| Human rights leader doubts wisdom of “social and economic rights” BY SALLY ACHARYA Should health care and adequate housing be guaranteed in a nation’s constitution? Or does the push around the world to describe these things as “rights” and incorporate them into constitutions lead to empty rhetoric and end up endangering political and civil rights? Aryeh Neier would seem to be an unlikely person to oppose the notion that all people should be legally entitled to economic, social, and cultural rights. After all, “few people in this world have done as much for human rights as Neier,” said Herman Schwartz, Washington College of Law. A founder and former executive director of Human Rights Watch, Neier was also national director for the American Civil Liberties Union and, Schwartz said, “basically the architect of the modern ACLU.” But when Neier spoke to an overflow crowd of law students recently, he came out strongly against the trend and warned against its long-term impact. The idea of human rights, he says, only has meaning if it is possible to enforce those rights. But rights should be clear, impossible to compromise, and the same across the world. Free speech must be free speech whether it takes place in South Africa or Washington, D.C.; torture is torture whether it’s in Great Britain or Pakistan. But by their nature, social and economic rights must be handled through compromise, Neier said. What, precisely, does a right to “fair housing” entail? Since resources are not endless and “not everyone is going to get everything,” he said, each country would need to compromise based on its own capacity to provide. This, he said, creates a dangerous precedent that would strengthen the ability of countries to argue that civil and political rights can also be compromised because of mitigating factors, such as an insurgency or even poverty. “China or Zimbabwe could say, ‘We’re not a developed country, why are you looking to us to provide the same rights?’” It also steps into the arena of democracy itself, he said. A judge’s ruling could, in effect, require a government to allocate immense amounts of funds for a “remedy”—in effect short-circuiting the democratic process, which is the proper venue for deciding questions such as how much money to allocate to housing programs or health care. While he’s a strong believer in equitable division of resources, he said, the courts aren’t the place to decide those questions. “If you’re allocating the resources of society, how do you compare one kidney transplant versus primary health care for 1,000 children?” he asked. “Who is to make that decision? Can a court reasonably make that kind of decision?” These questions should be a matter of public debate and not decided by “someone who comes around as a sort of platonic guardian.” Provisions for things like the “right to health care” are also meaningless, he argued, saying that they are not enforced in practice and sit on the books as empty rhetoric. Two law professors at WCL opposed Neier during a lively debate afterwards. You can’t have civil or political rights if you don’t have some basic social or economic rights, Schwartz said. “People who are unhealthy won’t go out and vote because they’re too sick to do that,” he said. Rick Wilson argued that “[Neier’s idea] that democracy works in neutral ways and every view can be expressed is naive. We need only to look at our own election of 2000 to see whether elections work.” He added that “the poor in the political process enjoy absolutely no voice,” and frequently don’t even vote. “The flaws I grant, but it’s a question of what is the appropriate forum,” Neier said. He admitted that he is “out of step with most of the international human rights movement as far as economic and social rights are concerned,” but said that there is a lot more rhetoric than action—which shows the difficulty of the idea in practice. Neier is currently president of the Open Society Institute and Soros foundations network. He has been a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, a columnist for the Nation, and is the author of six books. |
