WK 10.2 Human Rights and Asian Values - Hanane Ben Abdeslam

Since the human rights is seen as a normative benchmark for any government claiming legitimacy must surely rank as one of the most inspiring stories of all time. Given the dominance of human rights on the political stage today, it is easy to forget that the international human rights movement is primarily a product. While the outgrowth of the contingent circumstances and concerns of Western countries, the internal human rights movement has sought to escape its culture specific origins by basing its moral authority on universal claims. Asian governments started to champion their own Asian values. They also began to denounce what they considered to be self-righteous preaching by Western states that in many cases were responsible for a colonial legacy of rights abuses in the Asian countries over which they now sat in judgment, and in any event had human rights problems of their own back at home. Although, Asian leaders stopped short of denying outright the universality of human rights, their assertion that human rights must reflect the particular circumstances or particular countries at a particular time smacked of cultural relativism that threatened to erode the seeming consensus on human rights that had developed over the previous five decades. Whatever the ultimate aims of international politics are, power is always the immediate aim. The struggle for power is universal in time and space and is an undeniable fact of experience. 

What I find interesting is that almost all those values said to be Asian are similar to conservative Western values that have been said to arise from the distinct nature of Asian cultures have been, and are still being, debated in the West. Asian states conform to the values of Asian people. It is suggested that the debate about supposed Asian and Western values rests on false premises about the nature of values, and that a cosmopolitan approach, that recognizes both the genuine cultural diversity and the interdepended of peoples in the contemporary world, is more like to promote legitimate aims of economic, social and political development. 

Do you believe that human rights in South Korea are universal or culturally relative? 

Hanane Ben Abdeslam

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