by Aaron Dollhausen

Created on: July 25, 2009

The 1948 United Nations charter of universal human rights was drafted as a response to the horror visited upon the Jewish people and others during Nazi Germany's rule over much of Europe. Its goal was, and remains laudable, honorable, and long overdue. Perhaps if it were created earlier, the Holocaust could have been avoided, as the charter granted all people the protection of human rights. However, as events since the 1940s have shown, it may not have.

Threats and usurpations not only of human rights but human lives have continued within the sixty plus years since the Nuremburg trials brought many of the Holocaust's players to justice. Maybe the reason the 1948 charter has not performed as well as it was intended is due to its existence is dependent upon cooperation of the many nations of this planet. Or, the sheer diversity of human beings poses a challenge to its implementation, that human beings are relative in their desire and requirement of human rights. I agree with the former and wholeheartedly disagree with the latter.

I believe that all people are same at many levels, especially at the level of how they wish to be treated. No one wishes to have their property destroyed, their safety threatened, their lives taken, or their standards of life to be degraded. All persons are alike on this level. To believe otherwise is to accept, even allow, the depredations visited upon people by ruthless dictators, unjust governments, and mass-murdering tyrants. As the Holocaust has shown, passivity towards genocide, i.e. non-intervention, is the same as participating in genocide.

Human beings may be diverse in their economic and political situations, their ethnicity, religious affiliations, and core values, but we are the same when it comes to how we want to be treated: we all want to be treated decently and free from fear. A relativist standpoint on human rights, as Richard Falk supports in his article, "Human Rights," is a woefully inadequate stance since it denies that people, no matter their individuality, are the same at a very basic level.

Expanding on what I stated before, inadequate and partial measures towards the preservation and promotion of human rights are equally as wrong as participation in the abusing and denial of human rights and life. Partial measures leave openings for evil- minded people to find ways around and even outright defiance of protections of human rights.

Cohesive and complete protections of human rights establish barriers preventing

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