The Rights Revolution Read Online Free Page B

countries in the Islamic world, in Africa and Asia, human-rights movements are seen as an alien attempt to impose European standards on cultures and norms that have their own legitimacy.
    What entitles Westerners to enforce human rights on other cultures? Nothing does. If rights are about protecting human agency, then they require us to respect the way other human beings use their agency. The argument that people in other cultures would adopt human-rights standards if they only knew what we know — and that therefore we can intervene, whether or not they want us to — is simply wrong. The idea that some people are unable to discern their own real interests is an invariablealibi of paternalism or tyranny. Victims are victims only if they say they are. The corollary is also true: we’re mandated to intervene on their behalf only if other peoples and cultures ask for help.
    Rights language mandates respect, and respect mandates consent. If in Pakistan — or Canada, for that matter — women consent to remain within Islamic law, that is their business. If, on the other hand, they seek an education or want to marry someone of their own choosing, and they ask for our help against religious or secular authorities, then we can step in to aid them as best we can. But help means help; it doesn’t mean conversion or assimilation. We’ve got no business inflicting our way of life upon them. Rights talk and Western culture are quite separable. Other cultures want to have rights protection without choosing Western dress, food, or technology. To the degree that Westerners are drawn into assisting other cultures, they are under an obligation, one intrinsic to rights language itself, to respect the autonomy of the cultures in which they work.
    This problem of reconciling human-rights standards with local values doesn’t occur only in non-Western societies. It also occurs close to home. In Western societies, law is supposed to be the expression of popular sovereignty. Hence in our societies, as in non-Western ones, a real question arises: Should human-rights codes, drafted as they are by a bunch of international lawyers who are elected by nobody, have precedence over national laws passed by representatives of the people?
    One of the places where they ask this question is theUnited States. The U.S. Congress has repeatedly refused to ratify international human-rights documents, from the genocide convention to the Geneva Convention’s additional protocols and the Convention on the Rights of the Child. 16 Congress construes these documents as either inconsistent with American law or an intrusion on the sovereignty of Congress and the American people. Behind this attitude lies what might be called rights narcissism, the idea that the land of the free and home of the brave has nothing to learn from anybody else. 17 So America has a paradoxical relationship to human rights: its own constitution embodies a noble rights tradition, and American leaders such as Eleanor Roosevelt have helped write international human-rights texts, 18 but Congress and large sectors of the American people believe that nobody outside their country has any business criticizing the conditions of their prisons or the possibly biased, unjust, and unfair way that capital punishment is carried out in certain states, especially Texas.
    Human rights, therefore, are in conflict with popular sovereignty as an expression of national culture. 19 But this conflict is a necessary one. Democracies are not always right. When majority decisions are unjust, dissenting minorities must have the capacity to appeal to a higher law. Human-rights legislation provides just such a language of appeal. In the United States, those who oppose capital punishment do so in the name of both the U.S. constitution and international human rights. There is no way to eliminate the tension between human-rights principles and democracy. Indeed, thetension is essential to the preservation of liberty.
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