Beyond Parapraxes: Right and Wrong Approaches to the Universality of Human Rights Law

Abstract

Human rights law draws its legitimacy from the distinctiveness of the cultures that comprise the world community. Yet its intrinsic respect for cross-cultural difference does not condemn it to an intractable relativism. Even if significant cross-cultural disagreement about the meaning of specific rights is likely to persist, such disagreement takes place within a legal and normative framework that already presupposes a fundamental universality of human rights. Many relativist critiques contain nothing specific about human rights. Rather, they amount to little more than indictments of law, indeed of all normative thinking, as such. Others arise from conceptual misunderstandings and imprecise use of terms. Although the universality of human rights will remain controversial for the foreseeable future, its normative basis is more secure than its relativist critics would suggest.