Critical Analysis of Human Rights

1640 Words7 Pages
Critical analysis of the notion of human rights What are human rights? Well according to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) they are ‘inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world’i. So what is wrong with this? It is best first to understand the origins of human rights. Human rights formally entered international law in 1948 with the creation of the UDHR by the United Nation, formed by the victors of the Second World War in response to the wartime atrocities against humanity committed by the Nazis and militant Japan. This is a typical ‘winners win and losers lose’ story in which the winners write the ‘fundamental rights’ of ALL of humanity, but they seemed to have forgotten that the ethics and values of the vast number of cultures that made up the “human family” differed immensely. The cultural perspective of a Christian country such as the USA on human rights differed vastly to the cultural perspective of Muslim countries in the Middle East in areas such as the rights of women, the right to life and the freedom of religion. Effectively this means that the people who wrote the human rights listed in the thirty articles of the UDHR are subsequently rewriting the values of many societies and illegalising the traditions of many cultures. This fact seriously jeopardises the functionality of the notion of human rights and contradicts another UN document the International Covenant of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) which states in its first article “All peoples have the right of selfdetermination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development”ii. Human rights by definition extend to all of humanity and are therefore considered to be universal. However is this realistic or

More about Critical Analysis of Human Rights

Open Document