Global Awareness
Thoughts on Human Rights
Towson University, Maria Montserrat Padron A.
Rights that are given to people are known as Human Rights. Just being a human guarantees that these rights will be protected without condition. Human Rights include freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from persecution, etc. The right to associate is not an independent constitutional right but it is resultant from and dependent on the first amendment assures freedom of speech and expression. It is protected only to the extent that it is stated in conjunction with a First Amendment right. Still, some legal academics maintain that freedom of association is more fundamental than the rights written in the Constitution because without it those other rights have little meaning.
There are a variety of institutions that have been created to protect this rights, the biggest is the United Nations. The United Nations is composed of various departments that are dedicated to investigate and prosecute human rights abuses. One department is the International Criminal Court, which focuses crimes. Nevertheless, the ICC has one obvious weakness and that problem is that the ICC only has jurisdiction is countries that have signed and ratified the Rome statute, which is the document establishing the ICC. So in other words, if a state declares that it will not sign or ratify the documents pertaining to the court, then the court cannot act upon crimes committed in that country. Also, the ICC can’ t act in a country if the country’ s own legal system is investigating or prosecuting the crimes. This helps prevent double jeopardy, which is when a person is prosecuted twice for the same crime.
While this form of jurisdiction has caused problems in the past, it can also be valuable. A situation where the intervention of the International Criminal Court could be beneficial is in politically charged cases, in which any decision can create arguments or protests. If a politically unbiased organization enters and creates a trial, then the political organizations are free from the consequences of the decision. Human Rights on prosecuting crimes against humanity, genocide and war have been established as something that is conferred to all