Defending human rights is a moral imperative that Western governments are abandoning

The preservation of human rights must become a global moral imperative—a  commitment rooted in the understanding that without human rights, civilization collapses into violence, moral decay, and barbarism.  

By Fareed Khan

A version of this article can be found on Substack.

Before the modern human rights system emerged from the ruins of the Second World War, humanity lived in a world where rights were not inherent but conditional—granted or withdrawn at the whim of empires, monarchies, political systems, racial hierarchies, and economic elites. Across continents, people were governed by systems of domination rather than universal principles, where elites saw certain groups as inferior and unequal based on race, skin colour, ethnicity, faith, sexual identity or other defining characteristic. Colonial powers carved up territories and categorized peoples in terms of resources to be exploited without regard to any inherent rights.

In the America’s, Africa and Australia indigenous peoples were dispossessed and annihilated, to the point that in North America (present day Canada, Mexico and the United States), their populations declined to 5% of their pre-Columbian levels by the 1890s—a death toll of more than 95 million. Enslavement, segregation, caste oppression, and patriarchal subjugation were woven into the fabric of societies and were part and parcel of political governance. Workers laboured under conditions that amounted to economic bondage, and dissent was criminalized, while entire populations lived under the constant threat of violence by the state or economic elites who were only too willing to violently exploit workers.

This was the 19th Century world that shaped the views of American abolitionist and social reformer Frederick Douglass, who said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” It was the world of the Jim Crow era US south that Rosa Parks confronted when she refused to surrender her seat on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama—a simple act that exposed the absurdity and cruelty of the system of racial hierarchy that affected the lives of millions of Black Americans. It was the world B.R. Ambedkar, who fought to transform colonial India, arguing that democracy without social justice is merely a new form of tyranny. And it was the world that 18th century French playwright and political activist Olympe de Gouges challenged when she demanded equality for women, knowing full well that such demands were a threat to her own life.

Human rights, before 1945, were not universal—they were fragile aspirations, and often violently denied by political, economic and social elites.

The shock that forced a reckoning

The Second World War shattered any illusion that humanity could survive without a universal moral framework. The Holocaust, the mechanized extermination of millions, the mass slaughter of civilians in Europe and the Far East, and the global devastation of total war forced the world to confront the consequences of unrestrained state power. The scale of atrocity was so vast, so systematic—between 60 and 70 million killed—tthat it demanded a new global rights infrastructure.

The architects of the post‑war order understood that without binding principles, humanity would again descend into a barbarism that could engulf the world. Eleanor Roosevelt, who chaired the drafting committee for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, insisted that the new system must reflect the dignity of all people, not merely the interests of powerful states. Her work, alongside French jurist René Cassin, Lebanese politician and diplomat Charles Malik, Chinese academic and diplomat Peng Chun Chang, and Canadian diplomat and human rights activist John Humphrey, produced a document intended as a “common standard of achievement”—a moral compass for a world emerging from darkness.

The UN Charter (1945), the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), the Genocide Convention (1948), the Fourth Geneva Convention (1949), and eventually the International Court of Justice were built on the ashes of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Nanjing, and Hiroshima. They were designed to ensure that no state could again commit mass atrocities with impunity.

Elie Wiesel, speaking from the experience of genocide, warned that silence in the face of atrocity is itself a crime. His words became the ethical foundation of the post‑war human rights system—a reminder that neutrality is never neutral when human beings are being systematically annihilated.

The promise and the slow betrayal

For several decades after the war, the human rights architecture held—unevenly, imperfectly, but with enough force to restrain the worst impulses of states. Anti‑colonial movements invoked human rights to dismantle Europe’s empires. Civil rights leaders used its language to challenge segregation in the US. Feminist, Indigenous, labour, and LGBTQ movements drew strength from its universal principles. Nelson Mandela argued that denying human rights was an assault on human dignity itself. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. taught that moral courage requires confronting injustice even when the majority remains silent. And South African Anglican Arch Bishop Desmond Tutu reminded the world that neutrality in the face of oppression was a form of complicity.

However, the end of the Cold War in 1991 appeared to mark a turning point. With the collapse of the global bipolar power structure, the international human rights order built after World War II began to fray. Its erosion was visible in the Bosnian Genocide (1992–1995), the Rwandan Genocide (1994), and the sanctions and embargo regime imposed on Iraq in the 1990s, which led to the deaths of more than 500,000 children—a toll that former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright infamously said was “worth it” in a 1996 interview. As the United States emerged as the world’s lone superpower, it increasingly treated its international legal obligations not as binding commitments but as optional constraints it could disregard when convenient.

Israel—shielded by unwavering Western diplomatic and military backing, above all from the United States—has been able to violate Palestinian human rights repeatedly and with complete impunity for decades. No meaningful accountability has ever followed. Russia carried out atrocities in Chechnya and later in Ukraine, beginning with its 2014 annexation of Crimea. China constructed a surveillance‑driven authoritarian system and imprisoned millions of Uyghurs in concentration camps, abducting Uyghur children and placing them in indoctrination facilities—acts that meet the Genocide Convention’s definition of genocide. Both Moscow and Beijing were condemned for their crimes.

By comparison, the United Kingdom, France, and other European Union states supported US wars that violated international law, yet none faced consequences. The pattern became unmistakable—powerful states could break the rules without penalty, while weaker states were punished for far less. Observing this double standard, governments around the world logically concluded that it was power—not principle—that determined what was permissible in the realm of human rights.

The post‑Cold War era saw the rise of a global double standard where Human rights were invoked when convenient and ignored when politically expedient. The international system expanded in scope, but enforcement weakened, with serious violations increasingly going unpunished. In the process, the moral authority of the post‑war human rights order began to collapse, with genocides taking place in Darfur, Sudan (2003–present); Myanmar (2016–present); Xinjiang, China (2017–present); and Tigray, Ethiopia (2020–2022), with the erosion ultimately culminating in the current genocide in Gaza.

The collapse of global moral authority

The Israeli‑Palestinian conflict has deep historical roots, shaped by colonial legacies, competing nationalisms, and decades of conflict. But the events that have occurred since 2023 marked a moral rupture unprecedented in the modern era. Entire neighborhoods in Gaza have been leveled, while hospitals, schools, and refugee camps have been bombed. Civilians were intentionally targeted, starved, displaced, and massacred. International law was shredded in full view of the world, and Western humanity was shown to be a charade.  Additionally, the major Western powers did not merely fail to stop Israel’s genocidal crimes, they enabled it, particularly the US, by selling weapons to Israel which were used in their military assault on Gaza.

The United States served as Israel’s primary arms supplier, with the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, and others close behind—and Washington defended Israel’s actions diplomatically at every turn. Canada wavered between muted criticism and active complicity, continuing to provide military components even as the scale of Israel’s violence became undeniable. The European Union voiced rhetorical concern, but offered no meaningful action capable of halting the atrocities. In Gaza, the international legal order—created precisely to prevent the kind of heinous, genocidal crimes Israel carried out and continues to carry out—was not merely ineffective, it was immobilized by the geopolitical interests of the very states entrusted with upholding it.

The betrayal of Palestinians can be summed up in the following statement: We must refuse to compromise our humanity and never back down from speaking the inconvenient truth to power, for people whose very humanity is under attack.

This is the moral crisis of our time. The very states that built the human rights system have chosen to abandoned it, and leave innocent people to be slaughtered, unless intervening advantages a higher political purpose. Which, in the case of Palestinians, doesn’t seem to be the case.

The voices that still guide us

In this moment of collapse, the wisdom of human rights icons becomes not historical reflection but urgent instruction.

South African anti-Apartheid activist Steve Biko taught that oppression thrives when people internalize silence. Kenyan social and political activist Wangari Maathai showed that human rights include the right to a livable planet. South African musician and civil rights activist Miriam Makeba used her voice to expose apartheid’s brutality. American labour unionist Cesar Chavez demonstrated that economic justice is inseparable from human dignity. Salvadoran archbishop Oscar Romero died defending the poor against state violence, while Malcolm X insisted that dignity requires refusing subjugation in all its forms and speaking truth with uncompromising clarity.

Along with Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu and the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., these voices form a chorus across continents and centuries, united by one truth—that human rights are not granted by states—they are won with the blood, sweat and tears of ordinary people.

The moral imperative today

We now live in a world where the major powers—the US, the UK, Russia, China and others—have abandoned the very international order they once claimed to uphold. They have returned to the logic of empire where power takes priority over principle and geopolitical agendas over human rights.

This is what political barbarism looks like. And the only force capable of stopping it is the collective moral courage of ordinary people, human rights organizations, activists, scholars, journalists, and anyone with even a modicum of economic or political influence that still possess a moral compass.

It’s clear from history that human rights don’t come about naturally.  They only exist if they are protected and defended.

To maintain human rights as part of our society and culture we have to live by the adage that when those in power are telling you to move as you stand for principle, you need to plant yourself like a tree and say, “No, you move.”

This is the ethos the world needs now.

The preservation of human rights must become a global moral imperative. Not a slogan. Not a diplomatic talking point. A commitment rooted in the understanding that without human rights, civilization collapses into violence, moral decay and barbarism.

Human rights organizations must refuse to be cowed by political pressure, and activists must continue to speak truth to power even when power threatens them. Scholars must expose injustice with uncompromising clarity, journalists must refuse to sanitize atrocity, and citizens must demand accountability from their governments.

As before, the future will be shaped not by presidents or prime ministers but by social movements built by ordinary people—by those who refuse to accept a world where genocide is normalized, where oppression is rationalized, and where human dignity is treated as negotiable. American cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead captured this truth with unmistakable force when she said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only

thing that ever has.”

The post–World War II human rights system was created because those who witnessed the horrors of that war understood that nothing less than a new moral architecture was required to prevent such crimes from happening again. If the system we rely on to defend human rights is to survive—let alone be renewed—it will be because ordinary people insisted on defending it when governments would not.

The world stands at a crossroads. One path leads back to barbarism, where human life is expendable. The other leads toward justice. It is up to us, collectively, to decide which path humanity will take.

© 2026 The View From Here. © 2026 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.