Home » » International Human Rights » The right to appeal against your country!

The right to appeal against your country!

© Robert Kaso

Now and on I wish to write about human rights. Why? One said that because of the short memory of people human rights violations appear. It is common for every nation, for every government. Even to EU countries, The USA or Japan. Writing from a Ukrainian perspective may give some understanding of these, common, values and problems. Why? Because Ukraine is a European, developing, democracy and still has old, USSR, stereotypes. I wish to start a series of articles on the problem of co-existence of national and international human rights values and controlling authorities. I plan to do it on the basis of the European Convention on Human rights and freedoms (1950), the Ukrainian legal system and my own vision. This series should become a part of the general human rights movement, so I gently ask all of you, readers, to contribute to this movement with your constructive comments and discussions on the topic.

The first issue that we'll discuss is the citizen's right to appeal against his/her national country to an international authority. It should be clear that government are for the people and not people for the government-it is the foundations of human rights respect. It is also well known that governments and officials do abuse these human rights, for certain personal reasons. Nowadays the majority of democratic constitutions do acknowledge human rights and international law regards state as the guarantor of human rights on it's territory. Than why did they invent international bodies? As human rights have been acknowledged universal, it is not up to the government to decide whether to respect separate human beings or not. International authority exists to show the unity of democracy and the power it bears, in common. It is necessary to understand that appealing against a country does not mean that one aims to destabilize the situation, or 'undermine international prestige'. When appealing, people usually do it against certain actions they consider incorrect. Actually they do not appeal against the country, but the government and the actions it allows to do. Comparing the case law of the European Court for human rights we may find out that UK and Italy are the most frequent human rights violators!!?? Why? Do they have cruel governments or maybe they are not true democracies? No, in the contrary their governments do realize that they commit violations, and because they do not fear to 'undermine their reputation'. It is also a way of making money in these countries -Italy has a pretty weak legal system and UK the best lawyers in Europe. It's Ok., but are the new independent states (NIS) so good in human rights respect or is their legal system (partially USSR) better that say the Italian one. Ukraine, Russia, Moldova, Hungary etc. do not have any ruling in the new European Court (since 1999), meanwhile UK and Italy has over 100.