HUMAN RIGHTS.

Human rights have triumphed in the world. They unite left and right, the pulpit and the state, the politician and the rebel, the north and the south. Human rights are the fate of our societies, the ideology after "the end of ideologies," the only values left in a valueless world after "the end of history." And yet many doubts about their effectiveness persist. Recent history has witnessed genocide, mass murder, ethnic cleansing, the Holocaust. Not one day passes without newspaper reports about the latest atrocity somewhere in the world. Triumph and disaster are never far apart. How did we reach this state?

A SHORT HISTORY OF HUMAN RIGHTS

The initial impetus for the age of rights was the adoption of the Charter of the United Nations in 1945, which made the protection of human rights one of the main aims of the organization. Three years later the UN General Assembly passed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The declaration was a nonbinding proclamation of minimum standards of treatment of citizens by their state authorities the world over. It paved the way for the drafting of two binding treaties, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and that on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, which after long and difficult negotiations were adopted in 1966. The declaration and the two covenants are now considered as an International Bill of Rights and have created a model for regional and specialist standard setting.

The first reference to "human rights" is relatively recent. It appears in legal writings of the 1920s in relation to the position of minorities in the post-imperial European states. But the intellectual pedigree of the concept of human rights is much older. It is associated with the idea of nature and natural law, which started in classical Greece and has occupied a prominent role in Western ethics, politics, and law ever since. In its original version, natural law is part of an archaic cosmology in which the universe (the cosmos) and every thing (and person) in it has its own unique nature that provides it with its purpose or aim in life. The nature and purpose of the acorn is to become a mature oak tree providing the best shade, that of a baby boy to grow and become a just man, that of a cobbler to produce the best possible sandals. A person is virtuous if he strives toward perfection according to his nature, and perfection can only be achieved politically, that is, in the city (polis in Greek) in collaboration with other citizens. A just city provides the conditions for people to develop fully according to their natures, and a city is just if people strive to act according to their natures. The order of the universe is a moral order, with every animate being and inanimate thing having a part to play in its own perfection and completion. Indeed the discovery of the idea of "nature" by early Greek philosophers was an attempt to use reason against received opinion, ancestral authority, and custom. Socrates and Plato, the Sophists, and the Stoics explored what is "right according to reason" in order to combat established powers and the common sense of their times.

It was this natural order of things that obliged Antigone, the loving sister of Polynices, to defy the order of her uncle, King Creon, and bury her brother. Polynices was killed while attacking his native Thebes and was left to be devoured by vultures, against religious law and family duty. As a punishment for her disobedience, Antigone herself was buried alive. But the divine order took revenge on the rationalist king. He was cursed for his arrogance and his family destroyed. In this early confrontation between state law and the order of things, between male reason and calculation and female emotion and devotion to sacred and familial duties, the first and still-greatest symbol of resistance against unjust law was born.

It is a short step from this natural cosmology to argue that generally shared moral principles exist. They depend on the nature of the cosmos and the interlocking purposes of beings and can be discovered by reason. In a legal dispute, the experienced judge, who knew through a long and prudent life the natural order of things, would redress the disturbed relationship and make it again harmonious. His judgment would be what was right according to the nature of things but also what the law requested. Indeed, for both the Greeks and Romans, the word for "right" or "lawful" (dikaion in Greek , jus in Latin) was also the word for "the just state of affairs."

The next step was taken by the School of Stoics around the third and second centuries b.c.e. The Stoics argued that all people share the ability to reason and that moral judgments have a rational foundation. Nature changed from a way of arguing to a source of rules and norms. The new natural law was universal and even divine and became the sole criterion of valid law. This God-given, eternal, and absolute natural law was the foundation of laws and institutions and was disclosed by reason. The Roman politician and philosopher Cicero expressed this change when he wrote that

the true law is the law of reason, in accordance with nature known to all, unchangeable and imperishable; … nor will it be one law in Rome and a different one in Athens, nor otherwise tomorrow than it is today; but one and the same law, eternal and unchangeable will bind all people and all ages; and God, its designer, expounder and enacter, will be the sole and universal ruler and governor of all things.

Natural right used to be a matter of empirical observation, rational contemplation, and dialectical confrontation. Now it became a matter of introspection and revelation. The notion of universal humanity based on the rational essence of man and equal rights for all was a dramatic departure from the unequal and hierarchical Greek world.

But the main force moving the law toward a theory of natural rights was its gradual Christianization. Jewish cosmology believed that the universe is the creation of an omnipotent God, while Christianity placed the individual and his soul at the center of the universe. As a result, nature lost its normative character and became the inanimate natural world. Saint Paul's statement that God has placed a natural law in our hearts replaced classical natural law. And as the Judeo-Christian God is a severe legislator, the Roman idea of right, or jus, took the form of a set of commandments, or rules, found in the scriptures and ingrained in the conscience. By the Middle Ages a largely existential cosmology had been turned into a major weapon in the hands of the church. A crucial link in the Christianization of law must be sought in the theology of Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas distinguished four types of law: the eternal, natural, divine, and human. The law lost the cosmic flexibility of the classical tradition and became definite, certain, and simple, its fundamental propositions formulated by God in the Decalogue.

The source of natural law moved from rational morality to divine commandment—a higher law that consists of a small number of abstract ideals and values. These principles were declared superior to state law, which should either follow them or forfeit its claim to the loyalty of the citizens. At the same time, the idea of equality entered the historical scene. It is exemplified in St. Paul's statement that in the eyes of Christ "there is no Greek or Jew, no freeman or slave." Initially this was a spiritual, not political, equality, created by the soul we all possess and our participation in Jesus' plan of salvation. These beliefs had revolutionary power. But when the church achieved its aim of superiority over secular authorities, it turned these beliefs into a doctrine of justification of state power and asked its members to respect and obey the secular princes.

The revolutionary potential of nature was realized after its next great mutation from natural law into natural rights. This sea change was prepared in the writings of the liberal political philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Thomas Paine argued in different ways that natural law was no longer about abstract principles of state organization and state-church relations but rather a collection of individual rights that belong to the citizens because they pertain to their nature. The liberal philosophers argued that, before forming society, people lived in a state of nature where they enjoyed limitless freedom. However, the hazards and inconveniences of life led these noble savages to restrict their natural freedom by entering into a contract to establish society and political organization. This social contract transferred a large part of their natural freedoms to the government in return for protection and security. But a number of important rights, usually stated as those to life, liberty, and property, were retained by the contractors. The method used by the liberal philosophers was to observe people in their society, deduce their basic needs and desires, and then postulate the outcome of their observations as the basic characteristics of human nature, which must be protected by the institution of rights against state powers. For Hobbes, writing during the English civil war, human nature leads to conflict, and security, its greatest need, must be provided by an all-powerful state. For Locke, who lived in relative peace, man is naturally good, and the state must not interfere with his natural rights.

If state laws violate these natural rights they are invalid and could justify revolution against the unjust power. Rousseau was the favorite author of the French revolutionaries rebelling against the socially and economically static feudal ancien régime. The first act of the successful revolution was to pass a Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Similarly, Paine's Common Sense (1776) greatly influenced the American revolutionaries in their struggle against the colonial power. The American Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights were heavily influenced by natural rights theory.

The revolutionary potential of these principles did not escape the victorious revolutionaries. The centralized Western states, which developed out of the great bourgeois revolutions, soon abandoned and condemned the theory of natural rights and adopted the doctrine of legal positivism. For the positivists, the only law worthy of the name is the law posited by the state. A clear distinction separates law from morals, and appeals to a higher law, rights, or the dictates of conscience have no validity in the eyes of authority. The nineteenth century was the epoch of social engineering in the metropolitan states and of empire building and colonialism in the periphery. The law was seen as a tool in the hands of governments, institution builders, and reformers, and appeals to higher principles or individual rights were seen as reactionary hurdles to progress. As the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham put it, talk of natural rights is "nonsense, nonsense upon stilts, it is belief in witches and unicorns, for there is no right which when its abolition is advantageous to society, it should not be abolished."

The creation of large-scale theory in sociology, economics, and psychology and the rise of mass political parties accelerated the decline in the appeal of natural rights. The belief that political society was created by means of a social contract was seen as a myth while the claim that certain rights are eternal, inalienable, and absolute was exploded by É mile Durkheim and Max Weber, the founders of sociology, and Karl Marx, the founder of socialism. By the first half of the twentieth century the theory of natural rights had been discredited. It was treated in academic writings as an outdated conservative tradition, part of the history of ideas.

The rehabilitation of natural rights under the new guise of human rights dates from the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals after World War II. At a time when international law allowed states to treat their subjects as they liked, the Allied judges were faced with a legally compelling argument from the German defendants. From a positivist perspective, the only law that counts is the law of the state. The main defense argument was that in following the orders and applying the laws of the Nazi state, the defendants were acting within the limits of legality and should not be punished for carrying out their duty under the law. To answer this objection, the court ruled, however, that the systematized killing of Jews and others by the Nazis had been against the customary law of civilized nations and could not be overridden by national laws. In doing so, the tribunal rediscovered a main tenet of natural law. Certain acts are so heinous that they are banned by universal principles of humanity. These crimes against humanity have now become part of international law.

INSTITUTIONS AND IMPLEMENTATION

Since the creation of the United Nations in 1945, a major international process for the protection and promotion of human rights has been undertaken. Hundreds of human rights conventions, treaties, declarations, and agreements have been negotiated and adopted by the United Nations, by regional bodies like the Council of Europe and the Organization of African Unity, and by states. Human rights diversified from first-generation civil and political or "negative" rights, associated with liberalism, into second-generation economic, social, and cultural or "positive" rights, associated with the socialist tradition, and finally, into third-generation group and national sovereignty rights, associated with the decolonization process. The first-generation or "blue" rights are symbolized by individual freedom; the second or "red" rights by claims to equality and guarantees of a decent living standard; and the third or "green" rights by peoples' right to self-determination and, belatedly, the protection of the environment. A second approach led to the creation of treaties with a more limited scope. Certain categories of persons may need special protection. Such specialist conventions have addressed the position of refugees and stateless persons, migrant workers, children, and women. Specific instruments were also drafted to eliminate particular forms of human rights violations such as genocide, torture, and racial and gender discrimination. But what lies behind this apparently unstoppable proliferation of human rights?

To paraphrase Friedrich Nietzsche, if God, the source of natural law, is dead, he has been replaced by international law. The horrors of World War II and the Holocaust made it clear that democracy and national legal and constitutional traditions cannot always prevent large-scale violations of rights. As Hannah Arendt put it, it is quite conceivable that one fine day a highly organized and mechanized humanity will conclude quite democratically—namely by majority decision—that for humanity as a whole it would be better to liquidate certain parts thereof. The Germans voted Adolf Hitler into power, and later Slobodan Milosevic was repeatedly elected president of Yugoslavia. International human rights were therefore conceived as a type of higher law that should prevail over national policies. They are supposed to impose restrictions upon governments to prevent them from being beastly to their own citizens. An endless process of international and humanitarian lawmaking has been put into operation, aimed at protecting people from the putative assertions of their sovereignty.

Lawmaking in the huge business of human rights has been undertaken by government representatives, diplomats, policy advisors, international civil servants, and human rights experts. Indeed the proliferation of treaties and codes has made human rights a new type of state law. Codification, from Justinian to the Napoleonic Code, has been the ultimate exercise of legislative sovereignty, the supreme expression of state power. Governments were the enemy against whom human rights were conceived as a defense. Undoubtedly the atrocities of the twentieth century shook and shocked some governments and politicians as much as they did ordinary people. But the business of government is to govern, not to follow moral principles. Governmental actions in the international arena are dictated by national interest and political considerations, and morality enters the stage always late, when the principle invoked happens to condemn the actions of a political adversary. When human rights and national interest coincide, governments become their greatest champions. But this is the exception. In general, government-operated international human rights law is a good illustration of the poacher turned gamekeeper.

That human rights are superior to state law is seen as the result of their legal universalization. The law addresses all states and all persons as persons and declares their entitlements to be a part of the patrimony of humanity, which has replaced human nature as the rhetorical ground of rights. Every state and power comes under the mantle of the international law of human rights, every government becomes civilized as the "law of the princes" has finally become the "universal" law of human dignity. But this is an empirical universality, based on the competitive solidarity of sovereign governments and on the pragmatic concerns and calculations of international politics. A state that adopts the international treaties can claim to be a human rights state. Human rights become a tool for state legitimacy. Natural and human rights were conceived as a tool against the despotism of power and the arrogance of wealth. Their co-optation by governments means that they have lost some of their critical force and are often used to legitimize state practices.

Interestingly, national sovereignty and non-intervention in the domestic affairs of states were the foundation of the post–World War II international system. The contradictory principles of human rights and national sovereignty, schizophrenically both paramount in postwar international law, served two separate agendas of the great powers: the need to legitimize the new world order through its commitment to rights without exposing the victorious states to scrutiny and criticism about their own flagrant violations. While the major powers fought tooth and nail over the definitions and priorities of human rights, they unanimously agreed that these rights could not be used to pierce the shield of national sovereignty. This schizophrenia characterized human rights until the collapse of communism in 1989.

Problems in lawmaking are confounded by difficulties in interpretation and implementation. The international mechanisms are rudimentary and can scarcely improve, while national sovereignty remains the paramount principle in law. The main method is the drawing of periodic or ad hoc reports about human rights violations; the main weapon, adverse publicity and the doubtful force that shame carries in international relations. There are various types of reporting: monitoring, the most common, is carried out usually by volunteers and experts around the world under the auspices of the UN Human Rights Commission. "Special rapporteurs" appointed by the commission draw up reports about specific areas of concern, like torture, or about individual countries with poor human rights records. Under another model, states are invited to submit periodic reports about their compliance with certain treaty obligations to committees created for that purpose (the most famous being the Human Rights Committee under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights). Weak implementation mechanisms ensure that the shield of national sovereignty is not seriously pierced unless the interest of the great powers dictates otherwise, as events in the Balkans and Iraq since the late 1980s have shown. Finally, in a few instances international courts or commissions investigate complaints by victims of human rights abuses and conduct quasi-judicial proceedings against states. But the jurisprudence of human rights courts is extremely restricted and dubious, and its rapid changes in direction confirm some of the worst fears of legal realism: barristers appearing before international bodies such as the European Court of Human Rights quickly learn that it is better preparation to research the political affiliations of the government-appointed judges rather than to read the court's case law. It is well known that changes in the political orientation of the appointing governments are soon reflected in the personnel of international human rights courts and commissions.

The most effective international system of implementation has been that under the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). The convention protects the main civil and political rights, and no concession to the socialist tradition was made at its inception in 1950. But the convention introduced a radical innovation that has changed legal civilization. Traditional international law was the law of the "civilized princes," a states-based law with no place for individuals. But under the ECHR aggrieved Europeans (as well as residents in member states), after exhausting the remedies offered in their national legal systems, can submit an application to the European Court, based in Strasbourg, France, alleging that one of their rights has been violated by the actions of their state. The court conducts a full judicial investigation of the claim during which the citizen plaintiff is put on an equal footing with the defendant state. At the end of the process, the state is obliged to comply with any adverse findings of the court. Britain has changed its laws on telephone tapping, contempt of court, and the treatment of transsexuals; Germany gave non-German-speaking defendants the right to an interpreter; Austria abolished state monopoly on cable and satellite television; and Ireland decriminalized homosexuality. States can also bring applications alleging violations by their cosignatories against their citizens. When a number of governments brought an interstate application against the Greek dictatorship in 1968 they acted uniquely as their brothers' keepers. After it was found that every right in the convention had been violated by the military junta known as "the colonels," who were not prepared to end the emergency measures they had instituted, Greece had to withdraw from the organization on the eve of its expulsion. But that was the exception. Interstate cases are usually politically motivated. They have been brought by Ireland against the United Kingdom over British policies in Northern Ireland and by Cyprus against Turkey over the invasion and occupation of the island. This attitude represents the way that many governments approach human rights. They are happy to invoke them when their application happens to condemn an enemy.

But despite the various international agreements and mechanisms it must be emphasized that human rights are violated or protected at the local level. Human rights were created as a superior or additional protection from the state, its military and police, its political and public authorities, its judges, businesses, and media. These are still the culprits or—rarely—the angels. Irrespective of what international institutions say or how many treaties foreign secretaries sign, human rights are violated or upheld in the street, the workplace, and the local police station. The relative weakness of international law means that local legal and political initiatives and campaigns may be more effective. Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), such as the Red Cross, Amnesty International, and Oxfam have been the most important defenders of human rights and humanitarianism since the 1970s. They are able to mobilize international public opinion in the defense of rights more than governments because they cannot be accused of hypocrisy, double standards, and ulterior motives. Additionally NGOs rely on citizen initiatives and campaigns. This way they represent the radical potential of human rights and link to the spirit of popular organization and activism of the early modern natural rights tradition.

CATEGORIES OF RIGHTS

Human rights are the most striking institutional expression of the project of the Enlightenment, of the promise of emancipation through reason and law. The Americans rebelled against their colonial masters, the French against static and corrupt political and social power. That is why the early lists of human rights took a "negative" form and were predominantly defensive. They imposed restrictions upon state power, thus creating spheres of unregulated activity in which citizens can exercise their rights. The First Amendment of the U.S. Bill of Rights is a good example: "Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press." By outlawing censorship, this article creates the conditions within which the right of free speech can be exercised.

This first generation of rights includes the protection of life, property, the liberty and security of the person, right to fair trial, prohibition on torture and slavery, and basic political rights such as the right to democratic elections. They are the civil and political rights of citizens, the backbone of the liberal state. Emerging out of the great upheavals of the eighteenth century, they aim at protecting the liberty, dignity, and integrity of the person and promote the ability of citizens to participate in public life.

The democratic and socialist struggles and traditions of the nineteenth century led to the development of the second generation—economic, social, and cultural rights. These rights aim to promote the well-being of people by guaranteeing a minimum standard of material life. They address groups of people, communities and classes rather than isolated individuals, and assume that social solidarity is a central characteristic of societies. The rights to work and decent conditions of work, to education, health care, social security benefits, an adequate standard of life, and participation in cultural life are central to this list. Their enforcement does not rely on legal and judicial procedures. Economic rights cannot be delivered if the state keeps out of society. On the contrary, economic rights are positive in outlook and request state intervention in economy and society in order to create the conditions necessary for their implementation. If civil and political rights underlie the values of liberty and dignity, economic and social rights promote equality, nondiscrimination, and a sense of community that cares for its members.

The differences between the two types of rights developed into a central aspect of the ideological Cold War conducted in various meetings of the United Nations, in legal journals, and in the world media. The West claimed that the communist gulags and lunatic asylums were logical extensions of Marxism's totalitarianism. The Soviets responded that social and economic rights are superior because material survival and decent conditions of life are more important than the right to vote. "The right to a free press is of no interest to a starving and illiterate peasant in an African village," ran the argument.

For liberals, civil and political rights have priority. Their aim is to place limits around state activities, and this negative conception of freedom as the absence of state imposition is the heart of human autonomy and rights. According to liberal theory, economic rights are not proper legal rights. They are claimed by groups, not individuals, and they are "positive" in their action—in other words, they call for state intervention in economy and society, for heavy taxation and central planning, in order to deliver the necessary levels of employment presupposed by the right to work or the revenues necessary for welfare provision and free health care or education. Finally, economic and social rights are not justiciable: they cannot be guaranteed by legislation in a liberal state and, moreover, courts cannot enforce them. The appalling oppression of dissidents was seen as proof of the correctness of the Western arguments, and the assertion that the market is the superior, if not the only, mechanism of distribution was recited as a mantra in response to the communist claims about capitalist squalor and unemployment. These ideological conflicts made it impossible for the United Nations to draft a common international bill of rights. An indication of the liberal domination in the area is the fact that while the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights creates strong individual legal entitlements and state duties, that on Economic, Social, and Cultural rights requests only member states to take measures to implement these rights.

THEORIES OF RIGHTS

Human rights is a combined term. The human refers to certain standards of treatment to which people are entitled and that create a moral framework within which state policy, administration, and the law should operate. The reference to rights returns us to the discipline of law. Rights were the creation of early modern legal systems and constitute the basic building block of Western law. To have a legal right is (a) to have an entitlement, for example, a property right, which can (b) be realized through the respective action of one or many duty-bearers who must act or refrain from acting in certain ways (a property right creates a near-universal duty in people not to interfere with my property) and (c) can be legally enforced against duty-bearers who do not perform their obligations.

Human rights are a special category of right beset with a number of paradoxes. While they are legal rights, the main duty-bearer is the state. But it is state law that is called upon to enforce these rights, creating tensions within the legal system. Secondly, they combine morality and law, prescription and description, something that often leads to confusion and excessive rhetoric. In the expansive contemporary use of the term, human rights refer to moral or ideal rights that have no legal recognition. A South African during the apartheid regime or a political dissident in China could legitimately say that he or she has "the right not to be discriminated against." This is not a real, legally enforceable right, however, but rather the aim behind the struggle against the social and political system that does not recognize the right. A different form of confusion is evident in the use of the expression "I have a right to X" to mean "I desire X" or "X should be given to me." This linguistic inflation weakens the association of human rights claims with significant human goods and undermines their position as central principles of political and legal organization.

The confounding of the real with the ideal is characteristic of human rights discourse. Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that "all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights." But as Jeremy Bentham commented about a similar article of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, infants are not free, as they are dependent for survival on their caregivers, while the idea that people are born or enjoy equality around the world flies in the face of the huge disparities between rich and poor or the north and the south. The descriptive statements of the declarations should be read as prescriptive: people are not, but ought to be, free and equal. Indeed the great power of human rights lies in their rhetorical character, which is strengthened by their ambiguity and openendedness.

But the rhetorical force of human rights is part of their weakness. Over the long history of natural and human rights, their source has moved from purposeful nature, to reason, to God and the scriptures, to human nature, and, in their final mutation, to human rights and to international law. What argumentation or procedure can be used today to attract wide agreement about their principles? As moral standards, human rights derive from a group of anthropological hypotheses and moral assertions about liberty, equality, and the well-being of individuals and their relationship to wider society. Indeed it would be comforting to say that human rights are recognized and given to people on account of their participation in the human race and not through any restricted or regional membership, such as citizenship, nationality, class, or group. Yet it is quite clear that the only real rights are those given by states to their citizens. Aliens and refugees, those who have no state or government to protect them and who could have been expected to be the main beneficiaries of the rights of humanity, have very limited if any rights.

Indeed, the change from natural to human rights marked a loss of faith in the ability to justify rights on the basis of generally acceptable truths about human nature. While arguments from human nature are still canvassed, the "human" of human rights refers mainly to their scope (they are rights that should be given to all human beings) rather than to their justification. Commonly accepted facts about human nature keep changing with scientific knowledge, and whatever they may be, they are not sufficient to generate moral commitments. The method used for justifying rights in the early twenty-first century is constructive. Starting from the basic assumptions of liberal democracy about individual dignity, equality, and tolerance, the moral philosopher builds a coherent system of rights and expectations. This approach has been criticized as excessively abstract and unrealistic. An alternative detects certain common value commitments in the social mores or "deep structure" of a society, which are then raised into principles worthy of legal protection. A problem with that approach is that it raises and enforces legally the values a society has already accepted, and to that extent it neglects the forward-looking and critical function of human rights in relation to power and to received opinion. In any case, human rights standards are set today in international organizations by government representatives, diplomats, and civil servants, and the work of moral philosophers often takes the form of post facto rationalizations.

UNIVERSALISM AND CULTURAL RELATIVISM

The debate about the meaning and scope of human rights has been dominated since the 1990s by the argument between the so-called universalists and cultural relativists. The universalist claim is that cultural values and moral norms should pass a test of universal applicability and logical consistency. Human rights have a necessary universalist aspect, partly legal and partly moral. Morally, the justifications behind human rights norms or standards claim universal validity and create a duty of compliance in all situations and irrespective of the state of national law. Human rights must be the same everywhere at least as to their essence, if not their actual formulation. Legally, the large number of human rights treaties and conventions accepted by almost every state in the world has formed a kind of universal law of nations and peoples.

Universalists believe that reason and law give the right answer to moral dilemmas. As a result, judgments that derive their legitimacy from local conditions are morally suspect. But because all life is situated, an "unencumbered" self and judgment based on the protocols of reason goes against the grain of human experience. The counterintuitive nature of universalism can lead its proponents to extreme arrogance: only we, as the real moral agents or as the ethical alliance or as the representatives of the universal, can understand what morality demands. If there is one moral truth but many errors, it is incumbent upon its agents to impose it on others. In such a case, human rights universalists can turn into imperialists, who promote the "civilizing" mission by the force of arms.

Cultural relativists start from the opposite and commonsensical observation that values are contextbound, that they develop within particular histories and traditions. Relativism challenges the presumed universality of normative standards and values. There are many competing views about what is right or wrong, and no transcultural values exist to allow the comparison of competing views and provide the basis of universal legislation. Normality and morality are culture-bound; human rights express the cultural assumptions of Western societies. Their cultural and historical provenance makes human rights European creations and universal declarations of rights a chapter of European idealism. International human rights law has taken little interest in the values, histories, and traditions of non-Western nations and societies. The African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights (1981) includes an unprecedented part about the duties owed by individuals to African civilization, their states, communities, and families. This idea of a duty owed to one's community is largely unknown to the Western human rights tradition, for which the individual is the center of concern and rights are tools for his or her defense from the incursions of others.

But the relativists have to struggle with a metaethical contradiction. They must deny all absolute claims to truth except for that made for the principle of relativism. Furthermore, the relativist position has been often adopted by oppressive governments as a defense against criticisms of their highly inegalitarian and repressive activities. Indeed the cultural embedment of self and value is a sociological truism; the context, as history, tradition, and culture is malleable, is always under construction. History teaches nothing; it is historians and journalists, intellectuals and politicians, academics and ideologues who turn historical events into stories and myths and in so doing construct ways of seeing the present through the lens of the past. Often the relativist turns local norms and traditional values into absolute truths and imposes them on those who disagree with the oppressiveness of tradition.

In these extreme cases we can detect a certain similarity between universalists and relativists. The Kosovo war of 1998–1999 offers a good example. The Serbs massacred and ethnically cleansed the Albanians to protect the "threatened" community of the Serb nation. The Western allies, however, bombed the Serbs in the name of threatened humanity. Both principles, when they become absolute essences and define the meaning and value of humanity without remainder, can find everything that resists them expendable. Both positions exemplify, perhaps in different ways, the contemporary metaphysical urge: they have made an axiomatic decision as to what constitutes the essence of humanity and follow it with a stubborn disregard for opposing arguments and traditions. But humanity has no essence. The contribution of human rights lies precisely in the endless process of redefinition of humanity and its necessary but impossible attempt to escape external determination. Humanity has no foundation and no ends. Human rights, when not co-opted to the dubious cause of public and political power, are the definition of groundlessness.

See alsoConvention on Genocide; International Law; Nuremberg Laws; United Nations; Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Donnelly, Jack. Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice. 2nd ed. Ithaca, N.Y., 2003.

Douzinas, Costas. The End of Human Rights: Critical Legal Thought at the Turn of the Century. Oxford, U.K., 2000.

Gibney, Matthew, ed. Globalising Rights. Oxford, U.K., 2003.

Ishay, Micheline. The History of Human Rights: From Ancient Times to the Globalization Era. Berkeley, Calif., 2004.

Kennedy, David. The Dark Sides of Virtue: Reassessing International Humanitarianism. Princeton, N.J., 2003.

Owen, Nicholas, ed. Human Rights, Human Wrongs. Oxford, U.K., 2002.

Steiner, Henry J., and Philip Alston. International Human Rights in Context. 2nd ed. Oxford, U.K., 2000.

Costas Douzinas