*By Chief A .S Ngwana
On the 10th of December 2008, we shall celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted and proclaimed by the UN General Assembly resolution 217 A (111) of 10 December 1948.
It is pertinent that we should examine how the human race has fared during these sixty years of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Bearing in mind that the Declaration was prompted by the desire to uphold the right of all men to live, to own what is necessary to lead a dignified existence, to work and to rest, to choose a particular state in life, to form a home, to bring children into the world within marriage and to be allowed to educate them, to pass peacefully through times of sickness and old age, to have access to culture, to join with other citizens to achieve legitimate ends, and , above all, the right to know and love God in perfect liberty, for conscience, for true conscience, will discover the imprint of the Creator in all things. At the same time bearing in mind that Human rights, dignity, freedom, equality, solidarity and justice constitute the spiritual and moral patrimony on which the union of Nations is based.
Before the Declaration of these rights, the dignity of the human person had been abused and had reached an epoch in which liberty and justice were denied and the dignity of man was trampled upon in many ways.
SLAVE TRADE
The slave trade had been practiced from time immemorial. Africans know too well what the atrocities of the slave trade did to their fore fathers.
More than fifteen million Africans were sold to Europe and America where many died under the whip and hard labor. Slavery in the United States was especially brutal and demeaning. A slave had no rights. He or she was totally under the power of the slave owner. As a result, slave society was a violent society. Slavery demanded coercion and total control.
There was the constant fear of revolt or escape. With the division between the slave States and the free States, war was seemingly inevitable. The slave population was an ever-increasing threat. It was imperative that slave population be maintained in ignorance and under control.
All books and periodicals were to be censored. Any information regarding ideas and information touching on slavery or freedom, and changing attitudes and political discussion both in the States and in Europe was carefully kept away from slaves. As a result any notion of freedom or emancipation was to be absolutely concealed.
Every effort was made to control and obliterate any communication or literary source outside of the South.
In the antebellum South, reading was made an act of subversion; learning was an act of revolt. Sooner or later all of the southern states made teaching of a slave a penal offense, subject to prison.
For the slave who learned to read or write, amputation of fingers and whipping with cow hide lashes was the standard penalty. Excessive whipping was fatal.
GENOCIDE and UNJUST WARS.
Genocide is the killing or destroying of a group of people because of their religious, national, racial or ethnic identity.
In 1948 after the Second World War, the UN passed the Genocide Convention, an Act on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide.
The Act provided a legal definition of genocide and established genocide as crime in International law.
According to the Genocide Convention, any of the following actions when committed with intent to eliminate a particular national, ethnic, racial, or religious group constitutes genocide.
For example killing members of a group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to kill, imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group, or forcibly transferring children of the group. The gassing to death of about six million Jews, and the killing of half a million Gypsies and millions of other people considered not desirable, by Hitler, is a clear case of genocide.
THE TREATMENT OF WOMEN AND CHILDREN.
Women and children had no rights. They could not own property, they could not vote or be voted, women could not be raped by their husbands, men could marry many wives ( as in the case of King Solomon who had 700 wives and 300 concubines), but a woman could not marry more than one husband at a time, girls were given to marriage at tender ages and in many cases without their consent, girls generally were excluded from education and could not go to school, and domestic violence against women and children was tolerated.
The UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS is a common standard of achievement for all peoples and Nations, bearing in mind that human rights, dignity, freedom equality, solidarity and justice constitute the spiritual and moral patrimony on which the union of peoples and Nations is based.
Let us look at whether proper consideration has been given to
(ARTICLE 3) “Everyone has the right to LIFE, LIBERTY, AND SECURITY of person”
The first and the most important fundamental human right, the basis of all human rights, is the RIGHT TO LIFE. Without human beings we can not talk of human rights. How has the Right to Life been implemented during these sixty years?
Every human being has a right to live, from conception to natural death. Each child has the right to be conceived, born and educated within the family, based on marriage between a man and a woman, the family being the natural and fundamental group unit of society.
ABORTION.
Abortion is the deliberate killing of a human being after conception and before birth. Miscarriage ( or spontaneous abortion) is the accidental death of a human being after conception and before birth.
Science and religion agree that human life begins at conception, when the ovum (egg) is fertilized by the sperm. After conception, the human being is complete, and only grows. From conception the human being is only called different names as he or she develops.
He develops or grows from an embryo, fetus, baby, toddler, infant, boy or girl, man or woman and finally ends up as an old man or an old woman.
In abortion, a human being is deliberately deprived of his/her life. And that is nothing, but murder. There is no choice to murder. Abortion is an attack on life itself.
The 1959 Declaration of the Rights of the Child by the United Nations states that the child “needs special safeguards and care, including appropriate legal protection, before as well as after birth.” A principle, which is in keeping with a previous declaration by the World Medical Association to “maintain the utmost respect for human life, from the time of its conception.”
The 1966 International Convention on Civil and Political Rights states that “sentence of death shall not be carried out on pregnant women, and that the express intention of this Article is inspired by consideration of the interest of the unborn child.”
Abortion is a crime against natural law, abortion is a contravention of the UN Charter on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights , abortion is a terrible abuse of the Rights of the Child, an abuse of the Fundamental Right of every human being to live. Abortion is a crime against humanity and cannot be justified.
Last year alone millions of children were killed by abortion, more than all the people killed during the two world wars, more than the Afghanistan and Iraq wars put together.
More people die by abortion every year than they died during the slave trade. More people die by abortion every year than they have ever died through genocide.
More people are killed every day by abortion than by terrorism.
More people die from abortion than they die from AIDS or malaria.
The Declaration of human Rights paved the way for the emancipation of women, but radical feminism, in pursuit of freedom, has sought license and unfettered autonomy, in pursuit of sexual pleasure, and equality with men.
Women have surrendered the dignity of womanhood and rejected the value of motherhood. What the sexual revolution and radical feminism erroneously promise is that the pursuit of freedom, sexual equality, sexual pleasure and rejection of traditional morality will bring individual happiness and build a more truly human society.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was a mile stone in the maturing of humanity, of a moral awareness in accord with the dignity of the person, but sixty years after this declaration, the dignity of the human person has suffered immensely through abortion.
Now more than ninety Governments in the world, and even some UN agencies, have approved and legalized abortion.
Abortion kills not only unborn children; it destroys constitutional order and the common good, which is assured only when the life of every human being is legally protected.
Abortion is the most despicable, callous, heinous and inhuman method of killing. The child is killed by the very persons who are supposed to protect the innocent, harmless child, their parents and doctors. Think of the barbaric and brutal method called “partial-birth abortion”, usually performed in an advance state of pregnancy. It allows a partial delivery before the baby is killed, in some cases using a small hammer or cudgel to crush the skull of the baby while still crying.
Yes this is inhumanity of man to man. An abuse of the Fundamental Right to Live, approved and legalized by governments of the “civilized world”, signatories to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
When the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF} presented its “State of the World’s Children 2007” report in India, UNICEF officials said that 7,000 girls are aborted in India each day.
Globally, millions of boys and girls are aborted each year.
ABORTIONS have reached unprecedented, unimaginable numbers in the world, a world which has returned to a barbarism unknown in history.
UN treaty bodies are being used to promote the legalization of abortion without the awareness or consensus of member states.
UN human rights treaty bodies are groups of unelected, unaccountable bureaucratic officials before whom UN member states must appear every few years and report on how they are implementing the various UN human rights treaties. They have no enforcement mechanism, and the members act in their personal capacity with no oversight or accountability to a single member state.
Half of the treaty body that monitors the 1979 Women’s Convention, is made up of nongovernmental representatives, mostly advocating abortion rights. Even though not a single UN human rights treaty mentions abortion, the treaty bodies have pressured 93 Nation 122 times to legalize abortion in the last decade. In 2006, Colombia legalized abortion, citing statements by UN, human rights treaty bodies in support of its decision.
Any person who supports abortion, encourages abortion or who commits abortion, or any government which legalizes abortion, is worse than people who commit terrorism, unjust wars or are guilty of genocide.
Abortion is “genocide” to unborn children. People who support or encourage abortion, have no moral right to condemn crimes against human rights.
Developing countries need their expanding populations to develop quickly. Simplistic as it is, development is by people for people. Where there are no people there is no development. Development is for people. Abortion is the greatest enemy to development.
All African countries (except South Africa) and some countries of the world still treat abortion as a criminal offence.
It is therefore urgent that Cameroon and all countries which uphold the dignity of human life, all countries which see abortion as a greater evil than war, than genocide, or even than slave trade or terrorism, unite to fight this abomination.
A joint and concerted campaign or lobby should be staged at the United Nations, for the UN to enact an “ABORTION CONVENTION”, an Act on the prevention and punishment of the crime of abortion.
An Act which will provide a legal definition of abortion and establish abortion as a crime in international law, a Crime against Humanity.
Think of it, if President Barack Obama’s Mother, had aborted him, what a great loss it would have been to America in fact to the whole world, we would have been deprived of the opportunity of seeing a BLACK man in the WHITE house. Thank God Obama’s mother did not abort him.
* Chief A.S. Ngwana is Chairman of
Cardinal Democratic Party (CDP) in Cameroon
Email: ngwanasamba@yahoo.com
BP 2401 Bonanjo, Douala.
Tel. (237) 7775 7173
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