I know this is old stuff from 2014 but I think it deserves a discussion.
http://www.theguardian.com/news/2014...t-human-rights
Here's my take on it:...
The truth is that human rights law has failed to accomplish its objectives. There is little evidence that human rights treaties, on the whole, have improved the wellbeing of people. The reason is that human rights were never as universal as people hoped, and the belief that they could be forced upon countries as a matter of international law was shot through with misguided assumptions from the very beginning. The human rights movement shares something in common with the hubris of development economics, which in previous decades tried (and failed) to alleviate poverty by imposing top-down solutions on developing countries. But where development economists have reformed their approach, the human rights movement has yet to acknowledge its failures. It is time for a reckoning...
I think people refer to human rights constantly in an attempt to try to show off their morality as being superior to that of others who don't agree with the human rights. What they fail to realize is that the human rights aren't universally accepted by people, not in the west nor other parts of the world. Especially not in other parts of the world. It's a form of eurocentric imperialism where we try to make those countries meet impossible goals for them, because we think everyone shares our ideas of the west in regards to how a society should be built and then when they can't meet the goals, we criticize them, we might even impose sanctions on them due to them failing to the meet the goals. Many of them could never meet the goals in the first place, they were set up for failure from the very beginning because their societies are fundamentally different from ours, yet we try to act as if they should be behaving like we do.
The first mistake is assuming that people share our values and would see that they are the best, this is not the case.
The second mistake, we're expecting low-trust societies to act as high-trust societies, which makes for quite some problems in respecting human rights as people are behaving fundamentally different in a low-trust society compared to a high-trust society. In a high-trust society, people rely on the state for solving disputes. In a low-trust society people can very well take matters into their own hands because they don't trust the state for solving disputes, either due to incompetence or outright corruption.
The third mistake, we're expecting developping countries to be able to meet the goals of the human rights that are reliant on economical stuff, as if those countries have the same infrastructure as we do in the west, as if they have the same resources. They are far from us in developmental stage yet we expect them to behave and meet those goals as if they are at the same developmental stage as we are.
What's your take on human rights and how people use the term today?