Olivia Martin
Access
Brussels, Belgium
I am just a few days away from leaving for Brussels, but my personal and intellectual growth resulting from the Human Rights Fellowship began months ago. The seminar class and my independent study this semester have not surprisingly helped me return to the framework of my project and refine, add, and eliminate elements time and time again.
I have looked at the works of political theorists from Alexis de Tocqueville to Michael Warner to address the public/private dichotomy. One can see that through time, the goods and actions that are considered public or private are constantly in a state of change, revealing a temporal and context-driven understanding of human rights. Human rights are in theory inalienable, but at the same time, they must be weighed against competing rights and other urgent considerations in practice. This investigation is helpful for me as I embark on an exploration of current violations of privacy and dignity.
Discussions we’ve had in our seminar have, however, reshaped my understanding of the right to privacy within the limits of distinct cultural and political structures. In many cases, the human right to privacy not only competes with other rights, but could also be interpreted as protecting crimes perpetrated in the private sphere. For example, there are arguments that domestic abuse should not be publicly addressed because it is a private matter. This dark side of the human right to privacy brings new light to my project.
The experience of human rights in a public space gives them much of their meaning, so what value do they have if there is no public to experience them? Individualistic rights like the right to privacy may very well matter most when they are sensed and invoked publicly. Even the privacy of at-risk internet users such as LGBTQ and women’s rights activists is most effective for its public value: their right to privacy allows them to continue to fight for public goods like marriage equality and access to contraception.
I want to end this post with a favorite excerpt from de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America as a reminder for me to seek out new alternatives to structural oppression and as a source of inspiration for whoever might be reading this:
To educate democracy—if possible to revive its beliefs; to purify its mores; to regulate its impulses; to substitute, little by little, knowledge of affairs for inexperience and understanding of true interests for blind instinct; to adapt government to its time and place; to alter it to fit circumstances and individuals—this is the primary duty imposed on the leaders of society today. A world that is totally new demands a new political science (Vol I, 61).