A War on Enlightenment

In the war that has just begun, soldiers and civilians will not be the only casualties. Although President Bush trumpets the bringing of democracy to Iraq, in a larger sense the deadly rain of missiles on Baghdad has dealt a major setback to what historians someday may call the Age of Human Rights

Perhaps that's too grand a term for a principle that major nations have applied erratically, hypocritically, or often not at all. But the idea of human rights as an international standard, as something which transcends national boundaries, has gathered much force over the last several decades. It has been one of the great, fragile triumphs of today's world.

A major human rights landmark was the 1961 founding of Amnesty International, an organization based on the principle that no one should be imprisoned -- whether by Poland or Argentina, China or El Salvador, Pakistan or Bulgaria -- only for his or her beliefs. This proved a powerful, subversive message that rattled many governments in a world divided by the Cold War -- the repressive regimes of the Soviet bloc on one side, and the United States with its dictator allies in Latin America and elsewhere on the other. In 1978, across the kitchen table in the Moscow apartment of the famed physicist and dissident Andrei Sakharov, a Russian writer told me that a friend of hers in prison had once received a postcard of support from an Amnesty member in Switzerland. "I felt as if the doors of the prison had opened," the man told her years later, "And I could see the sky."

Today a report by Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, Antislavery International or other similar groups carries moral weight because people know that it is based on a universal standard. And that standard has broadened: The concept of human rights now increasingly includes not just the legal rights of free speech, due process and the vote, but the social and economic rights to health care, a living wage, and more.

Another set of human rights landmarks has been the setting up of United Nations tribunals for those who committed war crimes in Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and the former Yugoslavia. So far, such trials have been for officials from small and powerless countries only; it will be a long time before Russia is called to account for its atrocities in Chechnya, or the United States for a century of military interventions in Central America. Nonetheless, a principle is on the table that applies to all nations great and small. Many a would-be dictator now knows that he could someday be put in the dock outside his own country. And even where there are no tribunals, another set of rights is implicitly now on the table: the right for survivors of brutal, repressive regimes to know the truth. South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission has been a bold and daring experiment, imperfect but unprecedented in history, and is now being imitated in more than half a dozen other countries. Could something like it have even been imagined before our imperfect but unprecedented Age of Human Rights?

One of my favorite institutions of this era few Americans even know about: the European Court of Human Rights. Participating nations -- including many which are not yet members of the European Union -- must allow the court to overrule legal decisions made by their national courts. I recently heard a Danish former judge of the court describe how in an important test case the court had reinstated in her job a German schoolteacher fired only because of her membership in the Communist Party. The Dane was then asked by a new and bewildered fellow-judge from Eastern Europe, "Explain this to me. I don't understand it. In my country we're trying to fire Communist Party members!" Perhaps today that judge better understands how human rights extend even to those whose political opinions you loathe. Millions of Europeans certainly do.