Globalization and human rights

Globalization and human rights

By T. Mulya Lubis

JAKARTA (JP): Does culture matter? This question was raised by
Abdullahi An-Naim, a highly acclaimed scholar of human rights
from Sudan. The international community respected An-Naim's
clarity and consistency in advocating universal rights, despite
the fact that he comes from a traditionally conservative Islamic
community himself.

Why is it so important to raise such a question again and
again?

Because within the human rights community there has been a
reluctance to again engage in cultural debate questioning the
adherence to the notion of universality of human rights that in
its nature must be cross-cultural and inter-cultural.

Engaging in such a debate would be regarded as a serious
setback that might revive bitter tensions and conflicts between
those conflicting notions of human rights.

Moreover, such a debate might open an avenue for repressive
ideas together with a blanket cover up of violence and other
forms of human rights violations.

Continuing human rights violations in South Africa, Sudan,
Myanmar and other parts of the world serve as a fresh reminder to
those who oppose seeing human rights from a cultural perspective.

When the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was being
drafted immediately after World War II, a strong protest was
lodged by the American Anthropologist Association. It said that
universality of human rights was a nonsense. Rights must be
culturally bound, and no rights exist without cultural
affirmation.

Similar protests have been aired by various cultural
communities around the world. In Asia as we know, the emergence
of Asian values has been regarded as a rebirth of cultural
domination of the perception of human rights.

Asian values have contributed to the so-called "Asian miracle"
that facilitated several Asian countries to make economic leaps
from developing economies into (nearly) industrialized ones, such
as Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, Thailand, Malaysia and
Indonesia.

However, the collapse of the Asian miracle has destroyed the
mystique of Asian values whereby people started asking the
question: hasn't it been an empirical fact of life that history
of economic achievement was dictated by universal economic
indicators?

The economic development in Europe and America has been a
product of working achievement of similar economic indicators and
measurement. Why economic development in Asia has not been the
same as economic development in those two continents?

To contradict a cultural approach on one hand and universality
approach on the other hand might be a futile exercise, however
one must be able to clearly articulate a counter-cultural
argument to the hegemony of cultural fundamentalism or of Asian
values.

Therefore, it is not an overstatement that culture matters to
globalization, to economic and social rights, and to civil and
political rights because the very idea of rights is a cultural
construct.

An-Naim is right when he says that human rights is not a
culturally neutral concept. Human rights contents are also
culturally conditioned. The institutions for implementing rights
are culturally embedded. Both the force and appeal of rights and
the resistance to that appeal are culturally imprinted. The
problematic of culture's relevance is precisely that paradox:
that the notion of rights is a cultural construct while its
counter-forces are also culturally embedded.

Having said this, it does not mean that we should condone
human rights violations since such a kind of practice in a number
of cultural communities has cultural justification.

Violations of civil and political rights are indefensible.

Therefore, the question of Asian values, for instance, is not
whether there are Asian values or what their relevance is to
human rights in abstract but whose understanding of Asian values
is taken seriously.

This is the time, perhaps, for statesmen, scholars and
activists to reconsider their longtime position. Dictated by
perpetual tension and conflict in human rights, they keep on
contradicting cultural notion and universal notion of human
rights. After all, our world is becoming one where cultural
differences become less and less relevant.

As An-Naim says, our past mistake is to think of culture as
merely being bound to locality, either regional or national.
There is an emerging culture such as the global business culture,
technology cultures and security cultures which are crossing
borders.

The inevitable globalization of culture, whether we like it or
not, must include the globalization of human rights culture.
People, of course are rooted in their cultural communities, but
they are also sharing values and institutions and dynamics
globally.

The writer is a human rights activist and a corporate lawyer.