What Extent Are Human Rights Claims Culturally Specific Politics Essay

What Extent Are Human Rights Claims heathenishly Specific governmental relation EssayThe atrocities committed against individuals in events much(prenominal) as slain truth, the two existenceness Wars, the Holocaust, and the apartheid in South Africa caused the issue of charitable veraciouss to become a major concern for all nations across the globe, particularly for the western sandwich nations. The issue of homosexual rights, however, has its roots in natural law theories of the 17th and 18th centuries and was to a enceinteer extent firmly arrangeed contemporarily in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and an opposite(prenominal) covenants, conventions and declarations that were derived from it. At the core of this issue, is the controversy as to whether mankind rights argon ordinary or paganly relative. A nonher atomic number 18a of disputation is the efficiency of the multinational community in the face of ethnic practices that serve to discriminate against individuals, such as female genital mutilation, for example. The use of secondary data was use in carrying out this research to address the above-menti unmatchabled issues.In this try, I leave behind attempt to find out how loafer universal valet de chambre rights exist in a heathenishly diverse world. As the world(prenominal) community becomes increasingly integrated, how can cultural diversity and integrity argon respected? Is the African Union Security Culture effective? at that place is no universal consensus on the definition of homo rights because although benevolent rights treat to every(prenominal)one, divers(prenominal) finishings founder different concepts as to what human rights ar and what they rattling mean.Universal human rights do not impose one cultural standard, rather one legal standard of minimum cheerion undeniable for human hauteur. As a legal standard adopted by dint of the United Nations, universal human rights represent the hard-won cons ensus of the international community, not the cultural imperialism of any particular region or set of traditions.Jack Donnelly2defines human rights as a special class of rights, that is, the rights that one has simply because one is a human being. They are thus moral rights of the highest order. John Humphrey3states, when we direct of human rights we usually lease in mind certain rights which bring up to individual men and women because they are human beings and for no other causa. composition it may not be real that all human beings are born free and equal, they are born with certain rights. Some of these rights, nevertheless not all of them are called human rights. Human rights are those rights without which there can be no human dignity. They derive from the inherent dignity of the human person as mentioned in the preambles to the two United Nations Covenants on human rights. It follows that every one possesses these rights in full equality.Human rights are intended for everyone, in every refining and are the birthright of every person.Human rights also hold that every individual has certain rights cheer him or her against the debauch of power by governments.CULTURAL RIGHTSCulture4can be defined as a shared, learned, symbolic system of values, beliefs and attitudes that wreak and influence perception and behaviour. Culture5is the totality of knowledge, skills, traditions, and tradition, specific to a theme of people or a civilization. It is transmitted well-disposedly from propagation to generation and not by genetic inheritance, and largely determines individual behaviour. It encompasses a very broad aspect of social life techniques, manners, morals, lifestyle, systems of values, beliefs, religious observances, family organization, etc. every(prenominal) human being has the right to finishing, including the right to enjoy and develop cultural life and individuation. Cultural rights, however, are not un curb. The right to coating is limi ted at the point to which it infringes on another human right. No right can be used at the expense or devastation of another, in accordance with international law.Similarly, cultural rights do not explain torture, murder, genocide, discrimination on grounds of sex, race, language or religion, or impact of any of the other universal human rights and fundamental freedoms established in international law. Any attempts to justify such violations on the basis of kitchen-gardening have no validity under international law.A Cultural ContextThese are some of the issues, concerns and questions underlying the debate over universal human rights and cultural relativism.Cultural relativism is the assertion that human values, far from being universal, vary a great deal according to different cultural perspectives. Some would apply this relativism to the promotion, protection, interpretation and exertion of human rights which could be interpreted differently within different cultural, ethnic and religious traditions. In other words, according to this view, human rights are culturally relative rather than universal. taken to its extreme, this relativism would pose a dangerous threat to the effectiveness of international human rights laws that has been painstakingly set up with international standards, and consequently far-flung disregard, abuse and violation human rights would be given legitimacy.When a traditional culture does effectively provide protection, then human rights by definition would be compatible, posing no threat to the traditional culture. As such, the traditional culture can absorb and apply human rights, and the governing State should be in a better position not whole to ratify, entirely to effectively and fully implement, the international standards.Traditional culture is not a substitute for human rights it is a cultural context in which human rights must be established, integrated, promoted and protected. Human rights must be approached in a way t hat is meaningful and relevant in diverse cultural contexts. earlier than limit human rights to suit a given culture, why not draw on traditional cultural values to reinforce the application and relevance of universal human rights? There is an increased emergency to express the common, core values shared by all cultures the value of life, social order and protection from arbitrary rule. These basic values are corporal in human rights.Communitarians argued that rights and justice are culturally specific and cannot be applied across borders. For communitarians, human rights cannot be defined universally because they only have meaning in terms of the social fabric of a particular community and culture that proclaim them and does not apply in the real world. Human rights would be something different in Saudi Arabia compared to the UK. Cosmopolitans gain vigor rights to have universal meaning when they are ground upon human reason and that universal rights prevail over particular v alues because they express universal reason.6Make peace HappenIn the last decade, the security culture of the African Union (AU) has developed in some relatively composition ways. There are also new opportunities to advance the responsibility to protect (R2P) agenda adopted by the United Nations General Assembly orbit Summit in 2005. This agenda commits individual states and the international community to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. If successfully implemented in Africa, R2P would instal a tremendous contri bution to promoting stability and peace.The African Union (AU) has declared 2010 the African Year of Peace and Security with its campaigns slogan Make Peace Happen. crook this statement into reality rests in large part on the members of the AUs Peace and Security Council, the just about important African institution for the day-to-day charge of peace and security issues.inside the AU, support for the responsi bility-to-protect rationaleemerged from broader concerns with promoting human rights standards on the continent.If a government proves either unable or unwilling to protect its civilians from large scale loss of life then international society bears a collective responsibility to protect them and can override the reign of the state in question7.Security cultures are patterns of thought and channel concepts of the role, legitimacy and efficacy of particular approaches to protecting values.8.9Moreover, security cultures help establish the core assumptions, beliefs and values of decision-makers about how security challenges can and should be dealt with, by dint of the process of socialization.The African Unions Constitutive Act pledges respect for human rights and rejects the widespread impunity that has characterized armed conflict and political repression in umteen African countries. In grave circumstances such as occurred during the Rwandan genocide, the Constitutive Act autho rizes the African Union to intervene. Leading African states in the African Union have also adopted a New Partnership for Africas Development (NEPAD), a program to lift Africa out of poverty that explicitly recognizes the importance of democracy, human rights, and the rule of law for economic development. NEPAD has also developed its own principle of governance and system for peer review, but its pledges on human rights expect vague.The African Union will only succeed if it replaces the culture of impunity with the culture of accountability.10Indeed, the record of the AU was not much more impressive in the field of security-related activities. The organisation was mainly involved in setting norms and standards, but it was never effective in enforcing them. In the few cases of international wars (Somalia/Ethiopia 1977-78 and Eritrea/Ethiopia 1998-2000) the AU played virtually no role.The AU was also committed to the principle of non-alignment, but the fact that no member state ever linked any formal alliance with outside powers is probably mainly imputable to the fact that no alliance memberships were ever on offer, and the AU sure failed in preventing the actual involvement of the great powers in conflicts on the continent.Without besotted and interventionist versions of international distributive justice and measures associated with subsistence, economic and welfare rights, the AU will be powerless.The constructivists approach to analysing regional security dynamics as summarized by Hurrell, involves a number of central ideas first, that, in contrast to rationalist theories, we need to pay far more attention to the processes by which both interests and identities are created and evolve, to the ways in which self-images interact with changing material incentives, that both interests and identities are shaped by particular histories and cultures, by domestic factors, and by on-going processes of interaction with others.11In order to guarantee human secur ity at the personal, institutional, and structural-cultural levels, power relations and relations of power should be underscored within a socio-cultural context.In other words, emancipation or sustainable peace-building occurs when one understands the true nature of social-cultural categories such as class, gender, ethnic equality, etc. A great deal of peace-building deals with issues of security within a positivist-rational epistemology.Human security is wherefore a situation or a condition free of tarnish or threats to an individuals, or communitys well-being, including freedom from direct physical attacks and psychological integrity. To batten such security involves the rationality of human security located at the structural, institutional, and personal levels of society.It involves an attempt to understand human security or insecurity in terms of those who experience them. What motivates the dissatisfied to agitate and their beliefs as marginalized individuals should be ser iously taken into account, instead of merely imposing policies on them. Constructivism as an approach is a useful theoretical lens in collar the true nature of things such as collective violence, class, gender, and racial issues, among others. Within these units emancipation occurs when the accurate picture of the situation is understood. Constructivists operate on the ontological assumption that actors are shaped by the socio-cultural milieu in which they live.Constructivists filter out to go beyond the descriptive aspect of a situation to an understanding of the motives of a community in order to explain how they behave and what causes political outcomes. Constructivism is not only limited to the influence of norms and social understandings on different actors (individuals, groups, and states), it also investigates why the norms and inter-subjective beliefs often had different influences on different actors. umpteen constructivist studies have emphasized the ways in which ideas and norms become more coercive in their effect than conventional conceptions of strong state interests.In conclusion, this essay has considered many different arguments, cultures in the world are in many cases conflicting and the diversities in the world can make it difficult to have a universal consensus, especially when it comes to personal rights. While it is worth considering the western interpretation of human rights, the human rights school of thought should not have to make allowances for differences in morality. When it considers a right to be fundamental and important, this should mean it is universal. The business of Human rights is to improve the individuals life and the way it does this is not to make allowances for customs and traditions that should not be considered acceptable. For the time being it is a virtual impossibleness to make economic compatibility a reality, as the differing political systems do not allow for this. However this does not mean that human ri ghts in commonplace are not compatible with multiculturalism. We are all humans, with basic wants and needs. beingness granted these wants and needs does not take away anything from the differing cultures on the setback the Human rights protect our right to be different, through cultural identity and religion amongst other rights. The basic rights of humans should not be based on culture but on what improves peoples life in the most effective way. Diversity does not affect human needs, and therefore should not affect, at least at the most fundamental level, the universal doctrine of human rights.2194 Words