What Went Wrong With Human Rights - WSJ

What Went Wrong With Human Rights - WSJ--James Taranto

"When the U.S. withdrew in June from the United Nations Human Rights Council, Ambassador Nikki Haley described the council as “a protector of human-rights abusers, and a cesspool of political bias.” Aaron Rhodes agrees but thinks Ms. Haley was too gentle.“The Human Rights Council has become a cover for dictatorships,” he says. “They assume the high moral ground of standing for ‘dialogue’ and ‘cooperation,’ a tactic for smothering the truth about denying freedom. Raising human-rights concerns is dismissed as divisive and confrontational, and a threat to ‘stability.’ Most of the debate there is technocratic blah-blah about global social policy—not about human rights at all.”

To U.N. watchers it’s a familiar critique, but Mr. Rhodes, 69, applies it far more broadly. 

In his recent book, “The Debasement of Human Rights: How Politics Sabotage the Ideal of Freedom,” he argues that virtually the entire human-rights enterprise has been corrupted by a philosophical error enshrined in the U.N.’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights—and that this explains the travesty of the Human Rights Council.

That error is the conflation of “natural law” with “positive law.” 
Mr. Rhodes explains the difference: “Natural law is a kind of constraint on positive law.” 

Think of America’s Bill of Rights, whose opening clause is “Congress shall make no law.” 

The idea is “that laws have to answer to a higher law,” he says. 

“This is a vision of law that is very deeply embedded in Western civilization,” finding premodern expression in the ideas of the Greek Stoics and the Roman statesman Cicero, as well as in biblical canon law. 

Natural law is universal—or at least claims to be.

“Positive law,” Mr. Rhodes continues, “is the law of states and governments.” 

A statute like the Social Security Act of 1935 creates “positive rights”—government-conferred benefits to which citizens have a legal entitlement..."

Read on.