"The Worst Human Right Abuses occur in LEDCs". To what extent do you agree with this statement?
by
ejals25 (student)
Ernesto Safeca 11.1
“The worst human rights abuses occur in LEDCs.” To what extent do you agree with this statement?
The different growing rates of a country’s population are associated with inequalities in their economic development levels. Depending on their gross nation income (GNI), human assets index (HAI) and economic vulnerability, countries can be separated into two different categories: Less Economically Developed Countries (LEDC) and More Economically Developed Countries (MEDC). LEDC countries have low GNI, problems with nutrition, health, education and habitation in general and are more vulnerable to economic recessions and political instabilities (for example, Rwanda), whereas MEDCs are the opposite with better statistics in these aspects (for example, Germany). Both LEDCs and MEDCs have human rights because all human beings are automatically protected by human rights when they are born, regardless of their sex, skin colour or nationality. Human rights are the thirty moral rights of respect and self-worth written in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) that help protect all humans from social, legal and political violations. Such violations can happen when other human individuals or organizations mistreat other human individuals in an unethical way that is very different than described in the UDHR. I believe the most severe human right abuses are the ones that violate article number 3 of the UDHR, therefore I only agree with the statement to a certain extent because while a significant part of the worst human right abuses happen in LEDCs, one of the worst human right violations witnessed by the world happened in an MEDC. In order to support my thesis, I will analyze three of the worst human right violations that have happened in the world, which are the Rwandan genocide, Holocaust and the Congo Massacre by the Belgians during the African colonisation.
The article number 31 of the UDHR refers to what I believe is the most fundamental right and its violation is considered one of the worst, if not the worst human rights abuse, which is taking away another person’s life – homicide. They are considered the worst because it eventually leads on to penal sentences that last decades. These extensive penal sentences can degrade a human being’s psychological state and cause high expenses to a nation’s criminal section budget. Additionally, it can also lead on to even more deaths, therefore causing a continuous cycle of violence amongst human individuals or organizations. For millenniums, human beings have sought resolutions to conflicts through battles and wars. They have resorted to violence and homicide, amongst other acts of cruelty, to settle such wars, resulting on the death of countless human beings. The severity of murders is greatly increased when done at a large scale; these are called mass murders. Mass murders have killed hundreds of millions of human beings in wars such as the Two World Wars, but they are not the worst kind of violation of article number 31 of the UDHR. They are more serious when they target large groups of people from a particular ethnic class or nation. These are referred to as genocides.
