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Parchment Barriers Revisited

At first glance the U.S. and South African bills of rights appear radically different. Rights the United States codified in 1792 were exclusively civil and political, while South Africa, in 1996, recognized the full panoply of modern rights: economic, social and environmental, as well as civil and political. Such differences can be deceiving as both bills have important similarities. Both were political documents with origins in a complex and difficult social milieu. Both were post-colonial attempts to express a vision of an ideal new political and social order and to establish the rules to guide its realization. Though separated by two hundred years and created in vastly different contexts of rights consciousness, both documents were born in a spirit of compromise and conflict. They were less the result of doctrinal purity than of political struggle. Only with appropriate political will can the legacy of both bills be a genuine commitment to human rights leavening the force of political expediency and creating polities where bills of rights are more than just “parchment barriers” to tyranny.