This prompt has two parts in response to which you should write a single, well-integrated essay. Read the prompt carefully and in its entirety, making certain that you understand what you are being asked. Your essay should be no more than 1250 words (roughly five pages), typed in 12 point font and double spaced. Please put the word count at the top left hand corner of your first page, along with your name, PID, TA name, and section time.
Any text you use, assigned for class or not, must be cited and noted on a bibliography (which should not be included in the word count). Quotations must have both quotation marks and full citations to the text. Any ideas that come from an author other than yourself must be properly cited as well. Be careful of the evils of paraphrasing.
Part One:
In the Vienna Declaration (1993; paragraph 5), the following statement on human rights was reaffirmed and has become the standard, international understanding:
“All human rights are universal, indivisible, and interdependent and interrelated. The international community must treat human rights globally in a fair and equal manner, on the same footing, and with the same emphasis. While the significance of national and regional particularities and various historical, cultural and religious backgrounds must be borne in mind, it is the duty of States, regardless of their political, economic, and cultural systems, to promote and protect all human rights and fundamental freedoms.”
With a view to the thirty articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), write a narrative assessment of this statement, answering at least the following questions:
1. Taken as a whole, what is the argument of the international community about the origin or foundation of human rights?
2. Looking not just at the individual Articles but the UDHR as a whole, how would you characterize the international community’s understanding about human beings and the kinds of actions or experiences that are important? Does this make sense to you? Explain your answer.
3. Taken as a whole, how does the UDHR characterize the nature of states, the power they hold, and the likely ways they are to violate rights?
4. Looking at the individual Articles in the UDHR, what do they say about social institutions?
5. Taken as a whole, what does the UDHR suggest about the relationships- for good and ill- between the state and social institutions? Does this make sense to you? Explain your answer.
6. What does it mean to say that the rights of the UDHR are “universal, indivisible, and interdependent and interrelated”? For example?
7. Can rights, in practice, be enforced as “universal, indivisible, and interdependent and interrelated”? Why/Why Not?
Part Two:
Read the two articles from the New York Times, linked below. Both are about media, speech, race/ethnicity, and culture; one is about England and the other about Sri Lanka. The second part of your essay should use your argument about rights to frame a discussion about the issues in these two articles. What rights are at stake? How might the different sides in each case balance their rights against each other? In looking at the two pieces together, what are the arguments for and against considering differences in culture, nationality, level of development (this is made something of an issue in the piece on Sri Lanka), and inevitability of violence? What do the two cases share? Do the differences between the two have any consequence for how we should understand the rights at stake? At bottom, what kind of case- if any- are these? You must make an argument about speech and media that applies to BOTH cases.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/21/world/asia/facebook-sri-lanka-riots.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/13/world/europe/bbc-rivers-of-blood-enoch-powell.html
