...Extent Are Human Rights Universal? Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that ‘all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood’ (The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948). This idea that human rights should be applicable and accessible to all, that they are, in all senses of the word, 'universal', is a topic of debate for many critics in all parts of the world (Tharoor, 1999: 5). The very concept of anything being universal is in itself controversial; can anything in our multicultural, multipolar world ever be ‘truly universal’? This essay aims to evaluate the extent to which human rights are universal, focusing on the imposition of Western norms on Non-Western countries, the cultural relativist view of universal human rights and the defence for human rights as a universal idea. The first hurdle that the idea of universal human rights faces is who defines human rights? Critics such as Michael Ignatieff argue that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a Western document, and that individuals from Non-Western countries are not given the same rights as those in the West (O’Connor, 2014). This is noticeable in the emphasis on individual rights as opposed to communal rights, which are commonly practiced in Non-Western countries. In addition, many of the rights stated are only accessible to the West, such as the right to paid...
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...Reflection on Human Rights Yasmin Castañeda Dr. Loskot PHIL 201 October 29th, 2012 Reflective Essay on Universal Declaration of Human Rights Every single human being on this planet has rights. These rights are given to us through birth, and the day I was asked, what my human rights were, I found myself speechless. I did not know how to answer the question, which at the time sounded so easy. I forgot about the question that had me so puzzled, and just brushed it off, ironically six month later I get an assignment on the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. After reading this historic document, I realized how important human rights are. I believe most people take human rights for granted, we know they exist, but we don’t even know what they are and what they entail. This made me think a lot about the rights we all have, and how companies, schools and communities around the world incorporate most, if not all these rights into their policies. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1948. This declaration is analyzed as a system of elaborated and coordinated rules and guidelines of the world community. It is actually a code of mutually acceptable, civilized behavior of different countries, nationalities, corporative formations and also given citizens. This document has a universal meaning as it reflects the consolidated will of more than two hundred states of the planet. The XX century has brought...
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...Yasmin Castañeda Dr. Loskot PHIL 201 October 29th, 2012 Reflective Essay on Universal Declaration of Human Rights Every single human being on this planet has rights. These rights are given to us through birth, and the day I was asked, what my human rights were, I found myself speechless. I did not know how to answer the question, which at the time sounded so easy. I forgot about the question that had me so puzzled, and just brushed it off, ironically six month later I get an assignment on the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. After reading this historic document, I realized how important human rights are. I believe most people take human rights for granted, we know they exist, but we don’t even know what they are and what they entail. This made me think a lot about the rights we all have, and how companies, schools and communities around the world incorporate most, if not all these rights into their policies. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1948. This declaration is analyzed as a system of elaborated and coordinated rules and guidelines of the world community. It is actually a code of mutually acceptable, civilized behavior of different countries, nationalities, corporative formations and also given citizens. This document has a universal meaning as it reflects the consolidated will of more than two hundred states of the planet. The XX century has brought a lot of new changes into...
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...Omar Gholston 4/22/2012 POS 111 Unit 4, Question 3 Visit the websites below and then write an essay explaining the distinction between civil rights and human rights. Should the United States be bound by international law concerning human rights? The Merriam-Webster dictionary describes Civil Rights as the nonpolitical rights of a citizen especially the rights of personal liberty guaranteed to the United States citizens by the 13th and 14th amendments to the constitution and by acts of Congress. Our country has been dealing with the issue of civil rights since its existence. The first Civil Rights Act was passed in 1875 which allowed equal rights for African Americans but it was struck down in 1883 because the Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution can’t tell private businesses or any individual who to discriminate against. So the struggle for civil rights had to be fought harder. The promises that were made to protect civil rights in the Thirteenth Amendment were first kept then broken. Many states found their way around the flimsy wording of the Fourteenth Amendment. The case of Strauder v. West Virginia, the Supreme Court overturned a law keeping African Americans from jury duty but they refused to extend the amendment so that it contained a more narrow interpretation. One of the biggest segregation problems of our time led to a new era for civil rights which was the integration of the public school system. The NAACP, which is the National Association for the...
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...The death penalty has been seen as a human rights issue as some regard it as 'cruel and degrading' treatment of individuals. This essay will concentrate on three out of the nine safeguards that are in place to protect those facing the death sentence. It will be argued that, in relation to the U.S.A, these safeguards are ineffective in practice. In some instances, U.S domestic law rather than the safeguards offer more protection, and in other instances, the Supreme Court plays a crucial role. Human rights are viewed by many as rights that are held by everyone simply by virtue of being a human being. Their foundation stems from the view that all individuals are equal, and that there are certain rights that everyone should have. In any discussion on human rights, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is of great importance. Its signing in 1948 by the United Nations (UN) marked the 'true start of the international protection of human rights.' The Declaration was a response to the atrocities committed during the Second World War. The Declaration set out fundamental rights; these included the right to life and freedom from torture. These two rights are of vital importance in relation to the death penalty. The problem though, is that the UN Declaration was not binding in law, it had to be ratified by a country for it to be binding. However, that country may exclude from ratification any Articles or Protocols with which it does not agree. Amnesty International (A.I.) is strongly...
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...the UN General Assembly Declaration of Human Rights, made on the 10th December 1948, stood the test of time? A short essay focusing on freedom of religion. Introduction “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.” (Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 18, http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/index.shtml, accessed 14th March 2014) This essay will show that the rights protected in Article 18 - as with many other Articles of the UDHR (Universal Declaration of Human Rights) are protected to varying degrees – to not at all, depending on where you live, the level of democracy in your society, culture and lastly; external factors that dominate ordinary democratic processes and because of the forces applied by the geopolitical and economic forces of the day. The essay will show this by illustrating often controversial and disputed examples of violation on religious freedom in France, Saudi Arabia and Burma (Maynamar) and testing the principles of UDHR on those cases whilst also considering the socio-economic and political drivers. Simply defining human rights and its elements can be complex. This is shown in the minor disagreement between the drafters of the UDHR as described later below. This essay will also use the European...
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...Essay The Go-Between “So they opened the big gates and rounded us all up with dogs and threw us all out. We were in Europe. They where meant to process us, even if we didn’t have the papers.” (Page 2, line 20-21) Ali Smith is in her short story “The Go-Between” from 2009, celebrating the 60th anniversary of the United Nations (UN´s) adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to ensure human rights. Ali Smith tries throughout her short story to problematize the treatment of the refugees and tries to reference to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to make people aware of the injustice from the past and maybe present. She shows extended focus on Article 13 from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights throughout her short story, Article 13 is the right to freedom of movement. The focus is noticeable in this quote where she describes the inhumane treatment of the border-crossing people. In the short story we follow a 33-year-old man. The man originates from Cameron, but in the story he lives in Ceuta in northern Morocco from where he helps people cross the border to Spain. The man describes throughout the story some of his experiences from helping people cross the border, he describes how his ear got caught in the fence and how he lost one of his fingers in the sea. He also describes the cruelty he has experienced including seeing the police burn the peoples blankets, taking their phones and take all of their food. The protagonist has a strange relationship...
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...protection of human rights? 2 2. Homogenization of social and cultural identities? 5 C. CONCLUSION 6 BIBLIOGRAPHY 7 A. INTRODUCTION Over the last decades, the rapid acceleration of a process so called “globalization” has shifted our society to an era where interconnectedness, integration and interactions centered in the development of a new world, where everyone and everything are linked together one way or another. In a few recent decades, with the development in communication and technology that the world has witnessed the rapid increase in international trade, investment, immigration and the culture assimilation at an unprecedented quantity and quality never recorded before in human history. As such, globalization can be interpreted in some main characteristics: disembedding, acceleration, interconnectedness, movement, mixing, and vulnerability and re embedding. Characterized by these features, effects of globalization on different aspects are various but one cannot deny its long-term impacts on the enjoyment of human rights as well as social and cultural identities. On the one hand, people argue that this globalizing trend means homogenization of culture and social identities which diminishes the attainment of human rights, while the others believed that the concept itself not only enhance and liberate the full enjoyment of such basic rights of each individual but also mix and produce diversity of identities. Therefore, the following arguments of the essay will be...
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...Are human rights truly universal? This essay will address the question of human rights, whether they are truly universal or not. First I will explore the contemporary definition of human rights by outlining the key points in the historical evolution of the concept. Then I will engage with those perspectives which suggest that human rights are not universal, because of cultural or other differences between societies. After that, I will consider the possible ways that human rights can achieve its universality without the contradiction of any culture. Human Rights have quite a long history. They have already been mentioned in ancient Greek Philosophy. Later on, “Rights of Man” has been mentioned in both the American Declaration of Independence, as well as in the Rights of Man and the Citizens at the time of the French Revolution (Summa, 2011). After the second world war, the need for an organization to maintain international peace and to prevent the world from a new world war has been emerged. As a result of that, on the 26th of October 1945, 51 country has established the United Nations. To protect and guarantee the rights of every individual in the world, the United Nations General Assembly has approved a bill, which contains the human rights of individuals. This document is called the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which includes rights such as equality before the law, protection against arbitrary arrest, freedoms of speech, religion, assembly and political participation...
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...fellow human beings. – Desmond Tutu (Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights Follow-up Committee. April, 1998) It all began with the steam engine. The industrial revolution, which kicked off in late 18th Century set off a series of rapid improvements in technology, which provided us with mass transit and mass communications. Many places that were once exotic realms barely set upon, became multi million dollar wellness centres for exhausted western tourists, complete with western television, McDonalds outlets and internet cafes. Professor Austin’s quote rightly alludes to the fact that the developments of modern technology over the past century have been a major factor in permanently concentrating the world closer together, a place where cultures bleed into one another. And it is having a dramatic effect on the number of languages. If means are not devised to stop it, half of the worlds 7000 odd languages that are spoken today will disappear within the next couple of generations. (SBS, 2013). This will also correspond to the loss of half of the world’s cultural wealth and ancestral knowledge. I will discuss the reasons why language diversity is important, and the challenges that are presented to it by contemporary society. Language is the most important tool we as humans have at our disposal. It is the means by which we learn, and the means by which we teach. It provides us with the only vehicle to express our feelings, articulate our ideas and collaborate. Human language...
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...affairs, the concepts of Human Security and Human Rights gained relevance in the international security and international norms field. And because those terms are still contested among both the academics and the States’ decision-makers, there is a need for us to understand what they really mean. The purpose of the present essay is to bring forward the differences between Human Security and Human Rights, regarding the fact that they are very similar and complementary, and also to understand the implications that the emphasis in the concept of Human Security have for the States foreign policy and for the international order and justice. The essay is composed by an introduction, a main body where we develop the answers for the research questions, a conclusion and finally the references. 2. The Prominence of the Concept Human Rights in International Relations 3.1. Human Security different from Human Rights? Despite the fact that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was adopted in 1948, due the debate raised because of the Holocaust, the WWII and many others factors, it is known that Human Rights gained more emphasis in the post-Cold War period, when the emergence of new wars (no longer conflicts between nation-states, but intra-state conflicts opposing individuals or communities inside the State mainly characterized by ethnic causes or political identity issues) started to threat the fundamental rights of the individual, such as the right to live. And the...
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...Human rights are moral principles that set out certain standards of human behaviour, and are regularly protected as legal rights in national and international law. They are "commonly understood as inalienable fundamental rights to which a person is inherently entitled simply because she or he is a human being." Human rights are thus conceived as universal (applicable everywhere) and egalitarian (the same for everyone). The doctrine of human rights has been highly influential within international law, global and regional institutions. Policies of states and in the activities of non-governmental organizations and have become a cornerstone of public policy around the world. The idea of human rights suggests, "if the public discourse of peacetime global society can be said to have a common moral language, it is that of human rights." The strong claims made by the doctrine of human rights continue to provoke considerable skepticism and debates about the content, nature and justifications of human rights to this day. Indeed, the question of what is meant by a "right" is itself controversial and the subject of continued philosophical debate.However, the aim of this essay is to explore the meaning of human rights and comment on human rights violation in Zambia since 1964. To begin with, it is worth mentioning that in order to gauge the future of human rights, it is vital to look at both the past and the present. In comparison to the early days of the 21st century, individuals are far...
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...THE UNIVERSITY OF Manchester “Human Rights in World Politics” POLI 70492 Essay title: East meets West: Human Rights in Perspective. Lecturer: Dr James Pattison Essay Question: “Should Universal Human Rights Be Enforced regardless of Cultural differences?” ID Number: 8262033 Introduction: Even though human rights are of the major issues in our current day world, it has not been the case over the course of human history. Despite some early calls by the Greeks especially Aristotle for citizenship rights and participation in the political life, slavery was regarded as a normal feature back then and it was not until the 18th century that serious attempts to protect human rights and dignity took place: The two major events promoting these rights were without doubt the United States of America’s declaration of independence in 1776 and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in 1789 both of which endorsed some basic rights and freedom which were a huge step forward at the time. As an example, the French declaration clearly enclosed the following article “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”. Following these two events, many Western writers and philosophers such as John Stuart Mill, Thomas Paine, and G.W.F. Hegel defended human civil rights and liberties in their writings...
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...Uganda This essay urges that the state is a relatively stronger player in delivering public policy in contemporary governance. This essay will discuss this with reference to the implementation of the Special Needs Education and Inclusive Education (SNE/IE) program in Uganda. The Special Needs Education (SNE) program in Uganda was introduced in the 1950’s by the Colonial Government for provision of ‘special education’ services to children who had visual, hearing, learning and motor impairments (CSBAG, 2013, p.15 see Civil Society Budget Advocacy Group). The author indicates that, with the introduction of the Universal Primary Education (UPE) Policy in 1997, Inclusive Education (IE) as a key component of the policy was emphasized with a major goal of increasing access, equity and quality of educational services for persons with special learning needs (pp.15-16). Special Needs Education and Inclusive Education (SNE/IE) is drawn from the ultimate right of every child to education which is declared in various international instruments to which Uganda is a signatory. These instruments include; the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), the Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), the Salamanca Statements and Framework for Action on Special Needs Education (1994), United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2006) and the African (Bunjul) Charter on Human Rights and People’ Rights (1986) (p.23). This commitment to the declarations of promotion...
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...Position paper From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia A position paper is an essay that presents an opinion about an issue, typically that of the author or another specified entity; such as a political party. Position papers are published in academia, in politics, in law and other domains. Position papers range from the simplest format of a letter to the editor through to the most complex in the form of an academic position paper. Position papers are also used by large organizations to make public the official beliefs and recommendations of the group. In academia Position papers in academia enable discussion on emerging topics without the experimentation and original research normally present in an academic paper. Commonly, such a document will substantiate the opinions or positions put forward with evidence from an extensive objective discussion of the topic. In politics Position papers are most useful in contexts where detailed comprehension of another entity's views is important; as such, they are commonly used by political campaigns, government organizations, in the diplomatic world, and in efforts to change values (e.g. through public service announcements) and organisational branding. They are also an important part of the Model United Nations process. In government, a position paper lies somewhere between a white paper and a green paper in that they affirm definite opinions and propose solutions but may not go so far as detailing specific plans for implementation...
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