Grounding Human Rights in a Pluralist World

Introduction

Introduction On December 10, 1948, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) without a single dissenting vote. The document was novel in declaring that every human being, without “distinction of any kind,” possesses a set of morally authoritative rights and fundamental freedoms that ought to be socially guaranteed. Along with the 1946 Nuremberg Principles and the 1948 Genocide Convention, the UDHR was radical in helping to construct a new geopolitical framework to hold states more accountable for the manner in which they treated their own citizens, foreign nationals, and members of other states.1 Today, human rights have arguably become the most important cross-cultural moral concept and evaluative tool to measure the performance and even legitimacy of domestic regimes. Most UN member-states have ratified the two international covenants that subsequently gave the UDHR legal form: the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and its optional protocols and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). Other international human rights conventions or treaties cover topic-specific concerns about torture and punishment, racial discrimination, children, women, migrant workers, persons with disabilities , and enforced disappearances. Consequently, states that are “named and shamed” for their persistent human rights violations could suffer adverse effects either in their diplomatic ties with others or in their petitions for economic assistance from international financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. A people’s prospects for statehood could even hinge upon their willingness or ability to honor human rights. Even nonstate actors such as multinational corporations increasingly face pressures to comply with international human rights standards, such as when labor activists and human rights watchdog groups inspire 1 consumer boycotts of certain products because of the sweatshop conditions under which they were manufactured. Despite the increasing rhetoric and expanding institutionalization of human rights, worries persist about their universal validity.2 Even before the UDHR was officially promulgated, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) had already expressed wariness that the proposed document would represent nothing but a “statement of rights conceived only in terms of the values prevalent in the countries of Western Europe and in America.”3 An anti-Western backlash by formerly colonized peoples soon followed upon the heels of the UDHR and was detectable during the first international conference of Asian and African nations in 1955 in Bandung, Indonesia (Burke 2006). Samuel Huntington’s thesis regarding a “clash of civilizations ” between the “West and the Rest” is now well known, as is his claim that the values of “individualism, liberalism, constitutionalism , human rights, equality, liberty, the rule of law, democracy, free markets [and] the separation of church and state, often have little resonance in Islamic, Confucian, Japanese, Hindu, Buddhist or Orthodox cultures” (1993, 40–41; see also Huntington 1998). Are human rights concepts actually Western ones masquerading under a cloak of ethical universalism or otherwise concealing a disreputable claim to power? Admittedly, the post–Cold War superpower , the United States, has historically minimized or even ignored the human rights violations of regimes believed to be friendly to its interests (e.g., Israel, Egypt, and Iran under the Shah) but has publicized the abuses of others in order to discredit them (e.g., China occasionally, Cuba, Burma, Iran under Ruhollah Khomeini or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Iraq under Saddam Hussein), despite its own nonexemplary human rights record.4 All rhetoric aside, much has also been made about the uneven enforcement of human rights. For example, critics have questioned why the United States through the North Atlantic Treaty Organization engaged in forms of “humanitarian intervention” in Bosnia in 1995 and Kosovo in 1999 but apparently looked the other way in Rwanda in 1994, when extremists in the Hutu-dominated govern2 Introduction ment massacred approximately 1 million Tutsis and moderate Hutus in the span of ten to thirteen weeks. The United States has not yet (at the time of this writing) come to the rescue of the defenseless in the Darfur region of the Sudan, even though top U.S. officials have since September 9, 2004, used the word “genocide” to describe the crisis. Still others have been more chagrined that the “line of complicity” between state perpetuators of mass violence and those purportedly intervening to stop it has increasingly been effaced (Balfour and Cadava 2004, 288; Zizek 2004; and Brauman and Petit 2004).5 The world community continues...