19 November 2008
Relativity and the Universal Declaration
Jack Donnelly
Jack Donnelly is the Andrew Mellon Professor at the Joseph Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver. The author of three books and more than 60 articles and book chapters on the theory and practice of human rights, including Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice, 2nd ed. (2003), Donnelly is best known for work on the concept of human rights, cultural relativism, development and human rights, international human rights regimes, and human rights and foreign policy. He has lectured and taught extensively in the Americas, Europe, and Asia, and his work has been translated into 10 languages.
This publication celebrates the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action of the 1993 World Human Rights Conference authoritatively proclaimed that “the universal nature of these rights and freedoms is beyond question.” What exactly, though, does it mean to say that human rights are “universal”?
The six leading international human rights treaties (on economic, social, and cultural rights; civil and political rights; racial discrimination; discrimination against women; torture; and the rights of the child) have been ratified, and thus voluntarily accepted as binding by, on average, more than 85 percent of the world’s states. Practice often falls short of profession. Nonetheless, almost all states in all parts of the world acknowledge a duty to respect the human rights of their citizens — no matter how frequently they give in to the temptation to do otherwise.
There is also a strong overlapping cross-cultural consensus on human rights. Gandhi helped turn Hindu values to the support of human rights, reversing the traditional emphasis on caste as a source of unbridgeable categorical difference between groups of human beings. Muslim scholars and activists from across the political spectrum have for many decades interpreted internationally recognized human rights as a contemporary expression of Quranic social and political values. Scholars in China and Korea have begun exploring Confucian foundations for internationally recognized human rights. Western philosophies that once were hostile to human rights, such as utilitarianism, now generally are interpreted to support human rights. Socialists no less than liberals, atheists no less than Christians, Jews, and Buddhists, and those from many, many other traditions as well have, from very different starting points, converged on endorsing the rights in the Universal Declaration. And those few who still reject equal and inalienable universal human rights — for example, racists and fundamentalist religious fanatics in all areas of the world — are almost universally looked down upon by the majority of their fellow citizens.
Why Human Rights Are Universal
Human rights are based on a commitment to equality and autonomy that allows, even encourages, multiple paths to universal human rights. But much as all roads in the Mediterranean world once led to Rome, so today every major culture in our increasingly globalized world finds itself led to the Universal Declaration. Human rights are universal today because people pretty much everywhere, when given the chance to choose freely, have chosen, and continue to choose, human rights.
Such choices are neither accidental nor merely fashionable, or, at root, an expression of hegemonic power. Rather, internationally recognized human rights have proven themselves in practice to be the best mechanism yet devised by human ingenuity to protect people against certain standard threats to their dignity posed by modern markets and modern states. Human rights — the idea that individuals, simply because they are human beings, possess equal and inalienable rights that can be exercised against the state and society — first emerged in the modern West when individuals, families, and communities came to suffer under the intrusions of increasingly powerful bureaucratic states and the dislocations and indignities caused by unregulated markets. And the particular substance of our list of human rights has also been decisively shaped by historic encounters with states and markets. With the spread of sovereign states across the globe, especially following decolonization, and as global markets have expanded and deepened their reach, people in other regions also came to perceive comparable threats to their interests and dignity. They similarly have chosen the protections of human rights.
As in the West, other principles of government have also been tried, most notably dictatorships ostensibly committed to rapid national development. Those alternatives, however, have almost universally failed, often with tragic, even horrible, consequences for the safety, rights, and dignity of ordinary citizens. The increasingly universal contemporary embrace of human rights reflects the demonstrated failure of the leading alternatives to protect people against nearly universal threats. Until we find better mechanisms to rule ourselves politically and to distribute equitably the fruits of the market, there is a universal need for human rights.
The universality of internationally recognized human rights, however, does not extend to implementation and enforcement. International law establishes a system of national implementation of international human rights. Sovereign territorial states have allowed an extensive system of official and unofficial international monitoring but have retained for themselves the sovereign right to implement human rights largely as they see fit. (Armed humanitarian intervention against genocide is the fragile exception that proves the rule.) We possess human rights universally, simply because we are human beings. We enjoy them largely as citizens or residents of states. The practical fate of human rights is thus deeply relative to where one has the fortune or misfortune to live.
Implementation: Guidelines and Details
The Universal Declaration also establishes a limited but vital relativity of implementation. For example, Article 3 reads, in its entirety: “Everyone has the right to life, liberty, and security of person.” Such broad guidelines require both interpretation and implementation, allowing considerable space for cultural, regional, and local diversity. Universal human rights are neither a recipe nor a mathematical formula. Rather, they identify a set of destinations, point in the directions that lead to them, but leave the details of the journey largely to local debate and political contestation — although it must also be emphasized that these national debates take place within limits set by the international consensus represented by the substantial body of international human rights law.
What, then, of familiar arguments that, for example, “Asian values,” “African values,” or “Islamic values” are fundamentally different? Over more than 25 years of writing, teaching, and lecturing, I have found little support for such claims at the level of generality of the Universal Declaration. When the question of culture arises, as it invariably does when I lecture or teach abroad, I ask my audience which four rights in the Universal Declaration their culture rejects. I have never found an audience that seriously advanced objections to more than parts of three articles.
For example, many traditional cultures disagree to varying degrees with the provision of Article 16 that men and women “are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage, and at its dissolution.” This, though, is a secondary provision of the article, which begins: “Men and women of full age … have the right to marry and to found a family.” There is no more universally endorsed right in the Declaration. And even such limited disagreements are rare.
The UDHR offers much space for intense disagreements over details. Is pornography protected speech? Does the death penalty violate the right to life? What exactly is implied, at any given level of economic development, by the claim in Article 25 that “everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family”? There is little real disagreement, however, over the basics. Who really believes that their culture allows their government to torture them, to force a religion on them, or to permit their children to die from hunger or poor medical care? I, at least, have not encountered such people. We must not confuse what oppressed people have been forced to tolerate with what they value and aspire to. Although many have been — and continue to be — forced to accept a wide range of violations of internationally recognized human rights, few consider them just, right, or honorable.
Even where appeals to radical cultural difference are well-intentioned (rather than inauthentic efforts by ruling elites to justify their domination), such arguments ignore the malleability of human cultures, which are always multivocal, contested, and evolving. Consider the West, where the first historically influential expressions of human rights emerged in the middle- and late-17th century. Western states for much of the preceding century fought immensely destructive internal and international wars of religion. Their explorations devastated native peoples in the Americas and laid the foundations for exploitation in Asia and Africa that culminated in the brutalities of 19th-century imperialism. At home, the divine right of kings deprived the vast majority of the subjects (not citizens) of those kings of even minimal dignities. And for literally centuries afterward, Western states denied women, racial, ethnic, and religious minorities, and the poor the most basic rights. Had anyone looked at the West in the mid-17th century, the cultural ground for human rights could hardly have seemed less hospitable. Yet the West has become transformed into a world of rights-protective liberal democratic welfare states.
If the Europe of racism, sexism, religious intolerance, imperialism, and aristocratic domination succeeded by brutal class rule could be so transformed, it is hard to imagine that any society lacks the internal cultural resources to change itself similarly. And such a transformation need not be extended over generations or centuries. In most of Europe, it came only in the past century; in most countries, primarily after World War II; in many, even more recently than that. Thus it is hardly surprising that in all regions of the world we have witnessed substantial, often dramatic, sometimes even stunning progress toward humane, rights-protective governments and societies. Nor is it at all surprising that these changes have received the increasingly enthusiastic endorsement of most of the world’s leading philosophies, religions, and cultural traditions.
Beyond the Differences
Cultures are immensely flexible. Although core values do tend to persist over extended periods of time, those values, as the Western example illustrates, can surprisingly be easily associated with radically different social practices: racism no less than equality; self-determination no less than imperialism. Virtually every culture for most of its past has engaged in practices that today we would consider gross and systematic violations of human rights. But just as this did not stop Europeans from responding to new circumstances with the new practices of human rights, Asian countries such as Japan, South Korea, India, and Indonesia, African countries including South Africa, Nigeria, and Kenya, and most of the countries of Latin America have in recent decades responded to the challenges they have faced by endorsing the rights enumerated in the Universal Declaration.
None of this need mean the loss of local culture — any more than the West lost its culture as it gradually transformed itself from leading violator to leading example of and advocate for human rights. No people is less true to its cultural heritage because it commits to respect human rights. Canadians today are no less Canadian because they practice human rights, nor are Mexicans any less Mexican. Quite the contrary, they consider themselves more faithful to their deepest values because they have learned and struggled to express those values in the practice of human rights.
There are indeed immense variations across the contemporary world, in culture, economic development, political system, and historical experience. The lesson of the past 60 years, however, is that these differences, whatever they may have meant in the past, today are not durably associated with opposition to internationally recognized human rights. Rather, as we have seen in country after country, in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Europe alike, when people, after suffering under decades or centuries of oppressive misrule, are offered the opportunity to choose, they almost universally choose human rights — and see that choice as an expression of their deepest local values.
The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.
