Perspectives from Philosophers,
Historians, and Lawyers of various
traditions
 Universal/
relativist debate
 Individual versus collective emphasis
 The critique of the nation-state as the
framework within which human rights are
implemented.
 The critique of the language of law in
defining the “human”; the rejection of the
juridical framework of human rights.

Universality of human rights is the “product of a
process,” not a given (cultures must negotiate this
process within themselves and not as a response to
external pressures)

Human rights cannot be imagined as an abstract ideal
“without reference to the concrete daily experience
of the people who are supposed to implement them.”
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“The more we appreciate our shared, universal,
human vulnerability, in all its different and varied
forms and manifestations, the more we can respond
to the challenge of terrorism and all other forms of
political violence whoever the perpetrator happens
to be, as well as to poverty, disease and other evils in
general.”
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“rights in the sense of subjective entitlements are
conceptually incompatible with classical Buddhist
ethics, and their introduction would require a
fundamental conceptual transformation . . . .
Buddhism conceptualizes “duties and obligations as
the role responsibilities of persons in a cooperative
scheme” and not “as constraints on individuals”
(Craig Ihara)
Asian voices express “concern that a liberal
individualistic ethos in conjunction with a legalistic,
aggressive, and consumerist attitude does not meet
traditional values of Asian societies, i.e. social
harmony, respect for family and authorities and, in
particular, emphasis on duty and responsibility rather
than on rights that can be claimed” (Perry SchmidtLeukel)
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THE SOVEREIGNTY OF THE NATION-STATE
States have the right to include and expel and to
define membership.
“We became aware of the existence of a right to
have rights…and a right to belong to some kind of
organized community, only when millions of people
emerged who had lost and could not regain these
rights…”
“The Rights of Man [are] defined as ‘inalienable’
because they were supposed to be independent of all
governments; but it turned out that the moment
human beings lacked their own government and had
to fall back upon their minimum rights, no authority
was left to protect them and no institution was
willing to guarantee them.”[
The refugee should be considered for what it is,
namely, nothing less than a limit-concept that at
once brings a radical crisis to the principles of
the nation-state and clears the way for a
renewal of categories that can no longer be
delayed.
 That there is no autonomous space in the
political order of the nation-state for something
like the pure human in itself is evident at the
very least from the fact that, even in the best of
cases, the status of refugee has always been
considered a temporary condition that ought to
lead either to naturalization or to repatriation. A
stable statute for the human in itself is
inconceivable in the law of the nation-state

we could conceive of Europe not as an
impossible ‘Europe of the nations’, . . . but
rather as an aterritorial or extraterritorial space
in which all the (citizen and noncitizen)
residents of the European states would be in a
position of exodus or refuge; the status of
European would then mean the being-in-exodus
of the citizen.
 Only in a world in which the spaces of states
have been . . . perforated and topologically
deformed and in which the citizen has been able
to recognize the refugee that he or she is – only
in such a world is the political survival of
humankind today thinkable.
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 “beneath
[the] depoliticized, let's-justprotect-human-rights rhetoric, there is an
extremely violent gesture of reducing the
other to the helpless victim.”
 “the paradox of victimization: The other to
be protected is good insofar as it remains a
victim”
Criticizes the legalistic framework of human
rights and the juridical concept of humanity.
 The problem with linking humanity with “the
logic of legal status” is that one’s humanity
becomes fragile.
 A juridical concept of humanity rests on the
assumption that “humanity can be taken away.”
<South Africa during apartheid; Guantanomo Bay
detainees>
 “What is needed is the forging of concrete
alliances with human beings who await not our
[legal] recognition but our participation in their
struggles.” <Fugitive Slave Act>
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