In Defense of Universal Human Rights

Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781509513574
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Should African and Muslim-majority countries be obliged to protect LGBT rights, or do such rights violate their cultures? Should Western-based corporations be held liable if their security guards injure union activists in another part of the world, or should such decisions be settled under local or domestic law?

In this book, renowned human rights scholar Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann vigorously defends the universality of human rights, arguing that the entire range of rights is necessary for all individuals everywhere, regardless of sex, color, ethnicity, sexuality, religion or social class.

Howard-Hassmann grounds her defense of universality in her conception of human dignity, which she maintains must include personal autonomy, equality, respect, recognition, and material security. Only social democracies, she contends, can be considered fully rights-protective states. Taking issue with scholars who argue that human rights are "Western" quasi-imperialist impositions on states in the global South, and risk undermining community and social obligation, Howard-Hassmann explains how human rights support communities and can only be preserved if states and individuals observe their duties to protect them.

1
Universal Human Rights

Definition

In international law, human rights are rights held by all individuals merely because they are human. They are held equally by all human beings, regardless of their status, such as their gender, ethnicity, “race,” religion, sexual orientation, or any other attribute. They are inherent in being human, they do not have to be earned, and they are inalienable. Most human rights constitute claims by individuals against the state that it must grant and cannot violate, although there are certain exceptions to do with prisoners or states of emergency. This is how human rights are defined in the many United Nations (UN) human rights treaties and conventions, starting with the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

I agree with this definition of human rights, not simply because it is the law but because I think that in principle, all human beings should be treated with equal concern and respect.¹ Moreover, all individuals need human rights protections against the power of the state. They also need protection against nonstate entities such as transnational corporations (TNCs), and sometimes against their own communities or family members. I defend international human rights as an ideal, a guide to how individual human beings ought to be treated. This ideal takes precedence over history, tradition, or culture: it also takes precedence over economic systems, class rule, and the interests of state elites. Indeed, this ideal is a guide to the way individuals should treat each other. That we do not always do so is sometimes of little importance, as when we inadvertently hurt each other's feelings, but it is often significant, as when men beat women or parents beat children.

Human rights are not an eternal, immutable principle. They are not inherent in human nature. If anything, the principles of human rights contradict human nature, which routinely categorizes people into superior and inferior, insider and outsider, those worthy of concern and those completely expendable. Nor are human rights God-given, although precursors of human rights principles can be found in all the world's religions. They are certainly not universal across time: they are very recent principles. They should be universal across space, but in practice they are not.

Human rights are a social construction: many people around the world have asserted them as principles, codified them as laws, and acted as if they had them even when they did not. In the twenty-first century, human rights are a social fact, a set of principles that large numbers of people worldwide expect to be respected, even when governments deny them and laws fail to protect them. Hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people around the world know when they have them and, even more, when they do not.

One could argue that the idea of social construction leaves human rights dangling over a relativist precipice: if there are no prior principles behind their construction, then any society, group, or individual can construct its own sense of what human rights are or ought to be. Indeed, if different societies have different conceptions of social justice, then human rights might not apply to all individuals simply by virtue of their being human. Human rights could, for example, mean the “right” of a wife to obey her husband, or the “right” of a black person to be enslaved, rather than referring to the liberal principles of equality and freedom that have been at the heart of socially constructed human rights since well before 1948. Such relativist objections to or revisions of the principle of universal human rights make a mockery of the term, which has a logical meaning: it applies to all humans, and it is about rights, not privileges.

Human rights are “minimal standards. They deal with severe political abuses that undermine fundamental interests and deprive people of dignity.”² Not everyone believes that all human beings deserve to have their fundamental interests protected or are entitled to a life of dignity, but I do. If I had to identify a prior principle to justify these beliefs, it would be compassion. It is incumbent upon me to care about other people, to try to understand them and their needs, and to try to ensure that if their life is not as pleasant and secure as my own, it is at least one in which minimal standards of autonomy, equality, respect, recognition, and material security are ensured. Their human dignity demands nothing less.

To state that human rights are universal in principle is certainly not to suggest that they are universal in practice. If they were, this book would be unnecessary. Moreover, not everyone agrees with the principle of universal human rights. Many people argue that women are not and should not be equal to men; that gays and lesbians should not have rights equivalent to those of heterosexual individuals; that ex-slaves and people of lower caste are inherently degraded and unequal to their various masters; that the poor deserve their fate; or that migrants and refugees should not have any rights to enter countries other than their own. Totalitarian and dictatorial governments routinely argue that human rights are “Western,” “liberal,” “imperialist,” “culturally inappropriate,” or whatever other term they can use to undermine their validity.

Much of the debate revolves around the contention that “Western” human rights are civil and political – such as the right to vote or the right not to be tortured – whereas the global South is more concerned with economic human rights such as the rights to food, health care, education, and shelter. Critics are correct in arguing that the concept of universal human rights was first articulated in the West, in liberal political thought. However, contemporary human rights also incorporate some elements of socialist thought, as do the core human rights documents themselves. The UDHR contains both sets of rights; unfortunately, the two sets were split in 1976 into the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR).

In order to protect the entire range of human rights, a society must be based on both liberal and democratic socialist components: in effect, a social democracy. It is a mistake to conflate liberalism with all Western thought. Liberalism is not the only conception of social justice to exist in the Western world; others are communitarianism, socialism, communism, conservatism, libertarianism, and fascism, although since 1945 most Western states have been predominantly liberal. Conversely, elements of liberal and socialist principles can be found in many non-Western belief systems, even if those belief systems are not clearly articulated as based on universal, individual human rights.

Thus, to state that the concept of human rights was first articulated in the West does not mean that only the West has a moral system of justice. Rather, the philosophical and legal conceptions of universal, individual human rights originated principally in the West. When discussing ideas that animate conceptions of the social good or social welfare, we must distinguish morality, justice, and human rights. Human rights are a particular philosophy of morality: other philosophies of morality, such as communism or traditionalism, are not rights-based. There are also systems of justice that are based upon inequalities among categories of people, on the belief that the king or ruler is always correct no matter what he does, or on the belief that adherents to a society's dominant religion should have more privileges than believers in minority religions. These systems of morality or justice do not articulate alternate or competing conceptions of human rights: they are simply not rights-based.

Although the United Nations was dominated by Western and Soviet Bloc countries when the UDHR was formulated in 1948, its members included many non-Western countries. Of the 18 countries that participated in the drafting of the UDHR, 9 were non-Western – namely, Chile, China, Egypt, India, Iran, Lebanon, Panama, the Philippine Republic, and Uruguay. No sub-Saharan African countries were independent in 1948, so there was no formal representative of this region at the meetings drafting the UDHR, although representatives of some anticolonial groups were present. Nor were any representatives of what we now call indigenous groups present. Thus, a legitimate complaint about the supposedly “universal” nature of the UDHR is that not all states or social groups participated in its drafting. Nevertheless, many small, non-Western states did actively participate, influencing clauses from economic human rights to prohibition of child marriage and the rights of women.³ Moreover, many Arab and Asian states were influential in drafting the two core Covenants in the 1950s and 60s; India played an important leadership role.⁴

Thus, the principle of human rights is one to which many states in the global South now adhere, at least formally with regard to their obligations under international law and their constitutional obligations to their citizens. This does not mean that the elites or ruling classes of all these countries actually believe in human rights. It would be useful if there were a deeper and more universal philosophical and practical consensus on human rights, especially among countries that were not independent in 1948.

This deeper consensus was officially arrived at during the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna, when 171 participating states agreed that human rights were “universal, indivisible and interdependent and interrelated.” They also affirmed that “[t]he universal nature of these rights and freedoms is beyond question,” and that neither national culture nor level of (under)development could be used as excuses to deny human rights.⁵ Nevertheless, states were also concerned to protect their sovereignty and self-determination as well as their commitment to human rights. This showed that the international consensus was far from perfect: it is still far from perfect 25 years later, as subsequent chapters will show.

Human Dignity

Insofar as there is an international consensus on human rights, it is based on the prior principle of human dignity. The UDHR begins with a preambular statement: “Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”; its Article 1 states: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” Nevertheless, there is no fixed content to human dignity; human rights and human dignity are not necessarily synonymous. If they are synonymous in modern-day thought, it is because they have been socially constructed to be so. Since social values are heavily influenced by conceptions of individual rights and an underlying vision of humanity, it makes sense to intertwine society's vision of dignity with belief in the necessity f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1: Universal Human Rights
• 2: Critical Perspectives on Human Rights
• 3: How Rights-Protective Societies Develop
• 4: Civil and Political Rights
• 5: Culture and Community
• 6: Economic and Social Human Rights
• 7: Collective Human Rights
• 8: Western (Ir)responsibility for Human Rights in the Global South
• Index
• End User License Agreement