60 Years of Commitment to Human Dignity

The United Nations has launched a new campaign – “60 Years of Commitment to Human Dignity” to commemorate and celebrate the 60th Anniversary of the adoption of the two International Covenants. As the Concept Note explains:

“On 16 December 1966, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). Along with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the two Covenants form the International Bill of Human Rights, which sets out a comprehensive vision of human dignity and the legally binding obligations of States to respect, protect and fulfil human rights.” (emphasis added)

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948 but was not sent out to nation-states for ratification; it simply declared, in 30 brief articles, the rights to which every “member of the human family” is entitled to enjoy. 

The two Covenants strengthen and expand the UDHR in important ways.

Unlike their predecessor, they are binding on the states that ratify them; to date, they have been ratified by more than 174 nations on earth. (The United States has signed but not ratified the social and economic rights covenant).

Moreover, they elaborate on the some of the rights identified in the UDHR and add new ones. And, as interpreted, they confirm that “all human rights are universal, indivisible, interdependent and interrelated.” Rights are understood to be indivisible for two principal reasons: what is experienced as fact and what is written into the law.

First, people experience rights not as distinct silos but in inter-related and compounding ways. For example, a climate event can eradicate a crop which reduces a family’s income, resulting in hunger, which impairs health and makes it harder or impossible to go to school, and so on. These impacts are not distinct facts but necessarily inter-dependent and inter-related, as we’ve written in our motion to the African Court of Human and People’s Rights. The Covenants themselves say, in nearly identical terms, that “the ideal of free human beings enjoying freedom from fear and want can only be achieved if conditions are created whereby everyone may enjoy his economic, social and cultural rights, as well as his civil and political rights.” As the Concept Note says, “the rights enshrined in the two Covenants cover all aspects of the everyday life of persons.”

Second, the Covenants root all human rights directly in human dignity. The Preambles of both say that “these rights derive from the inherent dignity of the human person” and, following the UDHR, that “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.”  Whereas the UDHR recognized dignity as the first and paramount right, the twin covenants confirm that dignity lies at the confluence of all human rights, and indeed, it is the source of the idea of human rights.

I have written elsewhere that if an alien came down to earth and wondered what a human being is, they could find out by simply reading cases about dignity. They would learn that a human being is an individual who has certain biological needs (food, water, health, a healthy environment), certain social needs (to live in community with others and be treated as an equal among others, but with individuation and privacy), and psychological needs (to make decisions for themselves, to freely fulfill their personalities, to be treated with respect), and so on. All this can be gleaned from what international law and judges say about dignity rights. To read the dignity caselaw is to learn what it means to be human in the 21st century  -- including how these principles apply in the context of biomedicine, AI, and modern warfare. This is why the Human Rights Committee, which applies and monitors implementation of the ICCPR has said, in a General Comment, that the right to life itself is the right to live with dignity.

The rights enumerated in the International Bill of Rights don’t just derive from dignity, they “set out a comprehensive vision of human dignity,” as the Concept Note says. This international law describes what it means to have dignity, what it means to live with dignity.

We join the UN and the High Commission for Human Rights in celebrating this historic achievement and renewing our global commitment to human dignity.