Denial of human rights

Active repression of human rights (including the right to work, education, social security, health, national self-determination, individual liberty, freedom of thought, expression, movement, privacy, religion, and ideology) or passive refusal to ensure human rights, usually on the part of governments, but also on the part of groups and individuals, occurs regardless of constitutions, legal provisions and bona fide statements. Human societies are so organized that in practice they tend to deny at least some of man's inalienable rights to some of its members on the grounds of race, colour, sex, language, religion, political opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. The widespread violations of human rights over the globe relate to the insecurity of governments that do not have a broad popular support; to the need to maintain national security in times of real or perceived external threat; to the imposition of a form of organization of society on the minority or majority that do not accept it; to the maintenance of political stability seen as a sine qua non for economic and social progress; to, sometimes, the personal idiosyncracies or perversity of dictators; and, perhaps, to the conception of power seen and lived as limitless, by conviction or tactic.

According to the United Nations, half the world's people experience some human rights abuse. Halfway through 1993, the UN Centre for Human Rights had received 125,000 claims of violation of human rights, three times the total for the whole of 1992. In the first three months of 1993, it also received reports of 5,000 people who had disappeared.

Saudi Arabian scholars and religious leaders who, in 1993, set up a human rights committee have been dismissed from their jobs and their group declared illegal and unacceptable under Islam by the country's highest clerical body.