Federalist No. 25
“For it is a truth, which the experience of ages has attested, that the people are always most in danger when the means of injuring their rights are in the possession of those of whom they entertain the least suspicion.”
Schools For Misrule, p. 196
“Georgetown recently hosted a National Forum on the Human Right to Housing at which conferees were instructed on such topics as “promoting affordable housing using a human-rights based framework.” Loyola-Los Angeles put on a conference rallying interest in the new U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, hailed as an “international ADA” and presumably the catalyst for the future construction of sidewalk curb cuts and wheelchair ramps in remote tropical settlements. Numerous groups have united behind the fruitful concept of “poverty as a human rights violation,” said to justify proposals for an international guarantee of minimum income. According to the introduction to an NYU symposium, international law now guarantees rights to health, education, and “decent work,” not to mention freedom from “severe social exclusion.”
Indeed, new universal human rights are identified and proclaimed on a regular basis, including rights to fresh water, corruption-free government, and access to gender-reassignment surgery. Gun control advocates led by the Chicago mayor Richard Daley have called for action in the World Court against U.S. firearms makers on the grounds that under-regulated trade in small arms is a human rights violation. In the European Union, in which new universal human rights are regularly spotted, few blinked when an EU commissioner proclaimed that tourism and vacation travel are human rights that should be subsidized by government if necessary to assure universal access.
Human rights, in short—universal, inalienable, internationally guaranteed human rights—have been proliferating at a bewildering pace. Why shouldn’t the right to reclaim an aboriginal homeland be among them? Even if restoring the tourist playground of Nevada to tribal use did risk complicating for others the universal human right of vacation travel.”