“No country is free of discrimination. We see it everywhere, in many forms: old and new, covert and blatant, public and private. It may appear as institutionalized racism, as ethnic strife, as episodes of intolerance and rejection, or as an official national version of history that denies the identity of others.

Discrimination targets individuals and groups that are vulnerable to attack: the disabled, women and girls, the poor, migrants, minorities, and all those who are perceived as different.

These vulnerable people are frequently excluded from participating in the economic, political, cultural and social lives of their communities. The bigotry that stigmatizes and excludes them can be exploited by extremists. In some countries, we are witnessing the rise of a new politics of xenophobia.

But these victims of discrimination are not alone. The United Nations is standing with them, committed to defending the rights of all, and particularly the most vulnerable.  That is our identity and our mission.

The international human rights community continues to counter bias and hatred.  Public awareness has led to global treaties offering legal protection from discrimination and unequal treatment.

But abstract commitments are not enough. We must continue to confront inequality and intolerance wherever they are found.

On Human Rights Day, I invite people everywhere, at all levels, to join the United Nations and human rights defenders around the world in the fight against discrimination.”

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon of the United Nations

I only learned this morning that 10 December is internationally marked as Human Rights Day, and have been trying to quickly catch up with the calls to action and familiarize myself with what the UN considers to be universal human rights.  Initially I had a few tweets of comments, but as I delved deeper I had a lot more to say on the issue, even in the once widely respected United States.  Worldwide human rights violations occur routinely as individuals and governments ignore the discriminatory and repressive actions of individuals and institutions within their nations.  It is my hope that professional organizations such as Amnesty International, the International Committee of the Red Cross, Human Rights Watch, and in the United States the ACLU and HRC, cover the broader human rights such as suffrage, education, gender equality, food, water, and shelter.  I would like to offer perspective on my own environment, in the areas of marriage rights, employment, health care, and developments in rights regarding the internet.

The primary document to which I will be referring is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations general assembly on 10 December 1948.  Within the declaration, the UN member states detailed out the rights and protections of all human beings and responsibilities of each nation to implement these rights into law and foster a global environment that upholds them.

Marriage

As I was reading through the Declaration, each of the articles seemed fairly straightforward and expected, but the first to give me pause was Article 16 Section 1 as it deals with the United Nations adopted stance on marriage as a fundamental human right.  Take a look at the highly ambiguous wording,

Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution.

The remainder of the article covers marriage as only entered into willingly and government protection of the family unit as a natural human behavior.

But this section does not state “Man and Woman” or “Male and Female”, singular, it talks about the union of “Men” and of “Women”.  That really is the capstone here and speaks directly to all the marriage equality arguments in the United States and other nations.  The efforts of individual populations to legalize the union of same-gender couples in marriage have been successful in some nations in Europe, where it was recognized that even on the global scale of universal human rights we have each and every nation agreed that human beings have a right to marry and found a family.  But the ambiguous subject of the article allow for interpretation under the law, even while it clearly states here that religion and nationality cannot serve as limitations to the human right of marriage.  To restate, our international law says that religion cannot deny men and women the right to marry, and our national laws are to adapt to reflect this.  I don’t believe it would be possible for the United Nations General Assembly to amend this article to include “without any limitation to gender, race…” for the same reason that individual state governments in the US have failed to recognize this right. If they did, nations around the world would have to stop making into law their own clarifications that are contrary. In 2008, my state, contrary to millions of dollars and hours of campaign effort, amended the state constitution in the Florida Marriage Protect Amendment:

This amendment protects marriage as the legal union of only one man and one woman as husband and wife and provides that no other legal union that is treated as marriage or the substantial equivalent thereof shall be valid or recognized.

California’s population removed this as a right to its citizens famously last year. Last month, Maine’s population removed this right in a voter referrendum with a tiny 51% majority.  Last week the state of New York’s senate failed to pass gay marriage after the other house of New York’s legislature, the assembly passed the law.  All the way up to Today, 10 December, when the state of New Jersey was to vote on the issue for the first time, but is now expected to be postponed until January in the hopes that more government officials will see the light on the issue.  I personally wish that they would press for the vote today, and go in with Article 16 blazing, shouting “This is a Human Right, and we are ALL Human Beings”.  Regardless of personal sexual identity, which is not protected under the UN, our planet’s diplomats and ambassadors, empowered by their many governments, have said that it is the right of every person born on earth to marry another and found a family; and that right is right. But they won’t.

Unemployment

In Germany this year, laborers took to the streets in protest over their inability to find work and provide for their families when the rate of unemployment reached 9%.  The US national average is already at that point, and in my local area it is over 11%, which is twice as many people without work as last year.  The Universal Declaration of Human Rights surprised me when I came across the following in Article 23:

Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.

Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.

Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.

To further illustrate the point, I am a college educated, degree holding white man with civic involvement and my peers, aged 18-28, have a potential unemployment rate over 18%!  Further, neither I or my father have found work in the past two years, but we have not reported our efforts to the government, and are therefore not even included in that rate.  How many more members of the “middle class” in America are too proud to stand in line at the welfare office and report their loss of work, the data being reported is wildly inaccurate.  In 2005 the youth of France, went beyond protest, fueled mainly by lack of employment and opportunities due to societal age based discrimination.  Figures in the last two months have shown that the US economy is finally starting to improve and hiring has resumed in some industries, but I have to wonder if our geographic wealth and general poor fitness saved our government from a similar unrest.  The United Nations addressed this issue half a decade ago, as a civil right of the people of the world.  The national governments have a responsibility to their citizens to protect against unemployment, meaning secure jobs, to see that citizens are treated equally in the labor pool and do not face discrimination, and finally, that the work given by individuals will afford them an existence worthy of human dignity.

I think that last point is going to increasingly become an issue in the United States, which sees much less industry oversight than the EU member states.  The US refuses to look up from the sink into the bathroom mirror when it comes to providing “favorable, supplemented remuneration” to its citizens and class stratification is continuing.  This also brings up health care, which I’d like to speak on later.

Let me speak briefly on the second section of this article, regarding discrimination.  While race, religious affiliation, and other factors are protected from discrimination nationally, less than half of the 50 states have protections against workplace hiring / firing discrimination based on sexuality, and many of those do not include gender identity.  One could make the poor argument that these were not public issues at the time of writing, but they are public issues now, and leaving them unaddressed is criminal, and now I would also say, a UN human rights violation.  Last week a male to female transgendered woman filed a discrimination lawsuit here in Orlando against international corporation McDonald’s, after a manager left the message “We don’t hire faggots”.  Court cases in this state have ruled that discrimination law covers against sexuality hate speech, but if the manager had said “We don’t hire women who were born men” the statement would not have been illegal under the same laws.  Further, it took three days for me to find any coverage on this story in non-gay media, and then it was in the Miami and Tampa papers, not Orlando’s.  The United States House of Representatives has debated sexuality discrimination law (ENDA) since 1994, routinely removing and re-adding gender identity as an issue, in the attempts to garner more votes.

So, the federal government can claim that it is working to counteract unemployment, but at the moment, wouldn’t you agree that the US stands in violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 23 in regards to providing all Americans with the option of healthy, dignified level of income free of discrimination?

Health Care

Article 25 addresses health care simply and concisely.

Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

I do not have any health insurance.  I can go receive health care right now at a hospital, the infrastructure is in place, but I could not pay to receive it.  I do not have a way to acquire antibiotics without paying full price for a visit to a doctor.  In 2004 I had health care as a supported dependent of my military father,  which was very fortunate, because I spend 2004 overcoming cancer.  However, seeking preventative care and follow up is beyond my means, and that weighs on me daily.  You could say, “get a job!” but I would say “see above!”  I offered that information simply as framework for why I believe it is far past time for the United States to offer nationalized health care to its citizens.  Last week an acquaintance on the internet was hit by a car and hospitalized, after he got home he suffered seizures and was returned to the hospital for more treatment of internal injuries.  He lives in Toronto and can continue to heal without worrying about how to pay back a debt in the tens of thousands of dollars for the ambulatory and diagnostic care thanks to Canada’s health system.  Politicians may tire of American citizens pointing to the systems in place in other nations, with smaller populations or less advanced medicine but American citizens tire of greedy politicians with poor excuses.  The above issues of marriage and employment (I completely left out how the US military is a federal entity that discriminates with Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell) have been sidelined as the US Congress bickers and grandstands over health care for an entire year now, without result.  There are a lot of things right in our nation, but the government is not addressing serious human rights issues, and that message of HOPE that sparkled in November 2008 is starting to look more like GOTCHA! these days.

The Internet

But there is some real hope out there, across the insular oceans, to nations where health care, discrimination, and marriage have been addressed.  In Finland, the government has charged itself with providing high-speed internet connection to every household (within a year!) as part of an integral new human right to be connected to society.  The technology has advanced to connect us in new social ways, and Finland is leading the charge on adopting not just the technology but its societal implications.  Detractors point out that the population of the entire nation is smaller than many metropolitan areas, but scale is not factor to human rights. Scale is a factor to cost and implementation, but not freedom, the Declaration calls these rights Universal.  Finland isn’t alone, many European Union nations are trying to find ways to fight copyright infringement and product piracy on the internet, but when France implemented a law that would allow investigators to permanently remove internet access from repeat offenders, the courts of that country ruled it would be a violation of human rights and such sentencing could only be carried out by a judge.  So as we grow, we are developing new tools to our basics of food clothing and shelter, and defining them as integral, universal rights of all people.

In(con)clusion

The last articles of the UDHR relate to the protection of the document itself and the possibility of contradiction, but there is some beautiful language present.

Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.

Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.

In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.

And these words say to us, all of us, every human being, that if we have been given these many human rights, by our many governments, we have a responsibility to the ideal expressed here, to develop our individuality and personality freely and to our full extent, to work in our own communities to foster that growth, and to make certain our laws work only to support these rights and promote the general welfare of our society.

I said earlier, I woke up this morning and only learned by chance about today’s significance with the United Nations.  To offer a truly comprehensive look at the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as it pertains to the United States, I would be researching all the way to 10 December of next year (and might turn into the likes of Cory Doctorow or Baratunde Thurston) However, I am truly grateful for the opportunity, and the freedom, to reflect on these globally affirmed rights today.  I hope that when next year does come around, we (Americans) can take that look in the mirror and be proud, as Finns must.  So for Human Rights Day 2009, please take the time to think about human rights in your own community and as Dr. Treki, President of the UN General Assembly has said, “join hands to embrace diversity and end discrimination.”