The universality of human rights

The ongoing debate on human rights has seen quite a few comments framing the concept of human rights as a Western idea, and that it has to be modified for the Singapore context.

This, of course, is not a new phenomenon. But because it is a fallacy, it should be addressed everytime it pops up.

sgwatchDOG is not exactly a historian, and so has to rely on the relatively recent (about 60 years old) Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), and not some ancient civilisation that embraced human rights.

This UN document was not drafted solely by westerners. The photo above shows some of the people involved in the drafting committee. In any case, the draft still had to be approved by the countries in the UN. See here for more photos.

The list below show the people (and countries) involved with the drafting and discussion of the UDHR. Info from here.

John Peters Humphrey (from Canada) was then the Director of the UN Division on Human Rights, and was responsible for the research of past statements and wrote the initial draft.

Members of the full 18-member United Nations Human Rights Commission, 1946-1948*

Australia - Colonel William Roy Hodgson
Belgium - Fernand Dehousse
Byelorussia - Afanasi Stepanenko
Chile - Hernán Santa Cruz
China - Chang Peng-chun (usually referred to as P.C. Chang)
Egypt - Omar Loufti
France - René Cassin
India - Hansa Mehta
Iran - A.G. Pourevaly
Lebanon - Charles Malik
Panama - M. Amado
Philippines - General Carlos Romulo, Benigno Aquino
Ukraine - Michael Klekovkin
USSR - Valentin Tepliakov, Vladimir Koretsky, Alexander Bogomolov, Alexei P. Pavlov
UK - Charles Dukes (Lord Dukeston), Geoffrey Wilson
United States - Eleanor Roosevelt
Uruguay - J.J.C. Victorica
Yugoslavia - Vladislav Ribnikar

*Note: Representatives changed over this two-year period and delegates for each country are listed in the order in which they served. Also, other delegates sometimes sat in for the main delegate and made contributions to the drafting process.

So one can clearly see that the drafting and subsequent debate on the draft document was not limited to westerners only.

Different cultures got their say in how the document should look like. And after distilling to the basics, the UDHR was born.

What if we don't use history to explain that human rights is not just a western idea? No problem.

Let's take consumer rights for example. A consumer (no matter western or not) will feel that his or her consumer rights are violated if they get cheated into buying a defective product. But consumer rights are human rights.

There is often a misconception that human rights is something airy-fairy, something foreign. Tell that to the heartlander auntie who just got fleeced of her hard-earned money buying a useless product. Not so western a concept after all now right?

Even if you use the example of freedom of expression, you can show that human rights is not merely a western, or alien idea. Think of any issue which you are an affected party. E.g. An increase of concession card stamp charges affects you as a student that uses it. Wouldn't you want the right for your views to be heard? Isn't that also the concept of freedom of expression?