Persuasive Essay On Human Rights

In 2010, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that about 56.7 million Americans live with a disability, including physical and mental. This population is only expected to increase due to continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with the population aging and modern medical advances saving and prolonging lives. Disabled people, this means, constitute a sizeable 20% of the country’s population. This was not a recent discovery; the rights of people with disabilities has been on America’s political radar for some time now.
Physical and mental disabilities can present extreme difficulties; disabled people often require assistance in the completion of vital activities of daily living (e.g. showering, housework, walking/climbing stairs, preparing

Some claim that since implementation of international human rights treaties is rarely successful, there is no point in signing on to them. Binding ourselves to an international treaty will obviously be difficult, time-consuming, and expensive to implement, but so does anything that matters. We cannot follow the rest of the world’s example of not following through. Difficulty and complicatedness are not valid reason to evade the responsibility a nation; they are excuses. Human rights must be a global priority, and the United States ought to use their influence to be a leader in that movement. Every human must be given the basic rights to live a dignified life. Political interests, while important, cannot come before that. Moreover, taking care of your own citizens is not enough. The U.S. has a horrible track record of legally ensuring rights to our own people, encouraging other countries to do the same, but not doing anything about it. If we do not hold ourselves accountable for our promises to afford every person certain human rights, regardless of ability, it is near pointless to make those promises in the first place. When it comes to treating each human regardless of individual characteristics (including ability) equally, there is no room for politics. Even further, working towards a world that is more accessible to the disabled would not only help people with disabilities in other countries, but also our own; it would mean that Americans with disabilities have more opportunity to travel