Here’s something we all should be made aware of. We live in a country that is willing to nitpick on the concept of human rights. Apparently, a significant number of our fellow countrymen don’t think that human rights are something that extend to our fellow global citizens. If you’re an American, then, sure, you’ve got rights (unless you are an unlawful enemy combatant, then you kind of give up the privilege of being an American), but if you’re not one of us, then you don’t have a right to the same kinds of things that we do.

Seriously? I mean, I just don’t understand the argument here. Human rights are human rights. They’re not American rights. If a human has a basic right to something, they don’t just have it when they are born within a certain section of the globe. Human rights are one of those “if one, then all” kinds of things. Human rights aren’t afforded piecemeal.

Now, the question is, what are our human rights? There’s an argument to be made that while all humans have some rights, Americans have more rights than others. Those rights are what define us as American. But just because we have some, it doesn’t mean that everyone does.

But here’s where I disagree, and let me tell you why. I say that we all have the right to free speech. This includes the dozen Iraqi journalists who were arrested for criticizing public officials last year. While paragraph 226 of the Iraqi penal code says they don’t have that right, that doesn’t make it so. I’ve heard the arguments for and against free speech, and it is not in a society’s interests to prohibit it. This assertion does not help Iraqi journalists get out of prison, true, but what it should do is provoke some sort of reaction from the world’s citizens.

Here’s what I mean. There should be some sort of global meeting, and at this meeting, the people of the world should hear the arguments for each proposed human right. These proposed rights will most likely come at the expense of some others (for example, the right to free speech comes at the expense of the right to not be offended). There will be some sort of system that will cross-check for paradoxes; an “if this, then not that” kind of thing. At the end of the meeting, all the peoples of the world have are afforded all of the agreed-to rights. If any state government tries to curtail those rights to its people in any way, then all the other peoples of the world agree to work to restore those rights.

How long do you think this list of rights would be? If it was done through something like the U.N., it would be 30 rights long (including “the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers”). If it was done through some sort of International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), it would be 53 legal-sounding articles long.

But how long do you think it would be if we all got to write it? Just for a moment, imagine this meeting taking place on the Internet, perhaps at a Wikipedia type of site, where anyone and everyone was able to edit the list of rights. It wouldn’t be full on Wiki-free. Obviously, for this type of thing, with its highly-charged politics, we’d need some kind of safeguards to prevent tampering (each edit gets voted on before it gets made, with a time-limit on the voting of 24 hours? Imagine the micro-”get out the vote” campaigns that could happen within just a single day!), but if the safeguards were in place (and democratically agreed-upon), imagine the kind of rights we might have.

First of all, the people offering their ideas wouldn’t be limited to only those who have somehow found themselves in the privileged position of being at that specific conference (true: it would be limited to Internet users; however, according to Internet World Stats, one in six people have accessed the Internet…true: almost 90% of those who have accessed the Internet live in Asia, Europe, or North America, but that’s still almost a billion more people than attended any human rights conference). Just this alone could perhaps spark the same kind of wildfire that illuminated all those minds in the 1700s. Perhaps there’s a Jefferson or Rousseau who feels too shy to enter the highly-magnified political world, but is more than willing to contribute to an anonymous website. Perhaps there’s a human right we should have that we don’t quite know about yet, and perhaps this 21st century Jefferson is just the person to reveal it to us. Don’t you want that right? After all, it’s already yours. You just don’t know it yet.

Here’s a question for you. What’s to stop us from doing such a thing? What’s to stop us from creating a wiki, calling it Jefferson 2.0, and then getting to work on creating a universal list of human rights? Perhaps we start by combining the UN’s list with the ICCPR’s, and then we open it up for discussion. Next, we go on a kind of marketing spree and try to spread the word about the site. Perhaps Someone makes a YouTube video. Someone else posts Jefferson 2.0 to digg.com. Bam! Millions of people come to the site. The NY Times picks it up, and boom! a bunch more come. Perhaps it gets picked up in across the rest of the press because some celebrity posts an idea there. Finally, it busts onto the international scene, and next thing you know, the site gets it first registered member from Tonga, and all of sudden, it feels like, “Hey, just maybe there’s something going on here.”

The sticky point will be the enforcement. “If any state government tries to curtail these rights in any way, then all the other peoples of the world agree to work to restore those rights.” But if there are a billion people on the Internet, and Jefferson 2.0 can somehow win the loyalty of only 6% of them, we’re still talking about a group of people that rivals the size of the United Kingdom. There’s gotta be something 60,000,000 people can do to try to enforce human rights across the globe.

Who would have a problem with this? Who would have a problem with Human Rights 2.0? The status-quo, that’s who. But are they enough to prevent someone from at least creating the website and seeing what happens? Are they really that scary? Or perhaps there’s something else. Perhaps the status-quo is not a who, but a what. I don’t find it that difficult to imagine that the only reason we don’t do such a thing is because we’ve become comfortable. Settled. We’re happy with the rights we already have, and feel no desire to expand them in any way.

Is it really so difficult to imagine? Or is it only so difficult to do?