Text 2 Controversies and culture

In 1946 the UN appointed a committee of philos­ophers, historians and lawyers to see whether enough agreement could be found among the world's diverse cultures to draw up a list of funda­mental human rights. Mary Ann Glendon of Harvard Law School compares the committee's task to that facing the architects of the Tower of Babel. The committee began by sending an elaborate ques­tionnaire to statesmen and thinkers around the world. Replies came in describing human rights from Chinese, Islamic and Hindu as well as Ameri­can, European and communist-block perspectives. "To the committee's surprise, the lists of basic rights and values they received from their far-flung sources were essentially similar," Ms Glendon re­counts in a recent history of the creation of the Uni­versal Declaration; "Yes, we agree about the rights, but on condition no one asks us why," one commit­tee member, the French philosopher Jacques Maritain, observed wryly.

This puzzle has endured ever since. The very concept of rights, their source and their justification remains a matter of energetic debate not only among Christians, Buddhists and Muslims, but even among western political philosophers who share common assumptions about the nature of man and society. These debates are fascinating, but they are also interminable. This survey will make no attempt to resolve them, but instead follow Maritain's example and assume that every person, sim­ply by virtue of being human, has inalienable rights which others must respect in a civilized society.

Reconciling the irreconcilable

But that is the easy part. The next bit—putting hu­man rights into practice—is more controversial. Much political debate, even in Western Europe or America where basic rights have long been codi­fied, is about apparently irreconcilable clashes be­tween individual rights. This is to be expected, be­cause basic rights do sometimes clash—for example, the right to privacy versus the right to free expression—and balancing conflicting rights in particular cases is a proper subject for public dis­cussion. International human-rights law is not meant to settle such issues, but only to ensure that a society strives to achieve a balance and does not brush aside a fundamental right simply because it is inconvenient for the government to observe it.

There is also confusion about what constitutes a basic right. Americans especially tend to couch al­most any argument in terms of rights. Too much "rights talk" of this sort can be an obstacle to neces­sary political compromise. Every statute gives someone legal rights, and usually imposes legal ob­ligations on someone else. Such statutory rights are contingent on what the majority believes to be good public policy. Human rights are different. They should trump even what the majority might want.

Rights skeptics see this as anti-democratic, and it is true that human rights are inconsistent with absolute majoritarianism. Unconstrained major­ities can do unacceptably nasty things to minor­ities. Not many democrats today believe that major­ity support can justify overtly racist policies, the denial of legal equality to women or the suppres­sion of opposition newspapers.

International human-rights agreements are not meant to resolve controversial clashes of rights within individual societies; nor do they mandate specific policies. There is widespread, even grow­ing, agreement about what rights are fundamental, at least judging from the extensive ratification of treaties, but countries retain great latitude over how to put these rights into practice.

For example, the right to participate in politics is deemed fundamental, but it can be applied in a variety of ways, and through dozens of different electoral systems. Europeans accept some restric­tions on the media that Americans would find in­tolerable, but no one would compare these with the control of the press imposed by the Chinese govern­ment. International norms become relevant only when countries fail to balance conflicting rights, or to respect them at all. Even the European Court of Human Rights, which administers the most effec­tive international regime, allows countries what it calls a "margin of appreciation" in its judgments, rather than insist on legal uniformity.

Nevertheless, the rights listed in the so-called In­ternational Bill of Rights—the Universal Declara­tion and the two International Covenants it engen­dered—admittedly look like a charter for one particular type of government: the liberal demo­cratic welfare state. The main features were outlined in the Universal Declaration even be­fore America and Western Europe had firmly estab­lished their own welfare systems. In the debates on the declaration, the economic and social rights were keenly supported not only by the Eastern block and the third world, but by western representatives as well.

Do social and economic rights belong on such a list? Most human-rights advocates insist they do, ar­guing that human rights derive from the dignity of the individual, and are universal and indivisible. If people are dying of starvation, disease or neglect, they cannot exercise any of their other rights. Mini­mum levels of food, housing, medical care and edu­cation for every person are undoubtedly goals which should be pursued by any decent society, but what is gained by including them in an interna­tional covenant? Describing paid holidays as a ba­sic human right (as the Universal Declaration does in Article 24) just seems wrong-headed. If a country is too poor to meet such goals, then labelling it as a human-rights violator achieves nothing.

Claims for economic goods are not justiciable. A court of law, even in a poor country, can determine when civil and political rights are being violated by the government, but it cannot, by a mere legal judg­ment, summon the resources to meet social and economic goals. In countries where claims to eco­nomic assistance have been turned into legal rights, these are usually statutory, not part of constitu­tional bills of rights. Such countries have enough wealth for some of it to be redistributed to those in need, and enough political consensus to do so.

Moreover, mixing the two categories of rights in international human-rights law has created its own problems. For decades it allowed the Soviet Union to counter western criticism of its record on civil and political rights by claiming that they were sim­ply giving priority to social and economic rights. China and some third-world countries still make this case, and for the same reasons. Trade unions in rich countries also often decry poor working condi­tions in developing countries as human-rights violations, when their real purpose is to win protec­tion from low-wage competition.

In fact, observing civil and political rights seems to offer the best hope for the economic development that permits the provision of basic necessities. Stable democracies have a far better economic record than authoritarian regimes. Lumping the two sets of rights together—and thus trying to "legalise" issues which should be left to politics and the market—has only muddied the issue of human rights and relieved the pressure on governments to observe civil and political rights.

Cultural imperialism?

A more damaging attack on the idea of interna­tional human rights has come from cultural relativ­ists, who claim that the entire concept is the prod­uct of western individualism, and that trying to impose human rights on other cultures is a form of imperialism. Such arguments are being put for­ward, for example, by exponents of Asian values and by Islamic fundamentalists. Some western commentators agree. One of the most eloquent has been Samuel Huntington, a professor of interna­tional politics at Harvard University. In 1993 he published a famous article predicting that culture, not ideology, would in future account for most ma­jor conflicts. "Western ideas of individualism, lib­eralism, constitutionalism, human rights,equality, liberty, the rule of law, democracy, free markets, the separation of church and state, often have little res­onance in Islamic, Confucian, Japanese, Hindu, Buddhist or Orthodox cultures. Western efforts to propagate such ideas produce instead a reaction against 'human-rights imperialism' and a reaffir­mation of indigenous values...", he wrote.

The relativist thesis is unconvincing for a num­ber of reasons. It assumes that there is a single set of western, Islamic or Asian cultural values respec­tively. This is patently untrue. Mr Huntington's list—Confucian, Japanese, Hindu, Buddhist—is it­self a refutation of the popular catch-all of "Asian" values. There are many traditions and beliefs, some of them hostile to each other, even within each of these. Islam is also far from monolithic. Like Judeo-Christian culture, it comes in many flavours, from fundamentalist to secular, including a strand that has championed rationality and scientific inquiry.

Cultural relativists also assume that the core po­litical and civil rights identified in international human-rights documents are exclusively western. But they are based on values widely shared across many cultures: respect for the sacredness of life and for human dignity, tolerance of differences, and a desire for liberty, order, fairness and stability. The question of whether, and in what circumstances, the claims of the individual should prevail over those of the community, or vice versa, has been end­lessly debated in many cultures. It is a subject about which even western liberals, the supposed champi­ons of an atomistic individualism, often disagree. Intolerant forms of Islam and hierarchical forms of Confucianism do exist, but western societies too have often been intolerant or hierarchical. The United States did not start dismantling racial segregation until 1954. France did not grant women the right to vote until 1944, Switzerland not until 1971. The rights contained in the Universal Declara­tion and other treaties have had to be fought for in the West as anywhere else.

It tends to be the people in power who use Is­lamic or Asian values to justify political repression and restrictions of rights, and it tends to be the peo­ple they are repressing who appeal to the outside world to uphold those rights. "In the eyes of the in­ternational community, governments are no longer the only actors," says Christopher Keith Hall, a lawyer with Amnesty International. "People who are the targets of repression are participants too." Arab and Iranian human-rights campaigners are as much a part of Islamic culture as their rulers, or fun­damentalists. Who is more "Asian", Mahathir Mohamad, Malaysia's prime minister, who cracked down on dissent and jailed his dep­uty, or Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize win­ner who leads Myanmar's beleaguered opposition?

Moreover, international human-rights obliga­tions are not the straitjacket that cultural relativists claim. For most of the past 50 years Japan has been governed by a single political party, but that did not make it a one-party state like the Soviet Union or China. Japanese voters enjoyed full political and civil rights, but chose to exercise them in a culturally specific way. Similarly, if most Arab women are al­lowed to vote or hold a job, but choose not to do so, their rights have not been violated. Human-rights obligations bar coercion by government or law; they do not mandate a particular social outcome. True, legal and social coercion can be difficult to distinguish, but international human-rights norms can deal only with the legal issues.

Lastly, relativists ignore the fact that most of the world's population lives within states embracing more than one cultural tradition. Using the power of the government to impose a single, intolerant brand of culture on all of a country's inhabitants is a recipe for constant conflict, both within borders and across them.

Comprehension