The Attack on Human Rights

Michael Ignatieff

From Foreign Affairs, November/December 2001

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Summary:  The excessive individualism in Western human rights doctrine has been criticized by the Islamic world, East Asia, and some within the West itself. But human rights advocates need not apologize; human rights are popular and necessary worldwide precisely because they protect individuals against group authority.

Michael Ignatieff is Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. This essay is adapted from his latest book, Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry. Copyright (c) 2001 by Princeton University Press.

FROM WITHIN AND WITHOUT

Since 1945, human rights language has become a source of power and authority. Inevitably, power invites challenge. Human rights doctrine is now so powerful, but also so unthinkingly imperialist in its claim to universality, that it has exposed itself to serious intellectual attack. These challenges have raised important questions about whether human rights norms deserve the authority they have acquired: whether their claims to universality are justified, or whether they are just another cunning exercise in Western moral imperialism.

The cultural challenge to the universality of human rights arises from three distinct sources -- from resurgent Islam, from within the West itself, and from East Asia. Each of these challenges is independent of the others, but taken together, they have raised substantial questions about the cross-cultural validity -- and hence the legitimacy -- of human rights norms.

The challenge from Islam has been there from the beginning. When the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was being drafted in 1947, the Saudi Arabian delegation raised particular objection to Article 16, relating to free marriage choice, and Article 18, relating to freedom of religion. On the question of marriage, the Saudi delegate to the committee examining the draft of the declaration made an argument that has resonated ever since in Islamic encounters with Western human rights, saying that

the authors of the draft declaration had, for the most part, taken into consideration only the standards recognized by Western civilization and had ignored more ancient civilizations which were past the experimental stage, and the institutions of which, for example, marriage, had proved their wisdom through the centuries. It was not for the Committee to proclaim the superiority of one civilization over all others or to establish uniform standards for all the countries of the world.

This was a defense of both the Islamic faith and patriarchal authority. The Saudi delegate in effect argued that the exchange and control of women is the very raison d'�tre of traditional cultures, and that the restriction of female choice in marriage is central to the maintenance of patriarchal property relations. On the basis of these objections to Articles 16 and 18, the Saudi delegation refused to ratify the declaration.

There have been recurrent attempts, including Islamic declarations of human rights, to reconcile Islamic and Western traditions by putting more emphasis on family duty and religious devotion and by drawing on distinctively Islamic traditions of religious and ethnic tolerance. But these attempts at fusion between the Islamic world and the West have never been entirely successful: agreement by the parties actually trades away what is vital to each side. The resulting consensus is bland and unconvincing.

Since the 1970s the relation of Islam to human rights has grown more hostile. When the Islamic Revolution in Iran rose up against the tyrannical modernization imposed by the shah, Islamic figures began to question the universal writ of Western human rights norms. They have pointed out that the Western separation of church and state, of secular ...

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