Quite a lot of people seem to be surprised, not to say outraged, that South Africa is moving ahead of the US on human rights issues. They seem to be forgetting something.
The old South Africa was a state in which a minority had acquired power and held onto power and used its power to oppress a majority. The majority ultimately prevailed: people (of all ethnicities) who did not believe in racial discrimination or any of the other oppressive policies of the old régime ousted it and established a new kind of state. That is the South Africa we are now looking at.
There is really no reason to be amazed that this new South Africa is making advances like this in human rights. The new South Africa has embraced the modern concept of human rights, something that the old South Africa
was prevented from doing by the minority that controlled it. In that sense, this isn't really a "new" South Africa, it is the same old South Africa, no longer being prevented from being what it can be.
The report quoted in the opening post said (emphasis mine):
The National Assembly passed the Civil Union Bill, worked out after months of heated public discussion ...
South Africa is acting like a liberal democracy: it is engaging in public discourse about public policy, and making progress.
The new South African constitution contains this provision:
9. ... (3) The state may not unfairly discriminate directly or indirectly against anyone on one or more grounds, including race, gender, sex, pregnancy, marital status, ethnic or social origin, colour, sexual orientation, age, disability, religion, conscience, belief, culture, language and birth.
Many other national constitutions, and international rights instruments, and things like European Union rights instruments, contain similar provisions. The Constitution of the United States does not.
The process by which the SA Constitution was adopted is briefly described here:
http://www.polity.org.za/html/govdocs/constitution/saconst.html?rebookmark=1This Constitution was drafted in terms of Chapter 5 of the interim Constitution (Act 200 of 1993) and was first adopted by the Constitutional Assembly on 8 May 1996. In terms of a judgement of the Constitutional Court, delivered on 6 September 1996, the text was referred back to the Constitutional Assembly for reconsideration. The text was accordingly amended to comply with the Constitutional Principles contained in Schedule 4 of the interim Constitution. It was signed into law on 10 December 1996.
The objective in this process was to ensure that the final Constitution is legitimate, credible and accepted by all South Africans.
To this extent, the process of drafting the Constitution involved many South Africans in the largest public participation programme ever carried out in South Africa. After nearly two years of intensive consultations, political parties represented in the Constitutional Assembly negotiated the formulations contained in this text, which are an integration of ideas from ordinary citizens, civil society and political parties represented in and outside of the Constitutional Assembly.
This Constitution therefore represents the collective wisdom of the South African people and has been arrived at by general agreement.
As I noted earlier, some provisions of that Constitution are modelled on the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in the Canadian constitution, which was also adopted after lengthy and broad public debate, in 1982. Some go farther, e.g.:
Health care, food, water and social security
27. (1) Everyone has the right to have access to
1. health care services, including reproductive health care;
2. sufficient food and water; and
3. social security, including, if they are unable to support themselves and their dependants, appropriate social assistance.
(2) The state must take reasonable legislative and other measures, within its available resources, to achieve the progressive realisation of each of these rights.
(3) No one may be refused emergency medical treatment.
This is an example of what some rights theorists call the "third generation of rights". The generations roughly equate to the words in the motto of the French revolution: liberty, equality, fraternity -- or what is called, today, solidarity.
http://www.stoessel.ch/hei/dip/human_rights_encyclopedia_britannica.htmThe US came out of the movement for liberty, with rights that are sometimes called "negative" -- rights that protect individuals against interference in their personal choices and punishment for exercising them: freedom of speech, association, etc.
In the second half of the 20th century, the right to equality became the battleground -- rights that protect individuals against unequal treatment and thus enable them to achieve some security for themselves by getting an education, working, housing themselves, feeding themselves. The civil rights movement in the US, the women's movement, the movement to achieve equal rights for gay men and lesbians, etc.
Now, the movement gathering momentum is the battle for human security: a healthy environment and sustainable development, clean water, health care, education, housing, peace.
The US's FDR hinted at this in his famous "four freedoms" speech:
http://www.feri.org/common/news/info_detail.cfm?QID=1982&ClientID=11005On January 6, 1941, President Roosevelt proclaimed that four freedoms are essential to a flourishing democracy: freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.
Liberty rights alone did not achieve freedom from want and freedom from fear: there were still oppressors and exploiters. Equality rights allowed for progress to be made, but there is still exploitation and oppression. Freedom of choice and equal opportunity alone have not achieved freedom from want and freedom from fear for many people, everywhere.
The fact is that most of its peers have passed the US on the highway to human happiness, long since.
Equality rights are a fact of life in the rest of the liberal/social democracies in the world (by law and in widely accepted principle, if not always in practice), and solidarity rights at least have a foothold: the health care plans of Canada, Europe, Australia & NZ (and many more surprising places in the world), the social security networks (labour laws, provisions for child care and education, housing) in those countries, etc.
It should simply come as no surprise that a country like South Africa, which has stepped firmly into the modern current of human thought and development, should have passed the US on that highway too. The US, after the promise (and leadership) shown by the New Deal and the War on Poverty and the civil rights movement and the women's movement, has simply refused to open the door to the modern generations of rights -- equality rights, beyond the point reached some years ago, let alone solidarity rights.
The US has indeed innovated in some of those areas, and laid building blocks that others have used -- as have other countries (like the UK in the post-war era, with a social security network that few in the US today even know about). The thing is that the US has not only failed to keep building on its own foundations, it has resolutely refused to look outward and learn from what anyone else has been doing.
No one should be at all surprised that South Africa has taken this particular step before the US. The fact that it is surprising to so many USAmericans just goes to show how isolated people in the US are from the mainstream of human development these days, and how well insulated from the world at large they have been kept.
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