Following the American Psychological Association’s Guidelines
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights defines thirty basic human rights from right to live to right to marry and right to travel. Theoretically, almost everybody assumes that those are indispensable. Basic human rights mean a person make preferences in his or her life without disturbing another person. In another word, the borders of freedom are defined: one’s freedom ends where another one’s freedom starts. Theoretically, it is a very simple idea to define the basic human rights.
This approach is humanistic approach and assumes that everybody has very similar belief settings. However, it is not true in the real world. Every person’s belief setting is completely different. Thinking about the societies, the situation becomes much tougher. Social belief comes to existence depending on the consensus of every individual in the community on a set of believes. Thus, we need to consider whether differences in belief settings of each society converges a point. In another word, is it possible that the individuals with different belief settings can reach a consensus on a set of believes and create a society and the societies with different set of believes reach a consensus on a set of believes globally. We might say that in the small communities, that has been possible in reality.
Observing the small human societies shows us that they reach a consensus upon long years of social experience. Even we might claim that every country is the result of a social consensus. However, the same thing is not possible among countries with different belief settings. If it was possible, all the world would become one nation. We observe many conflicts between the countries. The most recent events happening in the Arabic countries (the Arabic Spring moverments) indicates us that there is no basic definition of human rights. Even we can claim that some Western countries are supporting one party in the Arabic countries; therefore, they reject the other parties’ human rights. As can be easily understood, the definition of basic human rights might be volatile depending on the political reasons.
If we, in a perfect world, would like to provide the same basic human rights for everybody, a power in the world needs force all the countries to accept the basic human rights. Is it possible to create this power? Unfortunately, the answer is no. As known, we have the United Nations lead by the most developed countries. The United Nations organization is expected to intervene the conflicts in countries and between countries. However, the war between the Bosnia Herzegovina and Serbia has continued a long time and many Bosnians lost their lives in the middle of Europe. However, no international organization or developed country have intervened. Consequently, the interventions of the international organizations and the developed countries are biased. Thus, we cannot claim that there exists a power over the national powers to intervene the conflicts and cope with the basic human rights problems.
