Kuklick, Bruce --- "Human Rights and Dag Hammarskjöld" [2012] ELECD 291; in Porsdam, Helle (ed), "Civil Religion, Human Rights and International Relations" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2012)

Book Title: Civil Religion, Human Rights and International Relations

Editor(s): Porsdam, Helle

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781781000519

Section: Chapter 8

Section Title: Human Rights and Dag Hammarskjöld

Author(s): Kuklick, Bruce

Number of pages: 15

Extract:

8. Human rights and Dag
Hammarskjöld
Bruce Kuklick


HUMAN RIGHTS AND CIVIL RELIGION IN THE
REAL WORLD

Students and, more particularly, defenders of human rights and the ideals
of the United Nations have faced a crucial challenge in the work of
commentators once thought of as allies. These scholarly commentators
came out of a tradition of urging tolerance and acceptance of the less
fortunate or less powerful. Human rights were once uncomplicatedly
thought of as friends of the weak. In academic circles in the present,
however, the friends of the weak have positioned themselves to launch a
powerful critique of the notion of human rights. Speaking of human rights,
it is argued, is merely a high-falutin' way of defending specifically western
norms to peoples who may have alternative and morally equal ways of
advancing certain values; human rights talk is merely the latest way west-
erners have of imposing their culture on to others.1 I think this critique
must compromise much discussion of any `universal' declaration of rights,
although in my own view we cannot rule out the possibility of absolute
moral standards. In this chapter, however, I am more concerned to show
how easy it is in performance, in the real world where issues of human
rights come to the fore, to allow other considerations ­ let me call them
political ­ to undermine the commitment to human rights. That is, we may
doubt an absolutist notion of such rights; more important, we may not in
any event ...