Human rights types: separatist to engaged religious variations.
| Author | Driedger, Leo |
Evelyn Kallen, in her Ethnicity and Human Rights (2003) presents a typology of human rights, which includes individual, collective, political, religious, and aboriginal rights, which will be examined, to provide a macro-sense of many of the elements and principles which need to be studied and considered.
These issues have been dealt with in the three major Declarations of Human rights, first by the Americans, followed by the United Nations, and Canadians. These declarations will be briefly examined as well, to enhance our insights into these individual, collective, political, economic, religious and aboriginal charters or rights and freedoms, to see how nations of the world have set their goals for their interchange of relations.
We also plan to compare four different cultural groups in Canada (Aboriginals, French, British, Others) to illustrate how the Kallen typology applies differently to the four groups, creating a mosaic of varied factors, situations and rights, which apply to these multicultural and multi-religious situations.
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TYPOLOGY OF HUMAN RIGHTS
In Table 1, Evelyn Kallen (1995:10; 2003) summarizes human rights moving from micro individual rights to more macro group rights, and then spells out claims of cultural, national and aboriginal rights. She helps sort some of the important categories: 1) Individual rights to life, freedom, opportunity, and dignity; 2) Group or category rights to life, freedom, opportunity, and dignity; 3) Collective cultural rights to ethnocultural distinctiveness, design for living, language, religion, institutions, and customs; 4) Collective national rights to self-determination, ancestral territory, nation; and 5) Collective Aboriginal rights to land, occupancy, and use. All individuals are covered by the first, religious groups by the second, ethnic groups by the third, Quebecois by the fourth and aboriginals by the fifth.
Individual rights can be violated by neglect, diminution, oppression, and homicide. Group rights can be violated by inequality, defamation, oppression and genocide, shown by the Jewish Holocaust, and the atrocities in Rwanda, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and now Syria. Deculturation, discrimination, and cultural genocide can be inflicted by those who are dominant, illustrated by European treatment of Canada's aboriginals (Kallen, 1995:10). Collective rights could be violated, if Quebecers decided to separate and the rest of Canada denied them nationhood status. Aboriginal rights can be violated when land settlements have not been made, as they have not in half of Canada. We shall examine some of these collective violations of human rights.
Beginning with Individual rights, we note that our capitalist economic system, where all need to be involved to eat, is highly motivated by individual enterprise, considered a "sacred" right of every person to compete, training for a good education to compete for jobs. Competition is important, where laws guide individuals, so that conflicts can be held in check, as we strive to achieve our goals. The profit motive is central, where expenses are cut, advantages are enhanced to make money, leaving the largest margin as accumulations of profits. Capital gains are important to enhance income over experiences, as we compete with others to make profits. Kallen calls this a right "to life," which includes the freedom to self-determination, where all have as much equal opportunity as possible, and the profits show that we worked hard, followed the rules and laws, and were among the best who succeeded. It should not be surprising that in this process some over-step the order so that neglect including diminution and oppression of others, and occasional homicides occur. It is a tough system where power is abused by many (Kymlicka and Norman, 2000; Driedger and Halli, 2000).
In the process of economic right to life, we of course become part of many groups where we seek more right to life, which illustrates Kallen's second category of fundamental right to life. Most humans are born into a family, the first primary group which we often refer to as "home." Most of the time marriage takes place between a man and a woman who legally have kids where they are cared for, educated and raised. Americans right now are debating whether same sex marriages can also be legal. In the process of socialization and work, humans become part of many groups, where humans should have equal opportunity, a right to a full life, freedom for individuals, to belong and form new groups which are given dignity to exist and thrive. As many groups are formed and people live together, they together develop similar habits, language, values, beliefs to form distinctive ethnic, religious and national groups, which in a multicultural and multi-religious environment must be ordered to prevent excessive conflict, and opportunities to live and work together. So Kallen also recognizes these political problems in a fourth category, where collective determination as a distinct nation within their own ancestral/territorial bounds can be ordered. Many such collective groups might want the freedom to have their own powers to form a new country, but there are needs to also avoid excessive proliferation to the point of chaos. How can these drives of freedom, identities, and desires for familiar living be balanced?
Fifth, and finally, Kallen includes "Collective Aboriginal rights" in her typology, which perhaps should have been dealt with first, since they were the first to possess this land called Canada, by the Europeans who invaded them. Many Europeans did recognize aboriginal rights to title of lands based on collective use and occupancy, so made treaties with the "first nations" to make joint use of the land. However, there are many examples of land entitlement discrimination, and unsettled aboriginal claims of rights of lands for which no treaties were made. Claims and settlements of the first peoples and their invaders, illustrate how complex the relations between each and all of these multicultural, as well as religious ideologies are. Let us examine a few rules or bills of rights which have been passed in the USA, United Nations and Canada.
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BILLS OF HUMAN RIGHTS
The invasion and settlement of the Americas by Europeans since the early 1500s was fraught with numerous wars among the British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. These nations wished to extend their power as colonizers of weaker peoples and to entrench their own political dominance and economic advantage.
Karl Marx's main concern was with these macro political-economy power issues and he hoped for a 'classless society' in which all people could survive under more equal relations. Unfortunately, he spent little time spelling out the fine points of how such relations on a micro level might work. Max Weber focused more on multidimensional factors of human relations that operated on the micro level, which he had experienced firsthand in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His concern for individuals and their needs, allowed him to consider economic and political factors, and also the religious and value systems that often motivate humans in a variety of directions (Li, 1999; Manivirabona and Crepeau, 2012, Mates and Cheung, 2012; Ryan, 2010.
The American Bills of Rights
The Spaniards, Portuguese, British, and French settled the Americas. The Spanish and Portuguese explorers who settled Central and South America came from homelands where Roman Catholicism was the state religion. They propagated their religion in Latin America, and all these countries are now also dominantly Roman Catholic. The state religion was considered an integral part of power politics, when the aboriginals were conquered and subdued (Driedger, 2003).
North American settlement, however, did not follow the pattern established in Latin America. The 13 American colonies on the East Coast began in a more heterogeneous manner. Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in North America, was established in 1607 in what is now Virginia. One year later in 1608, Champlain established the first French settlement on the St. Lawrence River at Quebec. The Pilgrim Fathers, a group of separatists from the Church of England who founded Plymouth Colony near Boston, came to America in 1620 on the Mayflower. In 1624, the Dutch West Indies Company established the colony of New Amsterdam, which in 1664 was surrendered to the English and renamed New York. In 1681 William Penn, an English Quaker who had earlier been jailed for his writings on religious freedom and his defense of the doctrine of toleration, received a grant of territory later to be named Pennsylvania after him. These varied settlements were founded because refugees and settlers left their European states for more freedom and tolerance, particularly of religious beliefs.
When the American constitution was drafted and signed in 1787, shortly after independence from British rule, it guaranteed freedom of religion, speech, and assembly. Many of the new settlers were dissenters who could not freely practice their beliefs in the normal context of European state religions.
Congress's first concern was that there should not be an official state religion, and that all people should have the right to practice their religions freely. Freedom of speech and of the press were important for maintaining and propagating Americans' beliefs, and the ability to meet and assemble as the people saw fit was an important part of these freedoms. The constitution was ratified by the states only after the promise of amendments that related directly to human rights. The first 10 amendments, known as the Bill of Rights, were...
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