FAITH & FREEDOM OF BELIEF-2019

FAITH & RELIGIOUS FREEDOM
Silhouette of bird flying and barbed wire
at autumn sunset background.
SHUTTERSTOCK
The concept of “human rights” has been stretched
thin by human rights activists, academics,
intergovernmental human rights institutions,
human rights courts and governments. At the same
time, rising numbers of people around the world are
suffering from restrictions on their basic freedoms as
the freedom of religion, in particular, is increasingly
violated. These two trends are not coincidental; they
are, in fact, related in ways that warrant close attention.
The fact that the idea of human rights has lost focus
and has been seriously exploited by actors with political
agendas is obvious, but it has gained a modicum of
legitimacy and acceptance recently. The United States
government established a “Commission on Unalienable
Rights” in 2019 to examine the problem, which has
led to a vigorous public debate. Given its classical
liberal foundations and tradition of constitutional
protections of basic freedoms, discomfort with human
rights inflation in American thinking comes as no
surprise. But it is highly significant that the European
Parliament’s Directorate-General for External Policies,
the previous year, examined how the “expansion
of the concept of human rights impacts on human
rights promotion and protection.” The consultation
resulted in the conclusion that “attempts to develop
new rights or to change the nature of human rights has
caused the system to be diluted and is continuously
undermining the protection of fundamental rights.”
The study found that some actors have sought to
use human rights mechanisms to address issues that
go beyond the scope of human rights. More and more
problems are labeled as human rights problems, and
there are more and more human rights standards,
treaties, “high level” international human rights
officials, international mechanisms and courts, all of
which offer a fertile ground for academics, lawyers
and the mainline human rights community, that is,
well-intentioned people seeking solutions to important
problems.
However, there is a darker side to this story; human
rights inflation is also driven by states that understand
the weak leverage international law and political
pressure have against their own oppressive policies.
Promoting human rights inflation is a tactic to violate
human rights with impunity. The Parliament’s study
found that in particular, collective, “Third Generation
Rights,” such as the putative “Right to Development,”
are tools promoted and used by undemocratic
states “seeking to undermine human rights through
expansion” with several goals; UN agenda cluttering,
resource absorption, weakening of human rights
scrutiny or accountability mechanisms, diversion of
attention from existing human rights or from their
Aaron Rhodes
Former Executive
Director of the
International Helsinki
Federation of Human
Rights 1993-2007. He is
President of the Forum
for Religious Freedom-
Europe and the author
of The Debasement
of Human Rights
(Encounter Books,
2018).
OUR WORLD | 2019
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