Unit 7: Critical Approaches to Human Rights
7.1 Asian and Western Human Rights Values
The 1990s saw an organised challenge to universal human rights. The “Asian values” claim (associated with the Bangkok Declaration of 1993, and with Lee Kuan Yew and Mahathir Mohamad) says: Asian societies prize community over individual, stability and development over political freedom, and family and hierarchy over rights-claims. The Western package, on this view, is one culture’s preference dressed as universality.
The counter-critique: dissidents and scholars (Kim Dae-jung’s famous reply) answered that the “Asian values” argument is authoritarianism’s dress — Asian peoples want rights as much as anyone; the claim serves rulers, not cultures.
The Asian resources’ counter-catalogue: the region’s own traditions carry human-rights material — Buddhist compassion and the equal dignity of beings (the syllabus’s own Buddhism-and-human-rights reference), Hindu dharma’s duties-and-dignity, Islamic law’s protections of life, property and religion. The traditions differ from Western liberalism in idiom, not in the core.
Nepal’s position: the Constitution’s universalism (the Preamble’s human-dignity frame, the full rights catalogue) expressed through local idioms. The exam’s balanced conclusion: the values debate may enrich the implementation of rights; it can never justify their derogation.
7.2 Universalism and Cultural Relativism
Universalism: human rights are the same everywhere — the UDHR’s claim, reaffirmed at Vienna 1993 (“all human rights are universal, indivisible, interdependent and interrelated”).
Cultural relativism: rights are culturally constructed. The strong version says rights do not apply where the culture rejects them; the weak version only asks for cultural sensitivity in implementation.
The test cases: female genital mutilation, forced and child marriage, equal inheritance — in each, the claimed cultural practice met a universal norm, and the universal norm won (the CEDAW Committee’s jurisprudence and the national reforms alike).
The methodological middle: contextual universality — the core is universal; the margins adapt. Proportionality is the working tool: the state may accommodate culture, but never at the core’s expense.
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