Indigenous Rights (a small victory)

Lightning is striking and we're about to shut off the power switch that includes the router, so this will be brief. The Federal Government announced today that the Native American Tribal Card issued by the Pascua Yaqui Tribe to its members is as an acceptable form of identity and citizenship for travel in the Western Hemisphere. This is great because it recognizes - in part - a tribe's sovereignty. Tribal identification often is not an acceptable form of identification or citizenship. Thus, because Native Americans do not have U.S. passports, Native Americans have no acceptable form of identification or citizenship and are not able to travel outside U.S borders.

Disturbing

Reports are that 50 women are raped each hour in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Technology Jump

So, as you know, I now have a Droid! I love it so far. And, in my humble opinion, I am NOT one of those people who is distractedly playing with it all the time. Many of you think it's strange that I went from a non-flip phone with no internet to a fancy-pants Droid. Heck, I don't even have a microwave (or, "micro" as my Grandma calls it!).

I've never, ever paid for home internet. Through undergrad I used free AOL trials. Then, for awhile I borrowed from unlocked neighbors. For the last two years I've just used internet at school or cafes. I have been at school so much that I figured by the time I get home, I really don't want to look at my computer anymore. It's worked out, despite occasional annoyances like not being able to look up directions or a recipe. But, now I have interwebs with me all the time. Amazing! I think of it as akin to the situation in many developing countries. People skipped the "home phone" generation and went straight to the cell phone. I skipped the home internet phase and went straight to the personal internet. All in all, I'm pretty glad I held out long enough to avoid paying for internet.

It sounds silly, but these days internet is arguably a human right, whose access is necessary to keep impoverished people and developing nations from falling even further behind. It's no joke. Even in the first-world, "global-leader" United States, people still don't have reliable internet access, let alone the ability to pay for it even when it exists in their area. Consider the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

Article 19 states that everyone has the right to “hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media regardless of frontiers.”

Think about it and read more here:

Human Rights and the Internet

Internet Access: Where Law, Economy, Culture, and Technology Meet

Snippet

Things I've thought about or done in the last few days --

Heard Heraldo Munoz speak (U.S. Ambassador to Chile) about inequality in Latin America.

Realized winter is in full force because my leg hair swings in the breeze. Why shave in winter, what with pants and leggings galore?

Had a fantastic hill run that left me breathless and almost too tired to make it back to school.

Sat outside in 72 degree weather.

Had a scrumptious Valentine's Day meal replete with wine, bread, homemade pea pesto, eggplant lasagna, kale, homemade cream puff pastries and - best of all - my favoritest girls, KS and GC. Couldn't have asked for better dates!

Finished reading Hygiene and the Assasin. Not sure I loved this disturbing, morbid tale. Unique, at least. Now I'm reading Little Bee.

Searched 5 grocery stores in Denver for 7-grain mix. To no avail. Date bread will have to wait until I can resume the search. I don't understand, though, because I've made this bread before in Denver ... which means I found the 7-grain mix somewhere. Riddle me this.

Here's heading into the weekend!

Call it what it is

In my best interest, I am going to try to write more about my "professional" thoughts. Part of why I started this blog was to explain concepts I struggle to understand as a way both to make myself figure it out and to make myself be able to explain it in "real people" terms. So! Here is a thought I have been wrestling with this week from my first class of Introduction to Human Rights.

Human rights are a way to organize society. We know -- have come to agree -- that the fairest, most moral way to organize society is by guaranteeing all people equal opportunity and enjoyment to some 50-odd human rights. A system of implementing, enforcing, and upholding these human rights creates rules for ourselves that do not just give order and expectation. The rules also will produce the maximum happiness for each individual and for the totality of humanity.

That human rights exist is a fairly well-accepted notion around the world. Most international organizations, countries and individuals accept that there are certain entitlements due to all humans by virtue of the fact that they are human.

What human rights exist is also well-settled. People, states, international organizations all pretty much accept the human rights that are laid out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. For example, everyone has the rights to life, liberty, security of person, education, health, and the right to work. Other rights that I particularly endorse are that everyone has the rights to freedom of thought, conscience and religion. While it is a declaration (non-binding), not a treaty (binding on its signatories), the document truly does serve as a foundation for accepted international norms.

So we know human rights exist and we know what they are. The problem comes in figuring out if an action is in accordance with, implements, or enforces what we know are human rights. Context without content.

The issue (finally!) I was trying to understand is why people try to add an extra label to each human right. People like to classify each human right as a particular type: "civil/political," "economic," "self-determination," or "social/cultural." First, I hate this added layer of linguistic fluff. Using different words can be a way to avoid enforcement. If a law upholds the "human right" to leisure time, but someone's case argues for their "economic right" to leisure time, then the law does not apply. Call it what it is.

Second, we run into this problem where now we're not sure if these new classifications become their own single-standing human rights, or if they are sub-categories under the overarching category of "human right." Should we forget about the "human" part and just start calling them "social," "economic," "political" rights? Take, for example, what is going on with indigenous rights. Are those human rights? Are they socio-cultural rights? They also involve civil/political and economic issues, so maybe they are "political" or "economic" rights. Or, maybe indigenous rights are a sui generis framework of rights wholly apart from human rights. Unclear, people, unclear! If we didn't have the stupid classifications, we wouldn't have these linguistic ambiguities that actually cause conceptual ambiguity (weird that sometimes words that come after a thought can "go back" and change what the thought was in the first place). Call it what it is.

Finally, I find these distinctions to be a wholly arbitrary farce. The example given in class was that the right to healthcare is an economic right. Never in a million years would I have first classified healthcare as a right that has to do with money. How is it that my right as a human to have a physically healthy body and sound mind can be classified -- and classified solely -- as a monetary issue? Certainly, in the United States, anyway, healthcare has come to be intertwined with financial concerns both on the part of the individual (access) and the state (burden). But, I do not think that is the essence of the right.

What about the right to refuse healthcare? Or communities that don't use money? Or communities whose Shaman or Medicine Man doesn't charge money? Or a group of peoples whose cultural values deem "healthcare" to be something wholly different from the Western conception of "cure" -- an Eskimo peoples believe the highest form of respect to an ailing elder is to kill them before their honorable life degenerates. My point is, why don't we call human rights by the names that they already have? Rather than presupposing what content must fill the context by using our Western, artificial classifications, we should call it what it is.

First Day of School!

Back in Grad classes! I just had two classes today. The first was better than the second.

First, Jack Donnelly's Intro to Human Rights. That guy is a riot. He does this weird pretzel thing with his legs under his desk, makes dry jokes as he runs out of breath, and breezes his hand (pinkie ring and all) through his white hair while talking. But, boy, is he brilliant. I had him for Int'l Political Theory last summer and basically hung on his every word. I'm looking forward to this class, too!

Here is the quick question I asked him after class. The basic concept of today that Donnelly lectured on is that while human rights norms are accepted pretty much across the board on the international level, the enforcement and implementation of human rights is done on a national level. In other words, all countries basically agree what are human rights, but not all countries believe they are improperly enforcing/implementing those human rights in their country to their citizens. So, I asked if this base premise (that nations enforce human rights) presupposes another "human right," the right to belong to a nation. Basically, this "human right" would be less of a universal right conferred from the fact that a being is human. Rather, it would be actually be a precursor to exercising one's human right that is due only because of our social-political constructs, namely, the way we have organized the world to be full of countries that have (1) territory and (2) sovereignty. Donnelly seemed pretty interested in this idea. He said that it was one of the weakest areas of human rights theory because it's unclear which takes precedent -- state territorial sovereignty or individual human rights -- and because not all people have membership to a state (refugees, asylum status immigrants, etc.) . True, true. Those reasons are what motivated me to ask the question in the first place. While I am interested in the strength (analytical logic) of the human rights theory, I actually was most curious about indigenous and minority groups that had/want their own territory, self-determination and self-governance within the dominant state.

Call me a groupie, but I am also going to audit Donnelly's other class - Ancient Political Theory.

Second class is Politics of Development. I was not as impressed. We watched some video clips, had some power points that made vast generalizations under poor logic. Worst of all, the professor posed some pretty scattered and unimpressive (hackneyed) questions in an attempt to generate discussion. Meh. We'll see how that goes.

Also - I applied to 13 internships today! Pick me, pick me! Must. Sleep. Now.