I don’t like mission statements. No one reads them, you spend hours on them, and people make the mistake thinking they’re important. After WWII, the United Nations was transitioning from a military alliance to a replacement to the League of Nations, so they wrote their own, called the Declaration of Human Rights in 1947. Important, yes, but are they useful?
When you’re working on a story idea, your mind goes to some weird ideas. Since my day job has currently dealt a lot with international law, naturally I’ve been reading a lot of conventions and declarations by the Conference on Weed Wackers, or the Protocol to Stop Bad Things Ever. Before I did this, I condensed International Law into one sentence, “This is the law agreed by all countries, until one of them decides not to.” As I learned, this is not precisely true. Now I’ve learned “this is the law as we enforce it.” India can sign the UN Framework on Climate Change in 1992, and the Paris Accords in 2015, but it’s up to them to enforce it. They did create the National Environment Policy (NEP), but I’m not sure how much the policy has been translated into law or action. Having lived in India, my guess is… not much.
Here’s Eleanor Roosevelt, former first lady and generally considered all around smarty, with the copy of the declaration she helped write when she was at the UN at its founding. So we’re trying to transition from a post-war world and get nations to sign on. So instead of NATO, whose mission statement was “let’s keep the Soviets from conquering Western Europe,” the UN was trying to say, “Let’s create a fair and just future. Don’t you wanna be a part of that?”
And it worked! The problem was this was just a declaration, not a law, not an agreement… NOT international law. The Virginia House of Delegates can pass a resolution that the Republic of Vietnam flag is the only Vietnamese flag that can be raised in Virginia (and they did), but they didn’t pass a law enforcing it. This was to appease the Vietnamese exile minority in that state who obviously gave a lot of support to a state legislator.
Okay, I hear you saying, so where are you going with this? Why I hate mission statements like this is because people think they have the force of law, when in actuality, they don’t. Take a minor example – I used to work for a giant insurance company, and my job was to be a secretary in Projects… all the IT programs that this company had going. This particular project wrote up their mission statement which had a two sentence statement basically saying, “This project is to maximize efficiency with the widgets. These widgets allow us to help our company grow more profitable.” You know there was a meeting where someone was upset that the widgets weren’t doing something, and even though the tech monkeys explained to this executive why the widget couldn’t do something, this executive pointed to the mission statement and said, “I don’t see how this maximizing efficiency.” We didn’t either, Chuck, but you wanted to use your damn personal iPhone for business purposes, so we had to create the security protocols for it. (shrug)
So the Declaration of Human Rights was used in the same way. I read Sharing the Land of Caanan by Mazin Qumsiyeh, which was the only non-raving version of why the Palestinians should exist as a country. Usually both Israeli and Palestinian arguments involve long-winded historical and religious statements which read like rally speeches, but this one avoided all that. However, even then, he would fall into “But the UN Declaration of Human Rights says…” and I would roll my eyes, because he obviously didn’t get the memo that the DoHR is not law, it’s just a bunch of flowing words.
Later on, when my wife started diving deep into indigenous rights and philosophy, she pointed out, “It’s not that they believe they’re law, it’s just one of the few weapons they have!” In other words, Mr. Qumsiyeh is just saying, “You guys say that you believe that everyone has the right to nationality – why don’t you recognize the Palestinian Authority’s passports?” He knows the DoHR is not law, but he’s using the weapons he’s been given to make a firm and coherent argument to a jaded world.
I guess I’ll have to explain how I’m going to use this in a future story in the next post, but I have to ask, what do you think? Am I too jaded? Do mission statements and the DoHR have a purpose in this world? Let me know in the comments below!
Albigensia Press 