Equality Before the Law & Equal Protection Under the Law
Articles 6 & 7 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Author’s Note: This essay is part 6 of a series considering all thirty articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Links to all essays will be added at the bottom of the introductory post announcing this series as they appear.
Article 6
Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.
Article 7
All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination.
In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread. ~ Anatole France
It’s impossible to imagine a government can long maintain its legitimacy in the eyes of its citizens without at least making some effort to treat everyone equally before the law. The less equal the treatment, the more cynical citizens become and the more likely the state will eventually find it necessary to rule through coercion and fear to hold onto power.
However, equality before the law is not as simple and straight forward as it sounds. As the French writer Anatole France (quoted above) suggests, a law that equally “forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges” and beg or steal food is equal in that it applies to everyone but unequal in so far as it is intended to target one segment of the population more likely to have reason to break it. A society that fails to feed its citizens has no reason to expect the hungry not to steal food to survive.
As with the earlier articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) already discussed previously in this series, we see here how Articles 6 and 7 guaranteeing both equality before the law and equal protection under the law cannot exist in a vacuum. They can only work in practice if the other articles are also being applied in good faith to the greatest possible extent.
