have the right to not have your internet disconnected by the government rather than being given internet access. However, that more careful reading would not have allowed the full force of my sarcasm.
I guess the truly scary part about this whole thing is that if you make everything (and now it appears that literally everything is) a human right, how do you then decifer which human rights are the important ones? I understand that it seems simple to say that clean water is more important than “internet access without government shut-off” but if both are human rights it seems to lessen the importance of clean water. Do you then develop scale of which human rights are primary and which are secondary?
At any rate, I enjoyed your sarcasm. I believe you should approach the UN about a marketing deal… Instead of just the Internet being a human right how about JoelSchwartz.net?
I understand your fears wholeheartedly. If we truly believe all of these things are human rights, then I’m not sure we can make a distinction between primary and secondary rights. Each person will value certain things over others, and things that they would want to be primary rights would be declared secondary and vice versa. This is part of the problem with having something resembling a governmental body declare what is a human right and what is not. It seems that human rights are not something that we can declare, but are things that already exist. It also seems to abide with the assumption that human rights are things that governments owe their people or restrictions on governments. There is no place for interpersonal interaction with this view of human rights. When we remove the interpersonal aspect of human rights, it is easy to demand a right to everything because it comes no obvious significant cost to any particular person.
An interesting bit of history for you: when the UN assembled the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, they were able to assemble the list of rights quickly, but no one could agree on WHY we have these rights. After they argued a bit, they decided that a list would be sufficient and the grounding wasn’t of the UN’s concern. I think the lack of concern for the grounding of human rights goes a long way in explaining why the UN declares so many things to be human rights.