Tag Archives: Minorities

The hijacking of Human Rights discourse: political manipulation and loss of impact

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José Daniel Rodríguez Arrieta

Professor and Researcher at the School of Political Science, University of Costa Rica

Human rights PhD candidate in Carlos III University of Madrid

Human rights, born from the 1948 Universal Declaration as a beacon of justice and universal dignity, are now hijacked by political and social forces that turn them into a tool, abandoning their historical vocation. This phenomenon is not merely a historical accident but a process in which human rights discourse has been shaped and manipulated to serve ideological and geopolitical interests.

We understand discourse as a set of linguistic and symbolic practices that not only reflect reality but also construct it. Discourses are not neutral; they are vehicles of power that shape how societies understand and defend fundamental values such as justice, freedom, and equality. The discourse on human rights, therefore, does not merely respond to an ideal or the need to protect people—it has also become a battlefield where meanings are negotiated and different forms of power are deployed.

In this context, the appropriation of human rights discourse by political actors has led to a distortion that weakens its transformative power. A clear example is the culture war that has defined the relationship between the ultra-conservative right and progressive movements, particularly concerning the so-called “woke culture.” Donald Trump, in his attempt to delegitimize struggles for racial and gender equity, has turned the debate into a dichotomy between the defense of “individual rights” and what he calls “progressive authoritarianism.” This discourse, filled with terms like “freedom of speech” and “reverse discrimination,” empties historical struggles for the rights of the most vulnerable of their substantive content.

On the other hand, progressive movements have also engaged in the instrumentalization of human rights discourse. By placing inclusion and diversity struggles at the center, they have created a sort of discursive orthodoxy that allows no dissent. The defense of LGBTQ+ rights or the rights of racial minorities, in many cases, has given way to strategies that can lead to the censorship of dissenting opinions, paradoxically undermining the very defense of human rights.

From an international relations perspective, the manipulation of human rights discourse becomes even more evident in today’s geopolitical dynamics. Western powers, for instance, have positioned themselves as defenders of international humanitarian law in certain conflicts while applying a double standard in others. The support for Ukraine after the Russian invasion is a clear example: sanctions and international condemnation of Russia are based on the defense of human rights and the right to self-determination of peoples. However, this same fervor is not applied with the same intensity when it comes to Palestine, where human rights violations by Israel have been minimized or even ignored by the international community, exposing the hypocrisy of an international system that fails to apply its principles consistently—an international system that once prided itself on being grounded in human rights principles.

At the same time, authoritarian governments like Viktor Orbán’s in Hungary have adopted human rights language to justify regressive and ultranationalist policies. Orbán has presented his anti-LGBTQ+ laws as a “protection of traditional family values,” appealing to the right of nations to preserve their own principles. In Russia, Vladimir Putin invokes the defense of “traditional values” to justify political repression and the criminalization of dissent, cloaking his authoritarianism in the guise of human rights while actually stripping them of their emancipatory content.

This hijacking of human rights discourse presents a legitimacy crisis both nationally and internationally. When human rights are instrumentalized as a means to achieve specific political ends, they lose their ability to inspire profound and universal social reforms. The rhetoric of human rights, instead of being a force for justice, becomes a tool of power, selectively used depending on geopolitical or ideological contexts.

To restore the transformative power of human rights, it is essential to detach them from partisan and political agendas. This requires a reassessment of their universal character and a commitment to accountability that ensures their consistent application in all contexts. A critical and profound reflection is necessary—not only to dismantle current manipulations but also to reinvent a vision of human rights as a principle of global and universal justice.

Only in this way can human rights regain their credibility and once again serve as an authentic tool for social and political justice.

Freedom of Expression vs Right to have Correct Information

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Shaista Tabassum 

Professor of international Relations 

Dean faculty of Arts and Social Sciences 

University of Karachi, Pakistan

Freedom of expression is a fundamental human right as given by Art 19 of the UDHR. The basic gain of this freedom is to increase knowledge and create understanding by dialogue on any issue among the people in any society. For any democratic culture the freedom of expression is the essential and primary stepping stone for democratic values to grow. 

In Pakistan, public faced suspension of social media when the government in the end of December2023 has gradually limited the use of social media platforms. Initially by limited access and later on slowing down the X (formerly Twitter) Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. Needless to mention that Pakistan is among the top most subscriber of Facebook in the World. It was reported that due to the underwater cable faults the access to internet was slowed down, however, later on the blocking was unofficially accepted on grounds that  it was due to the presence of blasphemous content or religious immorality on the social media [atforms. The blocking was primarily caused due to reports of the misuses of social media against the government, judiciary and the military establishment. The material used by the political opponents to spread disinformation based on propaganda and twisted facts using AI technology, thus creating chaos, anti-state and anti-military establishment propaganda. In societies like Pakistan where the literacy rate is below 60% there are high chances of public being easily influenced by the disinformation. Growing concerns were expressed by the religious community on the available online content and literature as misinterpretation of Islamic laws and practices equally challenging the very fabric of the society. Pakistani society is a conservative internally and is extremely sensitive on religious sectarian lines. The material on sensitive issues linked to blasphemy and pornographic material is popular and has wide market especially among the illiterate and rural young people. 

The freedom of expression is the basic human right of an individual, if it is denied, restrained or limited he or she cannot be consider as free. Every individual has complete freedom of thinking expression and writing. Any restriction is the violation of the principles of international Human rights laws.  The debate on freedom of expression becomes more complex when the use of such rights violates or caused damage to the rights of others. Thus it is agreed by international conventions that the freedom of expression is not an unrestricted right it must be balanced by the duties or responsibilities abide by the state the media and the individuals alike.  The 1950 European convention on HR very clearly agreed that this right may be limited. The primary reason being the protection of other’s rights. Article 10 of the convention is the crux of this debate, which says’

‘’everyone has the right to freedom of expression” but that this freedom may by subject to restrictions for a variety of reasons, including to protect the rights of others: The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.

This leads to yet to an extended discussion on the concept of Human rights. At the tip of the ice burg, every individual has the right to have knowledge and information but which is authentic, correct and genuine knowledge based on truth and facts not fictions or disinformation. Plato believed that knowledge is achievable but for him true knowledge must be trustworthy and also of the real. Any state of mind which cannot defend this claims cannot be the true knowledge.

While looking it from this angle it appears that the laws introduced by any government in such situation where the flood of information/disinformation is influencing the minds of the people the freedom of expression and the right of genuine information coincide in the state policy. The government as the custodian of the people security in every respect preferred that the public must be given right information. Now it is up to the masses to decide which right they prefer to have. Correct information or freedom of expression.

Analysis of the Speech: an epistemological tool to discover the social reality of the Quilombolas, neglected by the Brazilian legal norm

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Monique Fålcao

St. Ursula University

Brazil

mqfalcao@gmail.com

Since the establishment of the Brazilian Republic,1890, the impact of the abolition of slavery, 1888, on interests of ex-slaves has not been problematized either constitutionally or politically. This situation explains the fact that their descendants remained excluded for a very long time from their substantive citizenship. Because of this, land disputes have multiplied throughout the twentieth century.

The Brazilian Constitution 1988 “settled” these conflicts through the recognition of the descendants of slaves as owners of the lands they had occupied for a very long time. The Decree 4887 \ 2003) set the objective criteria for the recognition of communities and their land holdings.

The Anthropological Report is the normative instrument which diagnoses and officially recognizes the community as subject of rights with the aim of territorial delimitation and titling of property, from anthropological conceptions as common origin, historical process, collective memory and diacritical marks.

However, the application of this decree ended up either maintaining the exclusion of the descendants of slaves from their rights or by avoiding questioning specific elements of social reality. Moreover, the defense of the specific interests of these citizens deprived of their citizenship is still based today on racial discrimination which falls under the legal regime of slavery and which today still operates as an institutionalized common sense.

This institutionalized common sense is reprocessed by anthropologists as remaining from a “frozen vision,” being the official legal definition of slaves and quilombos of the days of slavery. As a consequence, the land conflicts which took place before the promulgation of the constitution of Brazil of (Eighty-eight, 1988 were linked one after the other at the end of the Decree of 2003.

Empirically, it is the Sacopã community that is the subject of the research. This community is located in an urban area in one of the richest neighborhoods of Rio de Janeiro. Its story begins 50 years after the abolition of slavery in Brazil with a couple of slave descendants who settle there. It is the Sacopã family. It has since fought against economic and state agents who, not recognizing any legitimacy in it, do everything to expel it.

Methodologically, Discourse Analysis is the tool capable of revealing the hidden and unproblematic elements of social reality. The hypothesis is that the methodological filter imposed by legal positivism does not allow us to detect the silences and violence of the slavery regime, nor the socio-cultural effects resulting from racial discrimination, nor the socio-economic effects of non- execution of inclusion policies for former slaves.

These are the elements which, in the Brazilian past, were hidden by a discourse based on a specific, modern and European epistemology, aimed at colonizing the “New World”. It was the epistemological basis of formal, modern, European, universalist citizenship. Until today, these elements still remain hidden and marginalized by common sense reproduced as an effect of this legal regime applied to slaves. According to the “frozen view” of old, slaves, as the object of law, and quilombos, as illegal collective subjects, were excluded from any kind of citizenship.

ORLANDI (1990), a Brazilian linguist, bases her studies on French ” Discourse Analysis ” and appropriates the theoretical categories “discursive formation” and “interdiscourse”; ideology and subject; Material relations of production and individual experience; with the aim of considering them from a Brazilian historical perspective by referring to the effects of the discourse of European colonization in Brazil.

On the theoretical-linguistic level, it understands the function of the “already-said” as “already-internalized”, as memory which remains present as a rationality. And it is historicity which, in the following theoretical-sociological plan, will compose the materiality of silence or the unspoken as a guarantee of movements of meaning. This conception of silence is developed by Orlandi from his critique of the original conception of silence “as a remainder of language”.

The historical process of the community, single-family, of sustainable production, of collective use of space, which is defined according to daily necessity, customs and traditions established according to experience, without any previously established rule, is today seen as illegal activities in front of the public order standards of urbanization and environmental protection, which arrived in the region from the 70s and still remain today. Likewise, it does not fit the classic definition of individual civil property, which is why the occupied space disrespects the state and the neighborhood and suffers from successive invasions by property speculators.

It is in the “unspoken” field of the legal norm, where imperative norms impose on the community the duty to adapt and to become civilized. The community can choose – in the binary system of traditional law – between remaining in the region by complying with urban planning and environmental protection standards or carrying out its cultural and economic activities in the suburbs or in the favela.

On this point of view, the Report and the Decree reaffirm and reproduce the historical materialities of illegitimacy and illegality of the activities of the community because they are not able to restrict or to compose the social effects of the meaning that the community has. for the Neighborhood, for economic agents and for the State.

From the analytical perspective, property and identity for Sacopã surpass the characterization of identity of the anthropological relationship, of collective memory, common origin, historical process as a diagnosis of a past that becomes present.

Identity and property, for Sacopã, are also formed from the preservation of interests historically denied and delegitimized by “Other” actors and institutions. Not just facts or traditions, but interests, for which the community fights until today on the argument of the realization of constitutional rights or substantive citizenship.

Identity and ownership, for the community, is made up of interests based on experience and need, and is established before or independent of legal provisions. All this inherited, on the one hand, from the days of slavery and the African traditions that were brought there, and, on the other hand, from resistance against the colonial regime.

It is this conflictual movement, this systematic and historical negation of these interests of the community that is silenced by the Decree, by the Anthropological Report and by the incidence of other urban planning and environmental laws which, because of its nature of public order, are political instruments used for the purpose of fixing or expelling the community.

If “the said”, represented by the legal norm, restricts the conflict to the territorial question and attributes to them a solution based on the formalization of civil property law, which awaits the civilizing promises made by traditional law, the “non- dit ”seems to denounce the silence and the historical-social rejection of the real interests of blacks, slaves and quilombos as real social actors or historical subjects.

The theoretical hypothesis to be developed is that the non-fulfillment of material citizenship results from the methodological filter imposed by the current traditional theory of law in Brazil. This discussion can be made from the critical thinking of the epistemology of the South, from the deepening of the historical and sociological critical aspects of the Brazilian reality and from the demand of the black social movements that were brought and discussed at the National Constituent Assembly, but modified because of the positivist constitutional methodological filter and the process of objectification of the categories identity and property in the Decree 4887 \ 2003