Dear Progressive Reader,

December 10 is the anniversary of the 1948 adoption by the United Nations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It also marks a kick-off of the year-long campaign to recognize the document’s seventy-fifth anniversary. The Declaration enumerates, in its thirty articles, the rights that its framers felt should be universally available to all human beings. Today, many of these rights remain unavailable in many different countries, and there are others that never made it into the original list. As Eduardo Galeano wrote in The Progressive in 2002, “[T]he Declaration lacks far more than it contains.” He goes on to list the rights that remain unaddressed and unfilled in the document. Yet, as I noted in an article for the seventieth anniversary of the Declaration’s signing, “Many of the principles in the Declaration have been used by a variety of civil society organizations to pressure governments to adopt better legislation.”

Since 1948, the United Nations has raised up many additional rights and protections. Yet many of those, too, remain unfulfilled such as the now thirty-two-year-old U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child. As Jo Becker and Callie King-Guffey of Human Rights Watch wrote in a 2022 op-ed, “The United States is the only United Nations member country that has not ratified the international treaty on children’s rights. Most people might think this isn’t such a big deal because our country is good to children. But it turns out we aren’t, and our state laws don’t help.” And, as Sarah Lahm reports this week, illegal child labor continues in the United States. “Children as young as thirteen are working overnights at Midwestern meatpacking plants,” she notes. 

Yesterday was also the twentieth annual U.N.-sponsored International Anti-Corruption Day. However, the United Nations-supported investigative body in Guatemala, known by its acronym CICIG, was shuttered in 2019, in part with aid from conservative Republican officials in the United States. But on December 7, the work of that anti-corruption group received vindication in the Guatemalan courts when, as Jeff Abbott reports, the former president and vice-president were convicted in a years-long tax fraud case that was initiated by CICIG’s investigations. As the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. is often quoted to have said in a speech just four days before his death in 1968, ‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” However, as former Attorney General Eric Holder noted in a 2016 CBS interview, “the arc bends toward justice, but it only bends toward justice because people pull it towards justice. It doesn’t happen on its own.”

Working people, whose rights are also listed in Articles 23 and 24 of the Declaration, have faced numerous struggles in recent years. While Starbucks workers were able to celebrate on December 9 the first anniversary of their successful union drive in Buffalo, New York, their efforts to organize and combat company tactics of union busting continue. Meanwhile, rail workers are dealing with a federally mandated settlement to their quest for better working conditions and, in particular, the ability to take sick days. As cartoonist Mark Fiore illustrates, “CEOs overseeing a small handful of rail companies that made $21 billion in the first nine months of this year were willing to blow up the U.S. economy rather than shell out $321 million for seven paid sick days for their workers.” Workers and their supporters are organizing a series of rallies nationwide on Tuesday, December 13, to raise public awareness about the impact of issues of rail safety and scheduling on these essential workers.

Elsewhere on our website this week, Ed Rampell reviews the new film To the End, which chronicles activism to halt the climate crisis; Molly Wadzeck Kraus looks at the recent successful efforts in Michigan to pass a ballot initiative for reproductive freedom; and I interview activist Medea Benjamin on her new book with Nicolas J.S. Davies, War in Ukraine, on the possibilities for a peaceful solution to that conflict. Plus, Washington State prison inmate Christopher Blackwell tells the story of how an adopted shelter dog created a relationship for him; and Mike Ervin writes a cautionary tale of federal protections being gutted by courts if they are actually used.

Please keep reading, and we will keep bringing you important articles on these and other issues of our time.

Sincerely,

Norman Stockwell
Publisher

P.S. - The new 2023 Hidden History of the United States calendar is now available. You can order one online and get it mailed in time for the holidays.

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