Unite for Rights Blog

#2 – 1/1/25 – The Mission of Unite for Rights

#3 – 1/1/25- The International Judicial Architecture of Unite for Rights

From the beginning, it is important to recognize that Uniters are not starting from scratch. There is a long, history of human rights being put into a document so that they can become civil rights enforceable in court. A good example is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Eleanor Roosevelt is one of the great leaders in the evolution of an International Bill of Rights (IBOR). When her husband, United States President Franklin Roosevelt, died, Eleanor said “great leaders can show the way, but others must come along and do the building.” This quote applies equally to her: Eleanor’s work, with others, on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is the foundation upon which Unite for Rights is built.  Eleanor explained: ““that nothing of what has happened to me, or to anyone, has value unless it is a preparation for what lies ahead.” What lies ahead is that through work by Uniters, the UDHR will become an International Bill of Rights that is enforceable in the courts of all countries.

Like the UDHR, an International Bill of Rights can be thought of as a plan for humanity. There is much yet to do, but the plan is unfolding. Unite for Rights takes the list of rights in the UDHR, along with new rights that belong on the list like the environment, and makes them legally enforceable through an International Bill of Rights, with Regional Courts, and an International Court of Human Rights, so that the rights in the UDHR become genuine for all, no longer only an aspirational statement as in the UDHR.

Making rights enforceable in the courts of all countries may seem difficult, and it is, but it’s time. Eleanor was a champion of a World Court after World War I, and then again pushed for enforceable rights after WWII. She saw that leaders of all nations need to heed the rights of all people. Authoritarians must be restrained by courts before they become too strong to stop. The invasion in Ukraine is a good example, and it’s not alone. Authoritarianism is increasing internationally. It’s time to act before humanity deteriorates into police states or WWIII results.  As she said, “We will all go ahead together, or we will all go down together.” Eleanor saw enough of war first hand to know this is true – she visited every military hospital in the South Seas during WWII.

Following her lead, we have the means to connect and write the rules who govern, then put those rules in the hands of impartial people, Judges, to enforce them. Together we can do this. The timing is right. People, Nonprofits, Businesses and Governments recognize that a fragmentary approach is leading us to war and the desecration of the biosphere of our planet through climate change.

Timing is not enough; work and funding are needed. Unite for Rights is working with people, nonprofits, businesses and governments who want to be leaders, not just victims. There is a spinning globe on the homepage of Unite for Rights. Whenever a person, nonprofit, business or government enters their name and country, a light ignites on the globe wherever they are: gray for a person; green for a nonprofit; blue for a business; and brown for a government. It’s no longer enough for people to sing about rights, or even just to vote, a movement for rights is needed to transfer the energy of singing, acting, writing, caring, into law – not something we talk about, but something whereby we can enforce our rights in court against those who govern. There will always be war, discrimination and ruin of the environment without this. Rights are not given us; they are a demand we make, and put into writing to enforce in courts with impartial Judges, prior to giving people the power to govern.

When combined with others, your small act of becoming a “Light for Rights” on the Unite for Rights website is one of the most powerful things you will do in your life. Some things, like an International Bill of Rights, can only be achieved through a collaborative effort. The goal of Unite for Rights is to have 10,000,000 Uniters on the globe by December 31, 2025. Join us on the globe! With the achievement of 10 million lights, the goal will become 1% of people, nonprofits, businesses and governments globally to become lights for rights.

Once 1% has been achieved, there will be a movement with sufficient strength to then ask/demand that an International Bill of Rights be drafted and implemented as a treaty for governments internationally. The draft International Bill of Rights on the Unite for Rights website can serve as a starting point. This is the realization of Article 28 in the UDHR which envisions that future documents will be created to make the rights in the UDHR legally enforceable in the courts of all countries.

Again, Eleanor guides us. She said: “You cannot live for yourselves alone. You depend on the rest of the world and the rest of the world depends on you.” Acting together we can do something grander than any of us can do individually, whatever our wealth or position, and create an international community at peace instead of war.

So Welcome. Bring others. Eleanor also reminded us “we must do the thing we think we cannot do.” Let’s unite to create a world of well-being for all, including other species and life, on Earth.

The logo above perfectly represents the mission of Unite for Rights: Linkage. At a time of international fragmentation and dystopian authoritarianism sweeping Earth, there is a deep-rooted desire within all four of the figures above (“Uniters”) to unite on a better path and create an agreement to live together, based upon fundamental rights for all with the rule of law to enforce them.

Unite is an international social movement based on nonviolence, but assertive of the power each of us has, individually and within nonprofits and businesses, to create the world we want for ourselves, as well as future generations – in all countries.

It was the intent of the drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) that it would become an enforceable International Bill of Rights. That is why Article 28 in the UDHR, which was passed unanimously by all countries on December 10, 1948, anticipates that there will be future documents to make the UDHR enforceable.

The major problems of the world, the rise of athoritarianism, poverty, pandemics, discrimination, inequality for women, overpopulation, gross disparities of wealth, along with poor or unaffordable health care and a lack of education, are the result of the intent of Article 28 not being fully realized over the past 75 years.

The idea of an International Bill of Rights is not new. U.S. President Truman, at the closing ceremony for the United Nations Charter, in the War Memorial building in San Francisco, said: “The first thing we will do is prepare an International Bill of Rights” and he then added that the International Bill would be like the Bill of Rights in America – enforceable in courts. Eleanor and others set out to create that International Bill of Rights. Unite brings humanity together to continue down this path.

An international social movement is the core. At a time when breakthroughs are being made in the fields of physics and medicine through international cooperation, the same can be done through international cooperation in the field of law. The movement is for “enforceable human rights.” That is, rights become “juridical,” something to be presented to a Judge when they are violated, not just aspirational or something reported about in United Nations meetings. This means an attorney can stand in a courtroom in any country and ask a Judge to issue an Order enforcing the rights in the document, and if she issues that Order, it can can be reviewed by courts at the domestic, regional and, infrequently, at the international level.

The stories we tell create the lives we lead. Humanity needs a new “overstory”, to use the insight of the author Malcolm Gladwell. An overarching story that works for all of us on the planet, not just an elite few in one country or another. Unite’s story leads to well-being instead of war and want and to an international community, not where we are all the same, diversity florishes with freedom, but to an agreement to live together, with courts, not weapons, to resolve disputes when they arise.

Please join us to fulfill this mission by becoming a light on Unite’s spinning globe, and encourage others to join as well!

Now as you read this, you may think it sounds like such an overwhelming task that you wonder how you can participate as a person, nonprofit, business, or even a government. The answer is, you can, even if you only spend one minute to become a light on the spinning globe with others – and it may be one of the most powerful things that you do in your personal life, or the life of your nonprofit, business, or government.

You see, there are some things, like a painting perhaps, that may be best done by one person. If Picasso were painting, it probably would not have been a good idea to say “hey Pablo, how about a little bit more green over there.” One, most likely, Picasso would have ignored you, and, two, if he had followed your advice it may be that some of the genius of the painting would have been lost.

Not so with the design of an international judicial architecture to enforce an International Bill of Rights. Such an architecture covers a vast array of humanity, and all other living creatures on the land, sea – all parts of Earth. Only a vast array of input can design an international judicial architecture, including input from a broad, diverse range of people, nonprofits, businesses, and governments from all corners of Earth.

The exciting thing is that at this moment in history, we have the technological means to engage in such a vast collaboration. We can unite in genuine ways, more comprehensively and inclusively, than ever before.

With this broad design, Unite for Rights facilitates the building of a tapestry of courts in all countries: domestic, regional and international so that rights are not claims made as aspirations, but are genuinely enforceable in courts, with orders from Judges that can be issued to strengthen our social contract with those who govern, and with one another.

A core part of this tapestry already exists: the Regional Courts, with Judges from numerous countries who today hear cases that cover more than 50% of the population on Earth.

It was understood when the UDHR was created that there would need to be Regional Courts to enforce rights, and the European Court of Human Rights is a prime example. As John Humphrey, the Canadian professor who did much of the research for the UDHR has written, “if the international community ever becomes really serious about human rights, the European example will be applied on the universal scale.”

This map shows how that can happen.CLICK BELOW TO SEE AN ENLARGEMENT OF THIS MAP!

2023 Jan 4 Map of Regional Courts

You can see the European Court of Human Rights on the Map. It was the first and now hears cases with Judges from 47 countries who review cases from the domestic courts of those 47 countries. Here is a picture of the European Court of Human RightsThere is also a Regional Court for Africa, the African Court on Human and People’s Rights and here is a picture of it.
And the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, which includes North, Central and South America. Here is a picture of it.

While these three courts are a dramatic success toward an international judicial architecture, as you can see from the photos, there is also a dramatic difference in the funding and administrative ability of the African and Inter-American Courts compared with the European Court. One of the primary efforts of Unite for Rights is to convince international philanthropic foundations and individuals to provide 50 million Euros to each of the African and Inter-American Courts to remodel them and bring them up to the standards of the European Court. Courts are being designed for other regions and they should be supported with funding and technical expertise as well.

An International Bill of Rights, along with Regional Human Rights Courts, and an International Court of Human Rights that would infrequently hear cases from the Regional Courts, could help to harmonize the Regional Courts, and leave room for cultural variation through a “margin of appreciation”, a judicial process by which each country and region may have some difference, but the core fundamental rights in an International Bill of Rights are upheld.

When Eleanor Roosevelt was the Chair of the Human Rights Commission drafting an International Bill of Rights, she asked Gandhi to determine whether freedom of religion was a human right that should be included in the UDHR. Gandhi studied the question and decided freedom of religion should be included. He wrote to Eleanor “I thought that the deeper I went, the more disparity I would find. Instead, I found that the deeper I went the more there was in common”

Using Gandhi’s insight, Unite for Rights unites people, nonprofits, businesses, and governments together in a spirit of openness, as part of an international movement, to see what rights we agree we have in common. Our unique abilities to read and write enable us to do this, particularly when the Internet and other technologies available today provide for the opportunity for us to “draft through dialogue” on a global scale. As former Russian leader, Mikhail Gorbachev wrote: “We should search for what is common to, and unites people and nations, rather than what divides them.” This is the spirit of Unite for Rights. Thank you for reading this blog, and we hope you will join us on Unite’s spinning globe so that you too will be a “Uniter.”

Of course, becoming an international community is not easy to accomplish, but without thinking about it, how do we achieve it? Imagination is useful. As Robert Kennedy Sr. said “Some people see things as they are and say why? I dream things that never were and say why not?” It does not matter that humanity has not yet matured into an international community. As the creator of Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry said “Humanity is in its adolescence.” With imagination humanity can grow into a young adult.

Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, once said that he “tried to do for computers what Eichler did for homes.” This was a reference to Joe Eichler, a home developer throughout the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond. My father, John Boyd, was a senior architect for Joe Eichler. They both admired the architect Frank Lloyd Wright and took inspiration from him to imagine subdivisions of homes that worked for common people and families.

I grew up in one these Eichler homes in Palo Alto.

So, if we take what Eichler did for homes and Jobs did for computers, create things that worked for everyone, how do we apply that to our international community so that rights are created that work for everyone?

When Eleanor Roosevelt was asked about what qualities were needed for the creation of the UDHR, she said “imagination and courage.” Following her guidance, Unite asks people to use their imagination to think together about an International Bill of Rights, and the courage to share their thoughts, not to agree on every right, but to agree on some of them.

Too often the discussion about human rights is what rights are we born with? It becomes an endless circle of discussion and those who resist enforceable rights goad others into this discussion. What rights are inherent in being human? The answer is none. We are not born with rights. Yuval Noah Harari, the author of “Sapiens” and recently “Nexus” is correct that human rights are just a story. We are born into societies where they either tell the story of rights, or they don’t. And they either have independent judges to enforce the rights in this story, or they don’t. It’s better if they do.

For many within the human rights community, equating rights with story is blaspheme. They like the story of rights being inherent in human beings so much that they like to assume it as a given. So, if we just repeat the story, or write out the list of rights enough times, they will develop and become enforceable: it has not worked. For the most part the UDHR was an unenforceable document when it was created, and it has remained so.

Please understand that I like the story of the UDHR, and the story of rights for all. I’ve spent one half of my legal career, much of it pro-bono, doing what I can to further the enforcement of rights in the UDHR. The basic principles in the UDHR have helped create rights in some nations. I’m glad to have children in all countries taught the story that there are rights we all have, and share, but it cannot stop there — we need to enhance the story into what Malcolm Gladwell, in his book “The Revenge of the Tipping Point” calls the “overstory.” What humanity needs is a sweeping overstory and Unite for Rights provides one – from its logo to its International Bill of Rights document, and a map showing locations for an international court system.

The mistake since the UDHR was created in 1948 is that our judicial enforcement institutions have lagged too far behind our proclamations about rights. It’s important to recognize and celebrate the many proclamations of rights over the years, they have created important norms, but we should equally and forcefully move to the next step, judicial enforcement of those norms. This is the story we need to tell; it’s the story of Unite for Rights.

The stories we tell create the lives that we lead. 

It does not weaken the story of rights to admit that it is a story. It actually strengthens rights to untether them from the story of natural law. As long as people are willing to tell a story of a right to free speech, or a right to education, or a prohibition on racial or gender discrimination, and to demand that those right are enforceable against those who they let govern, that’s the point where a right becomes “fully realized” in accordance with Article 28 of the UDHR. 

To secure rights for all, we need not prove that we are born with them. All we need to do is muster enough people to demand rights, and then use our ability to read and write to put those rights in a written International Bill of Rights. With an International Bill of Rights in hand, we make it a quid pro quo for those who govern –  then create Courts with independent Judges to ensure that leaders keep their part of the deal.

There will always be authoritarians who will try and seize power for themselves. This is foreseeable. Given this truth, it is essential for humanity to develop what Harari calls a “self-correcting mechanism”: An International Bill of Rights is a self-correcting mechanism for our social contract, our agreement between those who govern, and those who are governed. At the moment those in power try to abuse the limited power we give them, cases can be brought in court to stop them. As we transition to an international community, we can create judicial institutions to restrain authoritarians so that the rest of us do not suffer their abuse. 

Given humanity as it is, the UDHR is the best blueprint, created by people of free will, for the world as it can be. Now it’s time to use our imagination to change the story and make the UDHR, with some new rights such as environmental rights, enforceable. It’s a story that, like an Eichler, creates something that works for all.

The plan is an international social movement, a renewed “overstory” as Malcolm Gladwell calls it, embodied in the four figures of the Unite for Rights brand: the moment when people, nonprofits, businesses and governments unite to tell the story of rights for all, enforceable by all, in the courts of all countries.

We have advances in Medicine, Physics, Psychology, Computer Science, Food, Music, Biology, Environmental Science…this list is long, and growing. Law and Democracy should be on this list.

Law is an agreement to live together. It can be a local town ordinance, a state or national statute, or an international treaty. All are agreements to on how we will live together. The problem humans face is that the stories we are telling are much smaller than our existence together.

Human rights organizations, religious institutions, businesses and governments are dancing on the periphery. And I’ve been dancing with them: but the problems we face, nuclear war, the destruction of our biosphere, emergence of AI beyond our control, and the breakdown of family as a core human institution, all require broader thinking and a better, bigger, story for us to tell each other.   The remarkable gift that humans have, unique to them, no other species, is that humans can read and write. We can put our agreements to live together, a new overstory, into writing, as is evident from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Part of the plan, in accordance with Article 28 of the UDHR, is that there will be future documents which will make the rights embodied in the UDHR enforceable in the courts of all countries. An International Bill of Rights is the written embodiment of that overstory, and, as Yuval Noah Harari calls for in his book “Nexus”, it is a powerful “self correcting mechanism” capable of securing humanity’s social contract when our leaders falter, as all humans do at times.

That document, an International Bill of Rights, is on the table before you – have the imagination and courage to contribute to it! Each of us is needed to make this happen. Democracy is self governance. No one gets to govern because they were luckily born into a particular family or through some religious lineage. People are only allowed to govern when they are freely chosen by other people, and then they are required to follow the rules provided by those who are governed. As Rousseau said, “the people build the machine, the Prince merely operates it.”

Given the global challenges we face, climate change, rising authoritarianism, increasing wealth disparity, pandemics, and now war in the Ukraine, it’s time for people in all countries to plan together for enforceable law in all countries — to save ourselves, and the planet on which we live, Earth.

Narrow minds default to the impossible. Open minds realize there is a fine line between the impossible and the inevitable and try to cross it. As Eleanor Roosevelt, the “First Lady for the World” said: “We must do the thing we think we cannot do.”

Many may say that we cannot reach an international agreement to live together based on fundamental rights for all. They say “We will never agree.” At Unite for Rights, we live by the response Eleanor would give when she was working on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and was dismissed by naysayers: “Let’s see”; “Let’s ask”; “Let’s Do!”

Planning ahead is a good way to help determine where you will end up. Leaving the Earth’s ecosystem, and our individual well-being to random chance, or the market, is not enough. We must plan. For, as Confucius said “He who doesn’t look at what is distant will find sorrow near at hand.” Planning ahead is the means by which we avert calamity, whether it is the climate crisis, or another World War.

Don’t be dismayed by the enormity of the task. The success of the plan only requires 1% of all people, nonprofits and businesses. Please be one of them! When the path to a plan is worn, others will follow.