HR EDUCATION: Human Rights Makes Man Human

By Jose W. Diokno

Senator Jose W. Diokno

(Senator Jose "Pepe" Wright Diokno served as a Senator of the Philippines from 1963 to 1972. He founded the organization, Free Legal Assistance Group (FLAG), an organization of lawyers that provide legal assistance to victims of human rights violations. He also served as the founding chairperson of the Commission on Human Rights (CHR))

(Editor's note: Following are excerpts from a lecture delivered by the author at a human rights convention at Siliman University on August 31, 1981. The article falls in place to PHRU's thrust on human rights education, and we feel that we could not have presented the topic better that the late Atty. Jose "Pepe" Diokno, one of the first pillars of human rights advocacy in the country.)

Each of the great documents on human rights enumerates more than 20 human rights, because so many are listed, many of us find it hard to grasp their scope. So let us start with the basics.

First. None of us asked to be born. And regardless of who are parents are and what they own, all of us are born equally naked and helpless, yet with his own mind, his own will and talents. Because of these facts, all of us have an equal right to lif

e and share the same inherent human dignity.

The right to life is more than the right to live; it is the right to live in a manner that befits our common human dignity and enables us to bring or particular talents to full flower. So each of us individually has three basic rights:  the right to life, the right to dignity, and the right to develop ourselves. These are traditionally known as the rights of man.

Second. Even if we do not know who are parents are, we are never born without parents, and never live outside society, a society with its particular culture, history and resources. So besides our rights as persons, we have rights as a society, rights which belong to us individually, but which we can exercise collectively as a people. They are analogous to the rights of man and like the latter comprise three basic rights: to survive, to self-determination, and to develop as a people.

Third. Once society reaches a certain degree of complexity, as almost all societies have, society can act only through government. But government always remains only an agent of society; it never becomes society itself; it never becomes the people themselves. Moreover, since government is composed of men, each with his own interests and his own frailties, it usually happens – in fact it happens all too often – that governments do not seek the people’s welfare; on the contrary it oppresses the people.

These facts lead to two conclusions: One is that, when we speak of national security, what we refer or should refer to is the security of the people, not of the governors; and when we speak of economic development, we are talking about or should be talking about is the improvement of the standard of living of all the people, not the enrichment of the governors. The other conclusion is that since the government is only an agent of the people, people have the system of government itself; and when the people cannot do so peacefully, they have the right, in the language of the preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression.”

All the rights of men and the rights of the people stem from those three basic principles.

From man’s basic right -  his right to life -  spring our rights to health, own property, work, form trade unions, strike, social security, rest and leisure, move about freely within our country and freely leave and to return to it, marry, establish a family and exercise the rights of parents.

Analogously, the right of the people as people to survive is the source of our people’s rights to: peace, non-aggression and share in international trade, receiving a just price for our products and paying no more than is fair for the products of other countries.

Senator Diokno visiting a survivor of Lupao Massacre. File photo from Museum of Courage and Resistance

Man’s second basic right – his rights to human dignity – is the source of our rights to the recognition everywhere as  a person, to honor and reputation, to freedom of thought, of conscience, if religion, of opinion and expression, to seek, receive, and impart information, to peaceful assembly with our fellow, to equal treatment before the law, to privacy in our family, our home and our punishment, as well for arbitrary arrest, detention or exile and be presumed innocent  of crime or wrong, to fair trial and so forth.

The analogous right of a people to self-determination is the root of our people’s right to sovereign equality international affairs and international organizations, to freedom from all forms of racial discrimination, to political independence, and freedom from colonialism, neo-colonialism, alien domination and intervention in our national affairs, to sovereignty over national affairs, to sovereignty over our natural resources and over all economic activities, to control to activities of foreign investors and transnational corporations, and to nationalize and expropriate their assets and freely choose and change our political, social, cultural  and economic system.

Man’s third right – his right to develop – is the source of our rights to education, to share in a cultural life of our community, to form associations with our fellows, and to live in a national and international order that allows all our rights to flower and be respected.

Similarly, the people’s right to develop as a people implies the right to freely choose the goals and means of development to industrialize the economy, to implement social and economic reforms that ensure the participation of all the people in the process and benefits of development, to share in scientific and technological advances of the world, and as a former colony, to reparation and retribution for the exploitation to which we have been subjected.

No one has ever doubted that the rights of people are all of a piece. Equally so are the rights of man. But for convenience, the rights of man have been divided to two broad kinds: economic, social and cultural rights on the one hand, and civil and political rights on the other. This distinction has led to much argument about which kind should be given priority and whether one kind can be sacrificed for the other.

My experience has convinced me that these arguments are silly. As lawyers of small farmers, fishermen, workers, students and urban poor, many of whom have been detained, most of whom have been threatened with detention, a few of whom have been shot and wounded when they were peacefully exercising their rights of assembly. I have learned the painful lesson that we cannot enjoy civil and political rights unless we enjoy economic, cultural, and social rights, anymore that we can ensure our economic, social and cultural rights unless we can exercise our civil and political rights. True, a hungry man does not have much freedom of choice. But equally true, when the well-fed man does not have freedom of choice, he cannot protect himself against going hungry.

A more useful distinction that between economic and political rights is this: that some of man’s individual rights are absolute, others are not. Rights which are absolute, others are not. Rights which are absolute cannot be limited in any way under any circumstance, not even under the gravest of emergencies. Such are for example, the rights to freedom of thought, of conscience, of religion, to be everywhere recognized as a person, to be free from torture and from cruel, degrading and inhuman treatment; and of course, the right not to be deprived of life arbitrarily. Not only may these rights never be denied, but nothing justifies imposing any limitations on them.

On the other hand, other rights may be and in fact must be limited to preserve social life. Such are for example: the right to freedom of expression, freedom of assemble and freedom of association. To be valid however, limitations placed on these rights must meet three conditions, first, they must be provided by law, not by executive whim; second, they must be necessary to preserve society, or protect public health, public morals, or similar rights of others; and third, they must not exceed what is strictly necessary to achieve their purpose.

These rights and some others – such as, for instance, the right to be free from arbitrary detention and arrest and the right to a remedy for every violation of fundamental rights – may even be denied in times of grave emergency. But to justify such a denial, the emergency must be so grave that it truly threatens the life of the nation; the existence of the emergency must be publicly proclaimed; and the denial may go no further than is strictly required by the exigencies of the situation.