Author's
Preface This book owes its origin to an invitation I received to contribute to a symposium in Wellington, New Zealand, in 1998, marking the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I was asked to speak on human rights in the biblical tradition, while others were commissioned to deal with human rights in the theological, legal and political traditions. I accepted the invitation for mainly selfish reasons. Although a New Testament scholar by training and a longtime member of Amnesty International, I had given comparatively little thought to how my concern for human rights squared with the witness and world view of the Christian Scriptures. The symposium offered an opportunity to explore this connection in more detail.1 As I began working on my paper, I soon became aware of just how vast and complex the field of human rights discourse has become over the last fifty years. There are few areas of contemporary life that human rights thinking has not touched. Perhaps most striking is the way human rights categories have become an almost universal currency of moral debate. Rights language is prevalent in the discussion of all kinds of issues, from the personal to the political, from the trivial to the terrifying One gauge of this is the frequency with which rights terminology figures in newspaper articles on current events. Once I made a point of collecting articles over several weeks from the two newspapers I usually read in which some explicit reference to human rights is made. A brief survey of these articles will show how pervasive and diverse human rights issues are today. Some of the articles deal with so-called “gross violations” of human rights, such as arbitrary arrest, torture, forced labor, and summary execution. One cites Amnesty International’s estimate that daily violations of human rights occur in at least 144 countries in the world. In Tibet, children as young as six have been detained and tortured by Chinese police. So widespread is the practice of torture, according to another report, that over 220 organizations have sprung up around world for treating torture victims and their families. In the United States alone, there are twenty-four torture rehabilitation programs in operation. One article reports on Amnesty International taking up the case of a seventeen-year-old girl in Nigeria sentenced to 180 lashes for having premarital sex with three men. Other articles deal with human rights abuses during the Bosnian and Kosovo conflicts. One tells of how the International War Crimes Tribunal for Yugoslavia meeting in the Hague has deemed, for the first time in history, the systematic rape of Muslim women to be a crime against humanity, and sentenced some of those responsible for instigating such organized terror to long periods of imprisonment. Another article reports on a parallel tribunal convened by the Milosovec regime in Belgrade at which charges were laid against fourteen Western leaders for crimes against humanity during the Kosovo bombing campaign. The prosecutor called for maximum jail terms for Bill Clinton and the other NATO leaders, while their Serbian-appointed “defense” lawyer actually demanded their execution! Another extreme violation of human rights is slavery. According to one report, slavery is more widespread today than at any other time in human history. It is estimated that at its height, the Roman Empire absorbed some 500,000 slaves a year, while over 350 years the trans-Atlantic slave trade transported 13 million people from Africa. Today, a British sociologist estimates, some 27 million people live as slaves, especially debt-slaves. This is at least six times more than 150 years ago.2 Human rights language is not confined to accounts of such flagrant and historic injustices as slavery and torture. In some newspaper reports, local criminal violence and its consequences is depicted in rights categories. In a widely publicized court case in New Zealand, the stepfather of a teenage girl who was abducted by a neighbor, sexually violated, then buried alive was convicted of repeatedly threatening to kill her murderer should he ever be released from prison. Public sympathy for the stepfather was overwhelming. Some politicians hailed him as a hero, and popular demonstrations were staged outside courts throughout the land during his trial. One supporter said of the girl’s killer, “People like him should be killed as well. When you commit that kind of crime, you give up your rights. That kind of person is not even human any more.”3 The stepfather was convicted and received a suspended prison sentence. In agreeing with the judge’s decision, one newspaper columnist criticized the public lust for vengeance and insisted that even the likes of the child’s murderer “still have basic human rights and a decent society ensures those rights are upheld.”4 A flood of angry letters to the editor ensued criticizing the column’s viewpoint. The link between crime and human rights emerges in another report of a formal complaint lodged with the United Nations Human Rights Commissioner accusing the Australian government of breaching human rights by employing mandatory sentencing laws in the Northern Territory. Such laws, it is argued, remove judicial discretion and breach people’s right to a fair hearing. They also indirectly discriminate against the indigenous Aboriginal population who have experienced a sharp increase in imprisonment rates for minor property offences since the laws were introduced. Several articles deal with issues of sexual and reproductive ethics in terms of rights. One recounts arguments in favor of decriminalizing prostitution in New Zealand, on grounds that present legislation unjustly discriminates against the rights of prostitutes. Another tells of a complaint laid with the New Zealand Human Rights Commission against an Asian airline for refusing to transfer frequent flyer air points to the partners of passengers in de facto or same-sex relationships. In another case brought to the same Commission, a couple with five children won a government payout after being refused permission to have another child using a surrogate mother. The couple claimed they were being discriminated against on grounds of age and family status. Provisions in New Zealand’s human rights legislation for prosecuting people who incite racial disharmony are mentioned in a lengthy article criticizing an Appeal Court decision permitting the distribution of fundamentalist Christian videos attacking homosexuality. The Chief Film Censor had deemed the videos to be hate propaganda and banned their release, a decision upheld by the High Court. However the decision was reversed by the Court of Appeal because it infringed the rights to freedom of speech and belief, as enshrined in the New Zealand Bill of Rights. A similar clash of rights is reported in another article referring to a Supreme Court ruling in the United States upholding the exclusion of gays from being troop leaders in the Boy Scouts. To force this private organization to observe gay rights, the Supreme Court decided, would violate its right to freedom of association. In yet another case turning on discrimination, a widower has sued the British government under new human rights legislation for discriminating against him as a man because he is not entitled to receive the same benefits and pensions as a widow is. An article entitled, “Is Part-Time Work a Mum’s Right?” deals with discrimination against women in the labor force. The piece describes “a looming human rights battle” in New Zealand over discriminatory behavior against women when they return to work from parental leave. Discrimination against children features in reports on debates over the rights of children. One conservative columnist dismisses the whole idea of children’s rights, as set forth in the United Nations Convention of the Rights of the Child, as “one of the poisonous effects of political correctness on the community.”5 Another article reports that discrimination against minority groups has fueled a campaign by the Guardian newspaper in Britain against the legality of the British monarchy. The newspaper’s lawyers intend to argue in court that the eighteenth-century legislation barring non-Protestants and those born out of wedlock from succeeding to the British throne is discriminatory, hence illegal under European human rights legislation to which British law must now conform. Finally, a number of newspaper articles discuss the simmering debate in New Zealand over medically assisted euthanasia, following its legalization in Holland and, for a short time, in one Australian state. Opposition to the law change has come especially from Christian churches, with the Vatican denouncing the Dutch decision as a “violation of human dignity.” In an angry rejoinder, one newspaper columnist thunders, “We all have the right to die in dignity; the real violation of human dignity is leaving the terminally ill patient in agony to wait for death.”6 Even this limited sample of newspaper reports demonstrates how widespread human rights themes have become in contemporary discussion, and how sharply disputed their application to specific issues can be. It would appear, then, that if Christians are to engage meaningfully with the great moral issues of our day, they will need to master the rhetoric of rights and to use it sensitively to articulate key Christian insights and perspectives. At the same time, Christians will also have to recognize the limits of a rights-based morality. The language of rights is strikingly limited in traditional Christian sources, and a one-sided emphasis on individual rights can obscure the characteristic Christian stress on duty and self-sacrifice. Yet it is the argument of this book that the notion of human rights is deeply, and uniquely, grounded in the biblical story and that Christians therefore have something special to say about human rights. It is something that validates the modern quest to identify and respect human rights; it is something that enriches the secular human rights tradition at several key points; and it is something that offers a corrective to the growing tendency in contemporary Western society to divorce rights from responsibilities and to conceive of human relationships as a kind of negotiated truce in a battle of competing claims. So profound is the biblical story’s insight into the meaning of being human, so consistent, so uncompromising, is its insistence on human dignity, that those who look to the Christian Scriptures for guidance in this area should become both the world’s greatest champions of human rights and the world’s greatest critics of rights gone awry. I hope this little book will serve to inform Christian thinking and Christian action in both these respects. —Chris Marshall Crowned with Glory and Honor orders:
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