An intelligent strategy to protect and promote human rights must address the underlying causes of violations of these rights. These violations are caused by a wide and complex variety of factors and forces, including economic conditions, structural social factors, and political expediency. For the most part, however, human rights violations are due to human action or inaction—they occur because individual persons act or fail to act in certain ways. They can be the overlapping and interacting, intended or unintended, consequences of action. People may be driven by selfish motives of greed for wealth and power, or by a misguided...

It may be helpful to overgeneralize at the outset in approaching this difficult, yet challenging and vital, topic. Until recently, most human rights specialists have taken an all-or-nothing view of the relevance of culture; some ignore culture in favor of some sort of universalism, while others regard cultural specificity as the supreme guide to moral behavior. Those who would disregard culture come from various backgrounds, sometimes overlapping, sometimes not. There are, first of all, jurisprudcntial schools associated with positivism or naturalism. The positivists consider the content of human rights to be determined by the texts agreed upon by states and...

The Beijing Spring¹ of 1989 poses all too sharply the issue that lies at the core of this volume of essays and of the work of many of its contributors: To what extent are conceptions of human rights universal? Advocates of universality can point to those Chinese students, workers, and other citizens who at great sacrifice sought fundamental freedoms of assembly and of the press while demanding that their voices be heard. Conversely, scholars espousing the view that human rights are culturally specific or relative can argue that the Chinese leadership’s brutal crushing of the prodemocracy movement and the seeming...

In this chapter I argue that most known human societies did not and do not have conceptions of human rights. Human rights are a moral good that one can accept—on an ethical basis—and that: everyone ought to have in the modern state-centric world. To seek an anthropologically based consensus on rights by surveying all known human cultures, however, is to confuse the concepts of rights, dignity, and justice. One can find affinities, analogues, and precedents for the actual content of internationally accepted human rights in many religious and cultural (geographic and national) traditions;² but the actual concept of...

Liberalism has been the predominant philosophical foundation for the concept of human rights in the West. Marxism has provided the main theoretical challenge to the liberal conception of rights. This essay examines a different and less well known discourse on rights within the Western tradition by focusing on the personalist perspectives of three contemporary Western social theorists who have found wanting both liberal and Marxist conceptions. The theorists whose concepts of rights are described here—Emmanuel Mounier, Jacques Maritain, and Roberto Unger—have each independently elaborated a conception of rights based on Western philosophy and social thought which differs radically...

The central question in this chapter is whether communities should have rights. This is a question that I will consider in a certain ideological or normative context, namely, that of liberalism. There are other contexts in which the question could be asked for, in nonliberal ideological settings; there have sometimes been clear positive answers to the question of whether minority communities should have rights. For example, the Ottoman Empire’s millet system provided a system of group rights.¹ Various other autocratic states such as Czarist Russia have also provided at least some de facto, if not de jure, protection for various...

Marx often scorned “rights talk” and other “nonsensical” normative chatter about fairness, freedom, justice, duty, and so forth. Such remarks should not be taken to mean that Marx was opposed in principle to normative evaluation, including the conception of universal human rights. In fact, concern for human rights underlies Marx’s whole project, his criticisms of past and present societies and his vision of the future communist society. He condemned the capitalist system for what many would now call gross violations of fundamental human rights, the miserable living conditions of the workers, their subjection to capitalist tyranny in the factory, and...

Human rights law is an excellent vehicle for a reassessment of relations among Indian and neo-European groups. Following World War II the themes of decolonialization and individual human rights emerged as fundamental concepts, and this is the moment to extend those concepts to Indian groups. The year 1992 marks a half millennium of discovery and settlement by Europeans in the Americas. The initial misnomer “Indian” still denominates and separates the original inhabitants of the Americas and their issue from the dominant: culture of the settlers of North America: the Anglo-Europeans.²

Indians have never recovered from the initial cultural, racial, and...

The peoples who first inhabited the northern part of the North American continent were more concerned with mutual responsibility for the survival and well-being of the group than with concepts akin to individual human rights. After five centuries of pressure from Europeans and their social philosophies, communitarian views are still widely held by descendants of the original peoples of what are now Canada and the United States.¹ Yet, just as some institutions of the now dominant society may have borrowed ideas on democracy and diplomacy from the First Nations,² the indigenous residents have not been immune to the political and...

Human rights violations were on the increase during the 1970s and part of the 1980s in Latin America. Government violence intensified in Latin America, where military regimes ruled Chile, Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay. During the 1980s Central America took center stage as the focus of political violence in the Western hemisphere.

Political violence has always played a key role in the evolution of Latin American societies. Some authors have interpreted the recurrence of human rights violations as the by-product of a prevailing cultural tradition antagonistic to democracy.¹ They perceive human rights violations as expressing some form of monism, that is,...

For five hundred years, from the very beginning, Indian rights have been considered in Hispanic and Portuguese legal thought both as collective rights and as individual human rights. Two broad questions were considered: the first was whether Indians had any collective titles to their lands; the second was whether or under what conditions Indians would be subject to enslavement. The question of customary law also arose, since discussions went along on the topic of the right of the Indians to remain heathen, to retain polygamy, and even to practice cannibalism.

The issue of enslavement is now forgone, yet what is...

In a unitary and essentially monocultural society, the problem of cultural legitimacy in the formulation and implementation of human rights law and policies (whether these take the form of constitutional provisions, legislation, administrative or executive action) is relatively simple. If the human rights law and policies are generated from within the society, they can be assumed to be culturally legitimate, or at least as legitimate as any other legislation or governmental policy generated within that society.

If human rights law and policy is taken from outside, however—for instance by the adoption, through legislation or otherwise, of international human rights...

In commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, there is cause for celebration, but there is also a pressing need for critique. How are we to understand the discrepancies between the theory and practice of human rights? By what means may the credibility of national and international standards be enhanced? What strategies of promotion and implementation might deliver human rights more effective?² To these questions, posed by those who, on the one hand, yearn for a world order in which all persons may enjoy human dignity, justice, and peace but, on the other, recognize the pervasive...

The question of cultural survival has become a growing concern for encapsulated minorities in ethnically plural situations. In the relationship between relatively powerless indigenous minorities and the nation-state, cultural survival is not only a matter of culture per se. It can also be regarded as a human rights issue based on political rights and land rights, the two predominant elements contained in what is referred to as “Aboriginal rights.” Political rights refer to self-determination, whereas land rights can be either territorial rights to land and water, or rights and ability to develop traditional natural resources, such as sovereignty over a...

Constructive and critical concern with the cross-cultural foundations and legitimacy of universal human rights standards is no novelty. When in 1946 the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was first prepared by the United Nations Division of Human Rights, serious efforts were made by its director, John Humphrey, and his staff to provide the United Nations Commission on Human Rights with culturally and historically diverse background materials.¹

In 1947 UNESCO carried out a theoretical inquiry into the foundations of an international declaration of human rights, drawing on a large number of individual philosophers, social scientists, jurists, and writers from UNESCO...