A Timeline of Human Rights
(Under Construction)
1940
H.G. Wells and the Sankey Declaration of the Rights of Man
Filed under: Ideas
Writing with fellow British socialists, he asked society to consider the goals for which it was fighting and demanded that universal human rights be top on the list. His work had a profound impact.
In the first half of the 20th century, the idea of universal human rights were rarely discussed, let alone championed, by politcal and intellectual power brokers.
Robertson writes1 that this owed partly to the arguments of Bentham and Marx, who pointed out difficulties with the idea of natural rights.
It also derived from the fact that all the major countries were colonizers at the time, and declarations of human rights would have been rightly seen as hypocritical.
H.G. Wells must be credited with reviving the idea of universal human rights, Robertson continues. Letters Wells wrote to the Times of London in 1939 as well as books including H.G. Wells on the Rights of Man, (published in the UK in 1939, as near as I can tell), The New World Order (1940), and The Rights of Man; or What Are We Fighting For? 1940, along with speaking engagements, raised popular support for human rights as a war aim and as a basis for social order.
Versions of H.G. Wells on the Rights of Man were translated in to 30 languages and syndicated in newspapers around the world, Robertson writes. It was an idea whose time had come.
(Note: I’m trying to determine whether those three books are all just versions, with different titles for different places of publication, of the same book.)
Robertson notes that President Franklin Roosevelt, a friend of Wells, read and was influenced by the book; almost certainly it had an influence on FDR’s Four Freedom’s Speech of 1941.
By the time America entered the fight, human rights were widely accepted to be a war aim, as indicated by a declration of January 1942 which stated that “complete victory over the enemies is essential … to preserve human rights and justice in their own lands as well as in other lands.”
Wells’ Declaration was ultimately named for Labour Lord Chancellor Sankey, and it was among those documents considered by the UN Commission on Human Rights when they drafted the UDHR.
Personal comment
Wells’ socialist interest in the ultimate development of a collectivist society, in which private property no longer exists, is expressed in the books that popularized the Declaration and the idea of human rights as a war aim. He was, in my opinion, quite mistaken in hoping for this eventual outcome. But it is worth noting that the Declaration iteslf actually takes an entire article to state the right to private property.
Footnotes
1 Geoffrey Robertson, Crimes Against Humanity: The Struggle for Global Justice, (Revised Edition, The New Press, 2002) pp 22-28.
The full text of one version of the declaration (from an online copy of The New World Order:
In order to be as clear as possible about this, let me submit a draft for your consideration of this proposed Declaration of the Rights of Man – using “man” of course to cover every individual, male or female, of the species. I have endeavoured to bring in everything that is essential and to omit whatever secondary issues can be easily deduced from its general statements. It is a draft for your consideration. Points may have been overlooked and it may contain repetitions and superfluous statements.“Since a man comes into this world through no fault of his own, since he is manifestly a joint inheritor of the accumulations of the past, and since those accumulations are more than sufficient to justify the claims that are here made for him, it follows:
”(1) That every man without distinction of race, of colour or of professed belief or opinions, is entitled to the nourishment, covering, medical care and attention needed to realise his full possibilities of physical and mental development and to keep him in a state of health from his birth to death.
”(2) That he is entitled to sufficient education to make him a useful and interested citizen, that special education should be so made available as to give him equality of opportunity for the development of his distinctive gifts in the service of mankind, that he should have easy access to information upon all matters of common knowledge throughout his life and enjoy the utmost freedom of discussion, association and worship.
”(3) That he may engage freely in any lawful occupation, earning such pay as the need for his work and the increment it makes to the common welfare may justify. That he is entitled to paid employment and to a free choice whenever there is any variety of employment open to him. He may suggest employment for himself and have his claim publicly considered, accepted or dismissed.
”(4) That he shall have the right to buy or sell without any discriminatory restrictions anything which may be lawfully bought or sold, in such quantities and with such reservations as are compatible with the common welfare.”
(Here I will interpolate a comment. We have to bear in mind that in a collectivist state buying and selling to secure income and profit will be not simply needless but impossible. The Stock Exchange, after its career of four-hundred-odd-years, will necessarily vanish with the disappearance of any rational motive either for large accumulations or for hoarding against deprivation and destitution. Long before the age of complete collectivisation arrives, the savings of individuals for later consumption will probably be protected by some development of the Unit Trust System into a public service. They will probably be entitled to interest at such a rate as to compensate for that secular inflation which should go on in a steadily enriched world community. Inheritance and bequest in a community in which the means of production and of all possible monopolisation are collectivised, can concern little else than relatively small, beautiful and intimate objects, which will afford pleasure but no unfair social advantage to the receiver.)
”(5) That he and his personal property lawfully acquired are entitled to police and legal protection from private violence, deprivation, compulsion and intimidation.
”(6) That he may move freely about the world at his own expense. That his private house or apartment or reasonably limited garden enclosure is his castle, which may be entered only with consent, but that he shall have the right to come and go over any kind of country, moorland, mountain, farm, great garden or what not, or upon the seas, lakes and rivers of the world, where his presence will not be destructive of some special use, dangerous to himself nor seriously inconvenient to his fellow-citizens.
”(7) That a man unless he is declared by a competent authority to be a danger to himself and to others through mental abnormality, a declaration which must be annually confirmed, shall not be imprisoned for a longer period than six days without being charged with a definite offence against the law, nor for more than three months without public trial. At the end if the latter period, if he has not been tried and sentenced by due process of law, he shall be released. Nor shall he be conscripted for military, police or any other service to which he has a conscientious objection.
”(8) That although a man is subject to the free criticism of his fellows, he shall have adequate protection from any lying or misrepresentation that may distress or injure him. All administrative registration and records about a man shall be open to his personal and private inspection. There shall be no secret dossiers in any administrative department. All dossiers shall be accessible to the man concerned and subject to verification and correction at his challenge. A dossier is merely a memorandum; it cannot be used as evidence without proper confirmation in open court.
”(9) That no man shall be subjected to any sort of mutilation or sterilisation except with his own deliberate consent, freely given, nor to bodily assault, except in restraint of his own violence, nor to torture, beating or any other bodily punishment; he shall not be subjected to imprisonment with such an excess of silence, noise, light or darkness as to cause mental suffering, or to imprisonment in infected, verminous or otherwise insanitary quarters, or be put into the company of verminous or infectious people. He shall not be forcibly fed nor prevented from starving himself if he so desire. He shall not be forced to take drugs nor shall they be administered to him without his knowledge and consent. That the extreme punishments to which he may be subjected are rigorous imprisonment for a term of not longer than fifteen years or death.”
(Here I would point out that there is nothing in this to prevent any country from abolishing the death penalty any country from abolishing the death penalty. Nor do I assert a general right to commit suicide, because no one can punish a man for doing that. He has escaped. But threats and incompetent attempts to commit suicide belong to an entirely different category. They are indecent and distressing acts that can easily become a serious social nuisance, from which the normal citizen is entitled to protection.)
”(10) That the provisions and principles embodied in this Declaration shall be more fully defined in a code of fundamental human rights which shall be made easily accessible to everyone. This Declaration shall not be qualified nor departed from upon any pretext whatever. It incorporates all previous Declarations of Human Right. Henceforth for a new ear it is the fundamental law for mankind throughout the whole world.
“No treaty and no law affecting these primary rights shall be binding upon any man or province or administrative division of the community, that has not been made openly, by and with the active or tacit acquiescence of every adult citizen concerned, either given by a direct majority vote of his publicly elected representatives. In matters of collective behaviour it is by the majority decision men must abide. No administration, under a pretext of urgency, convenience or the like, shall be entrusted with powers to create or further define offences or set up by-laws, which will in any way infringe the rights and liberties here asserted. All legislation must be public and definite. No secret treaties shall be binding on individuals, organisations or communities. No orders in council or the like, which extend the application of a law, shall be permitted. There is no source of law but the people, and since life flows on constantly to new citizens, no generation of the people can in whole or in part surrender or delegate the legislative power inherent in mankind.”
There, I think, is something that keener minds than mine may polish into a working Declaration which would in the most effective manner begin that restoration of confidence of which the world stands in need. Much of it might be better phrased, but I think it embodies the general good-will in mankind from pole to pole. It is certainly what we all want for ourselves. It could be a very potent instrument indeed in the present phase of human affairs. It is necessary and it is acceptable. Incorporate that in your peace treaties and articles of federation, I would say, and you will have a firm foundation, which will continually grow firmer, for the fearless cosmopolitan life of a new world order. You will never get that order without some such document. It is the missing key to endless contemporary difficulties.
And if we, the virtuous democracies, are not fighting for these common human rights, then what in the name of the nobility and gentry, the Crown and the Established Church, the City, The Times and the Army and Navy Club, are we common British peoples fighting for?
Can the Sankey Declaration be freely re-printed in a book? Is permission required? From whom? Be aware that British copyright law was changed by expansion to 70 years after death, from 50.
— Bob Higgins Nov 17, 05:15 AM #