Human rights in the new millennium

Human Rights in the New Millennium
It is significant that the U.S. is self-exempted from international law
January 2010
By Noam Chomsky

Before trying to address the current state of human rights, it is worth considering what is admitted into that sacred canon. The question constantly arises, quite concretely. For example, on the International Day for the
Eradication of Poverty in October, when Amnesty International declared that,
"Poverty is the world's worst human rights crisis." Or two days before that, on
World Food Day, when the UN food agency reported that the number of people going hungry rose to over 1 billion, while rich countries sharply cut back food aid because of the priority of bailing out banks, and Oxfam reported that 16,000 children are dying a day from hunger-related causes—that is twice Rwanda-level killing just among children—not for 100 days, but every day, and increasing. And the issues regularly arise even in the richest country in the world, where the question of whether health care is a human right is being hotly debated while some 45,000 people a year die from lack of insurance, unknown numbers from utterly inadequate insurance, in the only industrial society I know of where health care is rationed by wealth, not need.
In all these cases, the lives could be saved by a tiny fraction of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the rich countries, so the question is whether they recognize the right to life as among human rights.
There is a gold standard on human rights—the founding documents of the
UN—the Charter, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UD).
The charter guarantees the right to be protected from what was declared at
Nuremberg to be the "supreme international crime," differing from other war crimes in that it encompasses all the evil that follows: the crime of aggression, which is reasonably well-defined. In practice, the Charter has long ago been revoked. Article 2(4) is in the wastebasket. There