The Rights Revolution Read Free Page B

people in one country have a right to be accepted in another if they can demonstrate a well-founded fear of persecution. If they can prove this, they can’t be sent back to face arrest or abuse. To be sure, these rights are abused by economic migrants, but it is the nature of rights to be abused. Abuse doesn’t justify the abrogation of the right for all, merely its more effective policing against abuse by some.
    It is legitimate to make the right of asylum conditional on the stipulation that the persons must be in danger — just as it is legitimate for communities to limit the number of immigrants they take in every year. 7 Too much immigration too fast can overwhelm the capacity of societies to treat people fairly and help them make a new start. Too little immigration turns rich societies into exclusive and unequal clubs. Immigration policy struggles to reconcile commitments to people in danger and in need with equal commitments to safeguard a national community’s cohesiveness and capacity to care. 8
    Human rights are there to protect people who do not have secure citizenship, or who arrive at our doors without rights of their own. Human rights are also important to those who have secure citizenship rights. Even democratic states with strong legal institutions and rights traditions can and do abuse the human rights of theircitizens. They can do so with perfect legality, as the conditions of many of the prisons in Western societies make plain. No law is actually broken when a prisoner is kept in solitary confinement for excessive periods of time, or when he is treated with contempt by prison guards. Yet his human rights are violated by these acts. The justification for this legal but unjust treatment is that those who commit crimes forfeit the right to be treated with decency. This is a simple mistake — the penalties of the law prescribe only the loss of certain rights, not the loss of all — but it is a mistake deeply anchored in retributive instinct, and hundreds of years of rights traditions have done little to correct it in the minds of the public. The idea of human rights incarnates the contrary proposition: that no matter what a person has done, he cannot forfeit his right to decent treatment.
    Western societies have done a poor job living up to this injunction. It should be a matter of shame, for example, that from the late 1930s to the 1970s, thousands of people were forcibly sterilized and sometimes even lobotomized in state institutions for the mentally handicapped in this country and many others. It was all done in their best interests, of course, by doctors who told themselves the dangerous fable that their intentions were above all possible reproach. In Alberta and several other Canadian and American jurisdictions, as well as in Scandinavia, young women who were labelled “sub-normal,” and therefore deemed incapable of responsible parenting, were sterilized without their consent on the basis of eugenics legislation passed with the enthusiasticendorsement of the medical community. 9
    One of the essential functions of human-rights legislation is to protect human beings from the therapeutic good intentions of others. It does so by mandating an obligation to respect human agency — however expressed, however limited — and to desist from any actions, even those that are intended to help, if these agents refuse or in any other way give signs of a contrary will. (For to be human is to have a will, however constrained, limited, or fallible.) To be sure, keeping to this rule is hard, but the test of human respect always lies with the hard cases — the babbling, incontinent inhabitant of a psychiatric ward or a nursing home; the prisoner who has shown no respect for others and now asks for respect from us; the uncontrollable adolescent whose behaviour seems to cry out for coercive restraint. To give these human beings the benefit of informed consent, the rule of law, and such autonomy as they can exercise