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Tag: Koen Donatz

Human rights: Why debating their universality is unhelpful

By Koen Donatz

 Human rights have become a hotly debated topic in both the academic and the political world, one of the main points of contention being whether they are universal or not. As Eva Brems has shown, feminists and cultural relativists are among the staunchest opponents of the claimed universality of human rights, criticizing its male bias and Western bias respectively. Thus, many debates discuss the universality of human rights at what Jack Donnelly calls the historical or anthropological level, examining its historical roots. However, most of such debates (and debates with different approaches, for that matter) ignore the fundamental question: How can we know for sure if any or all human rights are (not) universal? My answer is that we cannot. We may make claims, but the social, legal, moral and philosophical complexity involved in human rights demands that we always acknowledge the uncertainty of our own claims. In other words, the debate about the universality of human rights is irresolvable, which has significant international implications.

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