The
ninth meeting under the theme of ‘Talking about the Human Rights of Older
Persons’ took place online on August 11, 2022, with Dr Andrew Fagan. He is
Senior Lecturer at the School of Law and the Director of the Human Rights
Center at the University of Essex, UK. His research focuses on the normative,
political and cultural challenges to human rights. He is particularly
interested in the contributions that radical philosophies and politics can make
to defend human rights against multiple challenges. He has taught and lectured
on human rights across the world, including Central Asia, East Asia (Korea and
Japan), Europe, South East Asia and North and South America.
During
the meeting, he shared his personal story about his upbringing and how he
became interested in human rights. Then, he introduced and shared his thoughts
on the limits of human rights projects in addressing real social issues,
particularly its ‘class-blindness’, how to make human rights meet its moral
objectives by adopting radical political approaches and the need for a UN
Convention on the Human Rights of Older Persons.
1. Personal
Story and Human Rights
Contrary
to the belief of many, Dr Fagan holds the view that the concept of human rights
is highly political. This view is strengthened and confirmed by his experiences
of working in Korea, Japan and Myanma in the early 2010s: human rights enter
into highly politicized discussions and policy stances between North and South
Korea and in the context of Asia’s relations to the West. Especially Dr Fagan
is interested in human rights campaigners and groups of people struggling from
the bottom up, rather than the UN’s top down focus on human rights. In this
respect, his standpoint is at the grassroots level, being interested in how
human rights influence the way the people think about what they are entitled to,
how they campaign and pursue it.
Dr Fagan’s standpoint on human rights is shaped and
influenced by his life experience and the environment he grew up in. Growing up
in an economically and socially unprivileged neighborhood in postwar London as
a child of a multicultural family he was exposed to racism, economic poverty
and violence. Uninterested in schooling, he left school at the age of 14 and
returned to education only after he was twenty years old. While he continued to
be in education since and became a university lecturer, he came to discover that
many human rights scholars are overwhelmingly from middle class backgrounds and
often fail to address real life issues. By opening up his background to
students, he wishes to be a role model for those who are from underprivileged backgrounds
and turn his life experience to delve into areas of human rights that are often
lost sight of. For instance, human rights scholars in high-income countries tend
to focus on its violations committed overseas and on formality issues such as
criminal justice systems, while paying less attention to deteriorating and increasingly
impoverished living conditions of many people in their home countries, which in
fact amount to violations of human rights. Many people in the UK, the fifth
largest economy in the world, will be in the situation of having to choose
between food and heating in the coming winter. It is important to understand
that poverty is a disablement that affects people across different social identities
such as sex, sexual orientation and race.
2. Tensions and
Contradictions of Human Rights
Dr
Fagan came to the field of human rights via critical theory (the Frankfurt
School) and scholars critical of international law, with a primary interest in social
justice. He believes that there are different routes to achieving social
justice apart from the advocacy of human rights. Human beings as a species have
developed immense capacities to inflict serious harm on one another, but at the
same time many have also developed and showed an irrepressible urge and desire
to pursue a better life on the basis of dignity and autonomy. The human rights community
claims that what distinguishes itself from other routes, or, what sets itself
above any other routes to social justice is its universality, that is, its
claim that all human beings are ultimately entitled to social justice, as
expressed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. While the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights contains and expresses the essence of the desire of
many to lead an autonomous, dignified and just life, the problem is that the
concept of human rights came to monopolize and define such desires and
aspirations, and has been an instrument of their colonization by the West, which
has often been elitist and hypocritical. Human rights projects are often set
out by those privileged both globally and domestically.
This
critical view on the ways in which human rights operate today is also related
to Dr Fagan’s research interest in the relation between capitalism and human
rights. Human rights can provide critical perspectives on one of the worst
forms of capitalism (e.g. neoliberalism). However, many human rights scholars
tend not to question capitalism and accept it as a fact of life, and many human
rights projects have entered into alliance with global powers. Dr Fagan thinks
that this move is fundamentally incompatible with the social justice impulse.
Being a true human rights supporter should mean being far more critical of the
global system and of the claims that the West makes about itself, as well as
the ways in which the West characterizes non-Western societies as being invariably
unfriendly or hostile towards human rights without reflecting on the fact that some
actions of the West have been harmful to human rights. In short, human rights express
and capture the continuing desire of human beings as a species for living in a
just world, but the ways in which they are institutionally and conceptually
configured and arranged prevents that. On this basis, Dr Fagan encourages those
who are already uncomfortable with some aspects of human rights to critically
reflect on these and begin to develop a different way of thinking about human
rights. The human rights community largely ignores social class issues, poverty,
the capitalist dimension of social class, and human subjects are assumed to be
isolated, separate, sovereign individuals. However, human agents interdependent
on each other and identities are formed through interactions with and relations
to others. In this sense, human rights mischaracterize what it means to be a human
being. Unless human rights projects are fundamentally rethought and reformed they
will become much less influential in the next twenty years than they are today.
3. Human
Rights, Culture and Politics
Human
rights have often been criticized for being ‘imperialistic’ in that they
originate from the West and serve the interests of the West, particularly by
authoritarian governments in non-Western countries, and at the same time they
are accused of failing to challenge the violations of human rights committed in
the name of unique cultures and regions. To the question on the relation
between human rights and culture, Dr Fagan expressed the view that whether or
not one supports human rights, inside or outside the West, we should recognize
as a matter of fact that human rights are unduly shaped and determined by
Western sensitivities. For instance, individualism, a core Western value, is a
fundamental and unnegotiable component of human rights projects. However, this can
suggest that non-individualistic societies, cultures and religions will
encounter great obstacles to embracing human rights, whereas some societies that
are not hostile to human rights might utilize human rights as a means to pursue
their own ways of securing social justice. He then added that we have to distinguish
the objectives and motivations of the critics of human rights: we need to distinguish
between those critics who are simply seeking to legitimize their own powers and
those who are concerned with and aligned with social justice projects.
Dr
Fagan also argues that the human rights community in the West should be
reflective on the ways in which many Western societies and institutions have
been treating others: they often displayed judgmental and harsh criticisms of
some societies and cultures that they think were not aligned with human rights
principles, without realizing that their own actions had actually breached
them. In fact, this way of judging other people and societies does not work as
a means of persuasion and rather results in opposite consequences.
Unfortunately, many Western powers have employed such strategies by forcing
other non-Western societies to change their institutions to comply with human
rights as a conditionality to have access to aid and the Western market. It
should be recognized that Western understandings of human rights are not
necessarily and fundamentally universal. In fact, they do not express the
genuine identity of the West: the West is too diverse and fragmented to
represent one single unified value.
One of the reasons why this reflective approach is
important is also to do with the fact that the human rights community is
diverse politically, being supported by those on the center-right all the way through
to the hard-left. Some are interested in identity politics, others prioritize
civic and political rights, or social and cultural rights. Despite this
diversity and wide political spectrum that exists within the human rights
community, what bind them together is hostility to criticism. Many people seem
to think about human rights in a very narrow sense, being concerned about the
protection of prisoners, asylum-seekers and terrorists. However, human rights
affect ordinary people and are related to all aspects of life, from housing,
transport, education and healthcare to employment. Likewise, securing a dignified
life for older persons in their final stage of life is a fundamental aspect of
human rights.
Dr
Fagan thus called for fundamentally and critically reassessing and reformulating
human rights: we have to rethink what we understand what human rights are to be,
not merely applying what exists today to wider areas. For example, we should
not simply expand more human rights to more individuals, who are assumed to
exist as separate and sovereign beings, but challenge the individualistic
assumption itself.
4. A
‘Responsible’ Critique and the Human Rights of Older Persons
Concerningthe argument for the need of a UN convention on the human rights of older
persons, Dr Fagan offered the view that while it is true that the UN human
rights system and international law have many flaws, we need to be critical of
it in a responsible way. Being responsible here means that we need to think
about alternatives to the existing systems and instruments, in order words, we
have to question how bad things would be without those limited protections.
Undeniably, though limited, the existing human rights treaties and systems have
benefited some people. Similarly, a (liberal) version of human rights that is
insensitive to color and gender brings about only limited benefits to people. It
is thus important to specify the different needs of groups of people within the
human rights framework. In this respect, it is crucial and necessary to have a
UN convention or treaty that addresses specific challenges that older people
experience. However, at the same time, it is equally important to recognize
that a treaty or convention cannot be the ultimate goal – the aim should not be
having a treaty but ensuring its proper implementation and monitoring,
understanding that a treaty amounts to only the beginning of securing the human
rights of older persons.
manji74@asemgac.org
