What are your perceptions on the universal declaration of human rights would you like to amend any of the articles or add a new article to the declaration?
What are your perceptions on the universal declaration of human rights would you like to amend any of the articles or add a new article to the declaration?
In: International Laws [Edit categories]
Answer:
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is half a century old, but critics are still asking whether anything in our multicultural, diverse world can be truly universal.
Some ask, isn't human rights an essentially Western concept, ignoring the very different cultural, economic and political realities of the South? Can the values of the consumer society be applied to societies that have nothing to consume? Isn't talking about universal rights rather like saying that the rich and the poor both have the same right to fly first-class and to sleep under bridges? At the risk of sounding frivolous: when you stop a man in traditional dress beating his wife, are you upholding her human rights or violating his?
The fact is that there are serious objections to the concept of universal human rights which its defenders need to acknowledge honestly, the better to refute them.
The first is philosophical. All rights and values are defined and limited by cultural perceptions. There is no universal culture, therefore there are no universal human rights. Some philosophers have objected that the concept is founded on an individualistic view of people, whose greatest need is to be free from interference by the state. Non-Western societies often have a communitarian ethic which sees society as more than the sum of its individual members and considers duties to be more important than rights. In Africa it is usually the community that protects and nurtures the individual: 'I am because we are, and because we are therefore I am.' In most African societies, group rights had precedence over individual rights and conflict resolution would not necessarily be based on the assertion and defence of legal rights.
Then there is the usual North/South argument. The Universal Declaration was adopted
In: International Laws [Edit categories]
Answer:
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is half a century old, but critics are still asking whether anything in our multicultural, diverse world can be truly universal.
Some ask, isn't human rights an essentially Western concept, ignoring the very different cultural, economic and political realities of the South? Can the values of the consumer society be applied to societies that have nothing to consume? Isn't talking about universal rights rather like saying that the rich and the poor both have the same right to fly first-class and to sleep under bridges? At the risk of sounding frivolous: when you stop a man in traditional dress beating his wife, are you upholding her human rights or violating his?
The fact is that there are serious objections to the concept of universal human rights which its defenders need to acknowledge honestly, the better to refute them.
The first is philosophical. All rights and values are defined and limited by cultural perceptions. There is no universal culture, therefore there are no universal human rights. Some philosophers have objected that the concept is founded on an individualistic view of people, whose greatest need is to be free from interference by the state. Non-Western societies often have a communitarian ethic which sees society as more than the sum of its individual members and considers duties to be more important than rights. In Africa it is usually the community that protects and nurtures the individual: 'I am because we are, and because we are therefore I am.' In most African societies, group rights had precedence over individual rights and conflict resolution would not necessarily be based on the assertion and defence of legal rights.
Then there is the usual North/South argument. The Universal Declaration was adopted