Human Rights, Geography and

Human rights touch almost every aspect of life. Taken as a whole, they suggest a way of living together in peace, dignity, and freedom. A geographical perspective of human rights attempts to answer the question of whether people have the right, literally, to a place in the world. At its core, the concept of human rights involves political, cultural, economic, social, or environmental processes where issues of oppression are central to human struggles that are inextricably tied to particular places. As such, the major themes of locality, movement, and nature-society relations in the discipline of geography play an important role in any scholarship based on human rights. The late 20th and early 21st centuries have seen the emergence of human rights as a formal field of study that focuses mainly on the abuses of the state in oppressing its residents and citizens. In the context of international law, global awareness of the unjust treatment of people by governments or institutions is now commonplace. International entities such as the United Nations, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International now play a large role in revealing these abuses and pressuring governments to stop human rights abuses.

The initial concepts of universal human rights reach as far back as the Enlightenment, but it was the Holocaust in the mid 20th century that became the impetus for modern conceptions of human rights on a global scale. Engaging in mass violence, torture, and the mistreatment of human beings was certainly not a new aspect of humanity. But the rise of modern technology took human cruelty to new and frightening levels, giving rise to a systematic genocide that remains unparalleled in human history. As a direct result of the Holocaust, the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. The Declaration sets out a list of universal human rights, depicting them as “a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations.” Among these rights are the right to life, the right not to be tortured or enslaved, the right to seek asylum from persecution, and the right not to be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention, or exile. The Declaration also grants freedom of thought, expression, and religion. The cultural rights laid out in the document include the right to marriage, education, employment, food, and shelter. Although in a legal sense the Declaration is a nonbinding document, it has grown to become a major factor in international law since its adoption. In fact, many of the rights in the Declaration formed the groundwork for several regional human rights documents, such as the European Convention of Human Rights, the African Charter of Human and Peoples Rights, and the Helsinki Accords. While the Declaration has succeeded in extending human rights to some places (mostly Western democracies), it has not succeeded in extending rights to other places in the world. Indeed, the late 20th and early 21st centuries have seen their share of human rights atrocities in many places, including Guatemala, Cambodia, China, the Soviet Union, Tibet, Bosnia, and the Darfur region of Sudan, as well as the “disappearances” in Argentina and Chile, the death squad killings in El Salvador, and the genocide in Rwanda.

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