The debate on human rights is caught between the limitations of both universalism and cultural relativism. Comment. (2024, 20 Marks)
Human rights rest on the claim that every person has entitlements by virtue of humanity alone. The idea draws on John Locke’s natural law and Immanuel Kant’s idea of dignity, and was codified in the UDHR (1948). Universalism holds that these rights bind every society; cultural relativism holds that rights take meaning and validity from particular cultures. Each fails on its own terms, which has pushed the debate towards mediating positions.
Limitations of Universalism
- Eurocentrism. The rights-holder of the classical catalogue is an unencumbered individual, and property and civil liberty came before subsistence. Universal values often carry one civilisation’s particular ones.
- Abstract individualism. Karl Marx (On the Jewish Question, 1843) dismissed the “rights of man” as entitlements of an isolated, egoistic individual cut off from community.
- Selective enforcement. Powerful states press rights on rivals and excuse allies. In February 2025 the United States withdrew from the UN Human Rights Council, and in November 2025 it did not appear for its own Universal Periodic Review.
- Intervention abuse. In Iraq (2003) the invading coalition invoked democracy and human rights, and in Libya (2011) a civilian-protection mandate became regime change. Both discredited rights talk in the Global South.
- The saviour narrative. Makau Mutua (“Savages, Victims, and Saviors”, 2001) argued that the corpus casts non-Western cultures as savages, their people as victims, and the West as saviour. That structure denies agency to those it claims to rescue.
Limitations of Cultural Relativism
- It sanctifies oppression. Caste exclusion, child marriage and restrictions on women’s mobility have all been defended as tradition. The defenders are usually its beneficiaries.
- It essentialises culture. It treats a living, argued-over tradition as a single fixed code and silences dissenters inside it.
- State manipulation. The ‘Asian values’ of Lee Kuan Yew and Mahathir Mohamad traded political freedom for order. China rejected the UN human rights office’s 2022 assessment of serious violations in Xinjiang as Western interference.
- Incoherence. It cannot condemn even genocide, yet demands universal tolerance.
Ways Out
- Relative universality. Jack Donnelly holds rights universal at the level of the concept, open to variation in conception, and most variable in implementation.
- Dialogical universalism. Bhikhu Parekh proposes a non-ethnocentric universalism: universal values that emerge from intercultural dialogue, with human dignity the likeliest common ground.
- Internal discourse. Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im argues for building legitimacy within each tradition, for example by reinterpretation from inside Islam, alongside cross-cultural dialogue.
- Capabilities. Amartya Sen grounds rights in the substantive freedoms people have reason to value: universal in aim, local in form.
- The Vienna settlement. The Vienna Declaration (1993, para 5) calls all rights universal, indivisible and interdependent and interrelated. Particularities must be borne in mind, but states must protect all rights whatever their systems.
The Indian Test
India lives this tension through Articles 25–26. In Shayara Bano v. Union of India (2017) the Supreme Court set aside instant triple talaq by a 3:2 majority. In Indian Young Lawyers Association v. State of Kerala (2018, Sabarimala) it opened the temple to women of all ages on the basis of constitutional morality. Justice Indu Malhotra’s dissent defended the community’s own reading of its essential religious practice. A nine-judge bench reserved judgment on that question in May 2026. The contest is internal to the Constitution, not India against the West.
Conclusion
The debate is caught only when it is posed as a binary. Neither a universalism blind to power nor a relativism blind to victims survives scrutiny. The defensible path is a thin universal core of dignity, reached through dialogue and interpreted locally, with the vulnerable member, not the ruling elder, as the final interpreter.