The origin of recognisable human rights discourse can be found in the second half of the 18th century - Tom Paine published ‘The Rights of Man’ (and was prosecuted for sedition); the French Revolution overturned the aristocracy and proclaimed the ideals of ‘Liberty, Equality and Fraternity’.

In 1776 the American colonists signed the Declaration of Independence. Its opening words are as memorable as they are noble:

However, the record of human rights is stained with hypocrisy. High ideals are voiced and approved, but they are frequently not matched by performance.

One hundred years after the French Revolution, its ideals had been lost. Captain Dreyfus was prosecuted for alleged espionage. The prosecution was a monstrous fraud, driven by the deeply ingrained anti-Semitism in the Army and the Church.

The court held that the words
‘all men are created equal’
did not refer to African Americans.

And one hundred years after the Declaration of Independence, the United States Supreme Court had to interpret the words of the Preamble in a suit brought by Dred Scott; a slave who had lived for thirteen years in a non-slave state. Relying on English precedents, he sued for a declaration that he was a free citizen of the United States. The Court held by a majority that the words “all men are created equal” did not refer to African Americans. They were, the Court decided, “regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race”.

The first half of the twentieth century was also stained by dreadful abuses of human rights: the Armenian genocide, the Jewish genocide in Germany and the depraved Japanese medical experiments in Unit 731 at Harbin in China, the Russian gulags… It was in this context that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was created. Although the United States led the world in creating the Universal Declaration, they have failed this heritage in recent times. Guantanamo Bay is a scandalous violation of basic human rights principles, and one which Australia is supporting in silence. ‘Anti-terrorist’ legislation in the United States and in Australia involve serious erosions of human rights which neither government has attempted to justify as proportionate to the risk it seeks to meet. Since the September 11 attacks, there has been a significant retreat from the principles of the Universal Declaration. Six hundred and fifty thousand Iraqi lives were taken in the invasion of Iraq in retaliation to the deaths of three thousand American citizens. Such is the calculus of the land of the free.

By their conduct over the past five years, Western countries are saying, inferentially, that human rights are for ‘us’ not for ‘them’. How quickly we have forgotten the lessons of history.

Human rights only become a really difficult question in times of stress. They only present a challenge when the person whose rights are in question is someone we fear or hate. That is the problem we face today. That is why we need a new magazine about rights, now.