Essay The Politics of International Human Rights – Arts & Humanities Assignment Help

Assignment Task

The purpose of this exercise is to encourage engagement with the entire course and to ensure that all students have the opportunity to participate in informative tutorial
discussion.
Each assignment should consist of:
-Two short critical responses or comments on the lecture
-Two short critical responses or comments on the readings.
-You should provide references for each assignment.

Topic: 1
Antislavery and the struggle for womens suffrage

‘See your Declaration, Americans!!! Do you understand your own language?' – David Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles, Together with a Preamble to the Coloured Citizens of the World, (1829)
 ‘No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.’ – Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 4 (1948)
The limits of European ideas about human rights were defined by the encounter with non-European peoples. The ‘rights of Englishmen’ were not the rights of British subjects in India. The ‘inalienable rights’ proclaimed in the American Declaration of Independence were not the rights of Jefferson’s slaves. Even the French revolutionary proponents of the ‘rights of man’ had difficulty reconciling their proclamations with the institution of French colonial slavery. Not without reason did Samuel Johnson exclaim: ‘How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of negroes?’

Topic 2

 Totalitarianism and human rights
‘While the liberalism, that National Socialism has overcome, started with the individual and made him the centre of all things… we have replaced the individual by the nation and the man by the community. It must be admitted that in doing so we have had to restrict the liberty of the individual in so far as it collided, or was incompatible with the liberty of the nation… No individual, however high or low his position, can have the right to make use of this liberty at the expense of the national liberty. For only the security of the national liberty can permanently guarantee his personal liberty.’
– Josef Goebbels, speech to International Penitentiary Congress, August 1935

Discussion

• Was there a connection between the Nazi regime's attack on rights and the adoption of rhetoric about rights by the allied powers?
• In what ways does the ‘Provisional Declaration of Rights’ published by Wells anticipate the Universal Declaration?
• How convincing is the Webbs’ account of the Stalin constitution? What was the significance of the Soviet Union's embrace of the idea of rights? 
• How do Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms anticipate the Universal Declaration?