Putting the Right Back into Human Rights

By Piero A. Tozzi, J.D. | May 2, 2013

This Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), which serves as the hub for much of the United Nations’ various human rights activities – and, indeed, a good deal of its mischief too – recently sent out a request to civil society organizations for submissions on what concerns it should put on its agenda for 2014-2017.

Too often such calls are answered by non-governmental organizations whose missions are to elevate self-evident human wrongs, such as abortion, into human “rights.”  Groups that seek to protect the right to life – a truly fundamental human right absent which there are no other rights – are reticent to engage because they perceive, not without reason, the OHCHR to be ideologically hostile.  The high ground is thereby ceded to the radicals, who get to set the agenda and have a platform from which to amplify their voices.

Trying to change that, Alliance Defending Freedom submitted its suggestions this week on how the OHCHR might improve.  Giving praise where it was due, the conscience-rights organization congratulated the OHCHR for emphasizing right of conscience in at least one particular setting, namely, where it involved conscientious objection to military service.  However, it pointed out that elsewhere the OHCHR has called for removal of protections for health care professionals who hold conscientious objections to dispensing or administering drugs which potentially function as abortifacients.

Such double standards often emerge where the issue is abortion, producing what some call “abortion distortion.”

The drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights certainly understood the right of conscience to be a foundational human right, for they enshrined it in both documents.  Vigilance is required to ensure that the High Commissioner and others who purport to arbitrate what are “rights” never extinguish what George Washington once named that “little spark of celestial fire, called conscience,” and Gaudium et Spes referred to as “man’s most secret core and his sanctuary.”

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