Human rights violation

“ In order to strengthen and give credibility to the process of building democratic institutions that uphold the rule of law, the authorities must combat any manifestation of such groups, especially the key component of their impunity, namely, the tolerance, acquiescence or complicity of some public officials.
82. Threats and intimidation against members of the judiciary have been a habitual means of preventing the clarification and punishment of crimes and human rights violations. ”

“ The State is obliged to investigate and legally punish offenses against human rights committed by its authorities.
Actions to punish the offense of violating humanity rights, serious violations of human rights and war crimes shall not be subject to statute of limitation. Human rights violations and the offense of violating humanity rights shall be investigated and adjudicated by the courts of ordinary competence. ”

“ In the period under review, most of the violations were not the acts of members of URNG or of the Army or people linked with the Army, but of officials of the National Police, the Public Prosecutor's Office and the judiciary whose actions or failure to act affect the legal duty of the State to investigate and punish, and seriously impair the above-mentioned commitment.
56. Most of the unlawful acts committed in the country, whether human rights violations or ordinary crimes, still go unpunished by the law. ”

“ Following the exhaustion of other legal remedies, the Constitutional Court shall at the request of any person claiming to be a victim have jurisdiction over complaints that human rights and fundamental freedoms and the rights of members of national communities set forth in this Constitution have been violated by a public authority. ”

“ The Mission, which from its very earliest reports identified impunity as the main obstacle to the effective enjoyment of human rights, notes with profound concern that it is an entrenched phenomenon. No real progress has been made in the prosecution of the majority of the most serious and representative cases of human rights violations. ”

“ Is it possible to conceive of a more complete denial of all a man’s natural, human rights, than is the denial of his right to have any will, judgment, or conscience of his own, either as to his being killed himself, or as to his being used as a mere weapon for killing other men? ”

“ Did the people of the United States, whose government is based on the great principles of the revolution, proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence, confer upon the federal, executive or judicial tribunals, the power of making our nation accessories to such atrocious violations of human rights? Is there any principle of international law, or law of comity, which requires it? ”

“ On every hand they meet with execration. Such wanton cruelty—such palpable violations of human rights are stains upon the escutcheon of the nation that permits them to be perpetrated within her borders. ”

“ The bystanders, at these trials, look on amazed, but powerless to defend the right, or prevent the wrong. Human nature has no rights, in the presence of these infernal tribunals.
Is it any wonder that all men live in constant terror of such a government as that? Is it any wonder that so many give up all attempts to preserve their natural rights of person and property, in opposition to tribunals, to whom justice and injustice are indifferent, and whose ways are, to common minds, hidden mysteries, and impenetrable secrets. ”

“ It is said to conflict with the sense of justice, and to violate the fundamental principle of all free communities, that the members of such communities have equal rights to life, liberty, and personal security. ”

“ Acts innocent in themselves—such, for instance, as buying goods in a foreign market and bringing them for use to this—may be made a legal crime by statute law, while other acts which are monstrous violations of natural human rights may be and are ignored by the code, and are perpetrated with impunity in the highest grades of civilized society. ”

“ Their persons and property are doubtless secure from violence, or, if injured, the courts of justice are opeu to them. But in a country like this, where the people are sovereign, and every citizen is entitled to equal rights, the mere exemption from flagrant wrongs is no great privilege. ”

“ If this protecting, guarding Law is not enforced,—if the Law is obstructed, or crippled, or baffled, or violently set at naught; then, the security of civilized society is gone, and our property, our liberty, our rights, privileges and life, just lie at the mercy of every unjust man, and any violent and excited band of the wicked!—So important to us is the potential dominion and regular administration of Law. ”

“ This landed system, which has grown up under successive Kings and Governments, and is now upheld by bad laws, is a crime against the people; it is a violation of Divine order and of the inalienable rights of mankind. ”

“ Human rights were not merely declared to exist: against the background of genocide and crimes against humanity committed in the name of a racial ideology linked to state sovereignty, firm constitutional limits were placed on state power. ”

“ Maxson, of Allegheny, said:—"All laws, whether Constitutions or statutes, that invade human rights, are null. A community has no more power to strike down the rights of man by Constitutions, than by any other means. Do those who give us awfully solemn lessons about the inviolability of compacts, mean that one man is bound to rob another because he has agreed to? ”

“ The term ‘serious human rights offenses’ includes violations of Federal criminal laws relating to genocide, torture, war crimes, and the use or recruitment of child soldiers under sections 1091, 2340, 2340A, 2441, and 2442 of title 18, United States Code.’’. ”

“ Already, well off as we may be in comparison with other nations, have not our public concerns, through the criminal neglect and insensibility of the people, taken such a direction as, if it does not put us in peril of having our blood spilt in the streets, yet endangers the sacred rights of Free Thought and Free Speech, and makes it hazardous to property and to personal liberty to obey the plainest dictates of humanity? ”

“ For a positive and detailed criterion of just punishment, we must wait till a system of rights has been established in which the claims of all men, as founded on their capacities for contributing to social well-being, are perfectly harmonised, and till experience has shown the degree and kind of terror with which men must be affected in order to the suppression of the anti-social tendencies which might lead to the violation of such a system of rights. ”

“ And on the same principle upon which a state is violating natural rights in maintaining slavery, it does the same in using force, except under the necessity of self-defence, against members of another community. ”

“ When we go beyond that procedure and adopt the dragnet system now in force, we trench upon the civil rights of our people. We condemn by administrative edict, rather than by jury trial. [9] Of course, no one has a constitutional right to a government job. But every citizen has a right to a fair trial when his government seeks to deprive him of the privileges of first-class citizenship. ”

“ The community would not keep the peace by procuring redress for hurt or damage sustained by individuals, unless it conceived itself as having interest in the security of individuals from hurt and damage, unless it considered the hurt done to individuals as done to itself. The true justification for treating some breaches of right as cases merely for redress, others as cases for punishment, is that, in order to the general protection of rights, with some it is necessary to associate a certain terror, with others it is not. ”

“ Government is not necessarily founded on common consent, but on the right which society has to defend itself against all aggression. But am I bound to pay or support the government for defending the society against any violence or injustice? No: but then they may withdraw the protection of the law from me if I refuse, and it is on this ground that the contributions of each individual to the maintenance of the state are demanded. Laws are, or ought to be, founded on the supposed infraction of individual rights. ”

“ We, the members of this association, must plead guilty, in common with the entire community, to suffering the fundamental principles underlying the very fabric of our government, and guaranteed by our constitution—principles called inalienable rights of man—to be overridden and practically abrogated by lawless bodies throughout the land.
Thus far are we equally guilty with all other citizens in neglecting our duty as such. To uphold this government and constitution is the duty of all citizens. ”

“ The attachment of equal penalties to offences that are alike in respect of the importance of the rights which they violate, and in respect of the ordinary temptations to them, will, on the whole, lead to the association of an equal amount of terror with the prospect of committing like offences in the public mind. ”

“ They will be drawn into precedent. When, in evil days, further encroachments are meditated against human rights, these old measures will be cited as a sanction for new aggressions; and, in my view, they will always be found broad enough, and bad enough, to cover almost any [Pg 391] nameable assault upon human liberty. When bad men want authority for bad deeds, they will only have to go back to the legislation of Congress, in 1850, to find an armory full of the weapons of injustice.
Sir, legislative precedents are formidable things. ”

“ Still, the fact remains that even as we celebrate Bill of Rights Day and Human Rights Day, human rights are frequently violated in many nations. In the Soviet Union, for example, brave men and women seeking to promote respect for human rights are often declared mentally ill by their government and incarcerated in psychiatric institutions. ”

“ As awareness of human rights increased, as their definition expanded and as new, often authoritarian polities, resorted to torture and repression - human rights advocates and non-governmental organizations proliferated. It has become a business in its own right: lawyers, consultants, psychologists, therapists, law enforcement agencies, scholars and pundits tirelessly peddle books, seminars, conferences, therapy sessions for victims, court appearances and other services.
Human rights activists target mainly countries and multinationals. ”

“ So also in regard to crimes against humanity. The right of humanitarian intervention on behalf of the rights of man trampled upon by the State in a manner shocking the sense of mankind has long been considered to form part of the law of Nations. Here, too, the Charter merely develops a pre-existing principle. If murder, raping and robbery are indictable under the ordinary municipal laws of our countries shall those who differ only from the common criminal by the extent and systematic nature of their offenses escape accusation? ”

“ But when the expressions of public execration trample on all the rights of humanity, and violate the laws of nature, of the land, and of God—when the sufferings of a criminal are magnified beyond the laws, and rendered intense to a degree surpassing endurance—when, in fact, crime is punished at the expense of every principle of justice, humanity and religion, it is time to speak out, and inquire to what extent public indignation at crime may innocently go. ”

“ Thus the exclusion of criminals from the franchise, the designation of terms of minority as connected with the exercise of political duties, the regulation of the admission to citizenship of persons coming from foreign countries, find their justification in a principle which, so far from recognizing in Government or society a purely arbitrary control of the rights and exercise of self-government or personal liberty, brings it down within rigid and narrow limits of equality and necessity. ”

“ That, even if the framers of the constitution did leave an unguarded opening, through which such a law could be introduced without a breach in the structure of that instrument, still, that it is a cruel law, that it discards all those principles of evidence and forms of proceeding which have been devised by the wisdom of ages for the protection of innocence against power, and that in its whole scope and spirit it is in conflict with our fundamental ideas of human liberty. ”

“ This horrible law, which in the middle of the nineteenth century of the Christian era the legislators of the most highly favored nation on earth have had the effrontery to enact,—this law peremptorily, under heavy fines and penalties, forbids us to give assistance and comfort to a certain class of our fellow-men in the utmost need of help,—those who have fled and are longing to be saved from the greatest wrongs that can be inflicted upon human beings,—the wrongs of slavery. ”

“ What is meant is that there is a violation of a system of rights which the nation has, no doubt, an interest in maintaining, but a purely social interest, quite different from the egoistic interest of the individual of which the desire for vengeance is a form. A nation is capable of vindictive feeling, but not so a nation as acting through the medium of a settled, impartial, general law for the maintenance of rights, and that is what we mean when we talk of the state as that against which crimes are committed and which punishes them. ”

“ Society cannot forcibly prevent any man or woman so devoid of personal dignity as to place him or herself in voluntary servitude to another individual; but it can justly treat such persons as parasites, not entitled to the enjoyment of political liberty, though only for the duration of their servitude.
8. Persons losing their political rights will also lose custody of their children. Persons who violate voluntary agreements, steal, inflict bodily harm, or above all, violate the freedom of any individual, native or foreigner, will be penalized according to the laws of society. ”