Can western human rights ever be universal in such a diverse world?
Charlie Swinburn Since its introduction in 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) 1 has received both criticism and praise. A central debate is an apparent paradox at the heart of human rights; the idea that rights are a western concept but are considered by the west to be universal. This calls into question whether claims of universality are merely an attempt to impose western values upon the rest of the world. Although it is important to note that the UDHR continues to receive near universal acceptance by governments, controversies persist, especially in relation to cultural relativism, individualism and traditional Islamic teachings. Without trying to sound hackneyed: in preventing a gentleman dressed in traditional clothing from beating his wife, are you protecting her human rights or violating his? This anecdote - although fabricated - highlight the depth of the diversity between cultures. The differences run so deep between allegedly ‘universal’ human rights and non-western cultures that some governments argue that the UDHR is contradictory to their traditional societal values, thus isolating certain states. The historical traditions and cultural influences of human rights are important, not only because there is now almost total acceptance of the UDHR as a ‘standard of control’ to regulate the morality of states’ actions but also because not all cultures share the same beliefs and traditions. The first legal mention of human rights appeared in around 1920, but to grasp the concept of individual rights and moral codes one must look back to Ancient Greece. Early western philosophers such as Socrates and Aristotle began to use reason to investigate what they thought to be ‘right according to nature’. This ideology of what was ‘good’ then was introduced into law - fusing morality and legality. This ethic together with the concept of the Judeo-Christian God as the omnipotent legislator became the bedrock of divine natural law. This law was judged to be superior to state law. Natural law’s flexibility gave it formidable power and was used as a doctrine to justify state power. Many philosophers believe natural law to be the closest early comparison to modern day human rights. Subsequent writings of political philosophers such as Locke, Paine and Rousseau, drew upon the conflicts within natural law, which transformed the legal and political landscape of the time. Rousseau’s ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen’ (August 1789) 2 was a major influence on the French revolutionaries. Once they gained power, they had his writing entrenched into their constitution. Similarly American revolutionaries used the ideas of Thomas Paine and basic natural law theory to formulate the Declaration of Independence 4 and the Bill of Rights 5 . These writings were the first bills to compile a set of personal liberties and rights based upon human nature. However, quickly the idea of individual rights became out-dated following the works of Marx, Weber and Durkheim, which primarily focused of sociology and economics. These texts challenged the previous constructs and questioned whether certain rights were intrinsic, which in turn lead to the decay of natural rights. It was only following the turmoil in 1940s Europe, and specifically during the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals, that the concept of rights was re-kindled and importantly signalled the beginning of a ‘human rights culture’. The Nazi’s on trial, for crimes such as genocide, claimed to have operated within the limits of German statute – the only valid law at the time. To overcome this challenge the court argued that the extermination of an entire race had violated ‘the customary law and principles of civilized nations’. The Nuremberg trials suggested that there must be some universal code that, irrespective of domestic law, must prevail. This code, expressing the rights to which each human is inherently entitled, was enshrined in the UDHR, adopted by the United Nations on the 10 th December 1948. However many of the rights found in the UDHR have since been challenged.
The first challenge to the universality of the UDHR is the distinction between the communitarian
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