İNSAN HAKLARI

The idea of human rights, as a kind of universal
moral rights that belong equally to all human beings
only in virtue of being human, has been one of the
prominent ideas in the second half of the 20th Century.
Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) adopted
by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948 have
constituted a milestone in the history of human rights

Conceptual objections are mostly directed either
to the vagueness and abstractness of the concept
of human rights, and of human nature on which
the idea of human rights supposed to be to rest,
and of the claim of universality. Dembour tries to
summarize these in the following three propositions
which represents the main line of the conceptual
critiques, “(1) the concept of human rights is
wrongly presented as universal; (2) it pertains of
a logic which focuses on the individual to the
neglect of solidarity and other social values; (3) it
derives from a reasoning which is far too abstract”
(Dembour, 2006, 6).

According to Burke, rights discourse of his
century suffers from metaphysical idealism and
rationalism. The proponents of rights follow a
clumsy metaphysical theory; they are metaphysical
rationalists or “speculatists”, the worst insult
in Burke’s rich vocabulary of abuse. For Burke,
therefore, the standpoint of the absolute and
universal discourse seems to blind the politicians
to the realities of the particular and concrete and
turns them into metaphysicians and prophets
(Douzinas, 2000, 148-151).

The new objections to human rights are more
radical and harsh, but mostly directed to the
failure of human rights movement and the gap
between the idea of human rights and its practice
more than the idea itself. Though some critiques
originate from postmodern thinkers who consider
a transformation from grant narratives to small
narratives, from human rights to the rights of
children, to the rights of immigrants necessary
and unavoidable; the others esteeming the idea of
human rights in itself criticize the practice of human
rights which seems them far from securing human
rights to all members of the world community,
referring especially the huge gap between the idea
of human rights and its practice.
On the other hand, the concept of “the right to
have rights” introduced by H. Arendt triggered a
chain of challenges to human rights as we observe
in the accounts of scholars as Balibar, Agamben,
Douzinas, Dembour and Rancière. Samuel Moyn
decided to label human rights as The Last Utopia.
Even though all of those scholars are partly
sympathetic to the idea of human rights in principle
and believe still its potential in creating a more
human world, some argue that it has deviated its
initial revolutionary discourse; and today “human
rights have been turned from a discourse of
rebellion and dissent into that of state legitimacy”
(Douzinas, 2000, 7). M. Ignatieff identifies the
crisis that human rights face today as a spiritual
and cultural crisis related to both ‘intercultural
validity of human rights norms’ and ‘the ultimate
metaphysical grounding for these norms’ (Pedersen
and Murray, 2012, 6). Many believe that human
rights are in crisis in the beginning of 21th Century
and the idea of human rights either will face an
end or have to undergo some transformations to
survive.

Although
the theological content of the term was abandoned,
the ethical content was not. From time to time in
the course of the history one encounters the idea
that human rights are protections of our human
status and that the human status in question is our
rational or, more specifically, normative agency”

Cultural relativists claim
that every person lives in a specific culture and each
culture possesses its own values and principles of
conduct, therefore it would be nonsense to speak of
universal values or principles and of human nature
valid for all cultures.

According to humanism, humanity has two unique characteristics, it can
determine its own destiny and, secondly, it is fully conscious of itself transparent to itself through self-observation and reflection.

Kuçuradi asserts that human rights norms might be asserted as universal because of their epistemological and axiological specificity,

Critique of Deviation from its Utopian
and Revolutionary Core
Some social scientists and philosophers of our
era as Douzinas, Demboor, Gearty and Baxi are
skeptical to the human rights claiming its deviation
from its original utopian and revolutionary
nature.

Kennedy has expressed that has not been critical
to human rights, though he used criticism. He has
treated criticism as an instrument to return to
ideals or to perfect the assessment of consequences.
He argues for human rights not as a codification
of what we know justice to be, but as a lexicon for
criticizing the pretenses of justice as it is. He lines up
with a human rights training in critical reasoning,
with treaty instruments reminding us to ask again
what justice requires; with a humanitarianism
that invigorated our political life for heterodoxy
(Kennedy, 2004, 20).

According to Burke, rights discourse of his century suffers from metaphysical idealism and rationalism. The proponents of rights follow a clumsy metaphysical theory; they are metaphysical rationalists or “speculatists”, the worst insult in Burke’s rich vocabulary of abuse. For Burke, therefore, the standpoint of the absolute and universal discourse seems to blind the politicians to the realities of the particular and concrete and turns them into metaphysicians and prophets

Jeremy Bentham, regarded as a realist and utilitarian philosopher, put his reaction to the 1789 French Declaration with the phrase ‘From real law come real rights; but from imaginary laws . . . come imaginary rights.’ Bentham wrote an essay titled “Anarchical Fallacies,” in which he attacked the most popular manifesto of such rights in his day, the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen”. He claimed that any doctrine of natural rights is “simple nonsense, natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense,—nonsense upon stilts”

the concept of “the right to have rights” introduced by H. Arendt triggered a chain of challenges to human rights as we observe in the accounts of scholars as Balibar, Agamben, Douzinas, Dembour and Rancière. Samuel Moyn decided to label human rights as The Last Utopia. Even though all of those scholars are partly sympathetic to the idea of human rights in principle and believe still its potential in creating a more human world, some argue that it has deviated its initial revolutionary discourse; and today “human rights have been turned from a discourse of rebellion and dissent into that of state legitimacy” (Douzinas, 2000, 7). M. Ignatieff identifies the crisis that human rights face today as a spiritual and cultural crisis related to both ‘intercultural validity of human rights norms’ and ‘the ultimate metaphysical grounding for these norms’ (Pedersen and Murray, 2012, 6). Many believe that human rights are in crisis in the beginning of 21th Century and the idea of human rights either will face an end or have to undergo some transformations to survive.

M. Ignatieff identifies the crisis that human rights face today as a spiritual and cultural crisis related to both ‘intercultural validity of human rights norms’ and ‘the ultimate metaphysical grounding for these norms’ (Pedersen and Murray, 2012, 6). Many believe that human rights are in crisis in the beginning of 21th Century and the idea of human rights either will face an end or have to undergo some transformations to survive.

Conceptual objections are mostly directed either to the vagueness and abstractness of the concept of human rights, and of human nature on which the idea of human rights supposed to be to rest, and of the claim of universality. Dembour tries to summarize these in the following three propositions which represents the main line of the conceptual critiques, “(1) the concept of human rights is wrongly presented as universal; (2) it pertains of a logic which focuses on the individual to the neglect of solidarity and other social values; (3) it derives from a reasoning which is far too abstract” (Dembour, 2006, 6). These three objections of human rights, namely the critiques of universality, of abstractness and of neglecting solidarity and other social values consist of the main critiques of human rights that will be elaborated in this chapter.

Though the objections of Dembour and Kapur portrait the conjuncture well, but do not cover all the critiques of human rights. “A different but complementary argument is developed by Alasdair Macintyre in After Virtue, when discussing the idea of human rights. According to him, not only are there no human rights, the notion of a right itself is not found in every society. After pointing out that claims to the possession of rights presuppose the existence of a set of socially established rules, he goes on, ‘Such sets of rules only come into existence at particular historical periods and in particular social circumstances. They are in no way universal features of the human condition’” (Milne, 1993, 4). Consequently, he comes to the idea that “‘It would of course be a little odd that there should be such rights attaching to human beings simply qua human beings ... .’Referring to the same linguistic facts, he then comments, ‘From this of course it does not follow that there are no natural or human rights, it only follows that no one could have known that there were ... .’ He concludes that there are no such rights’, adding that ‘Every attempt to give good reasons for believing that there are such rights has failed.’ His verdict is that ‘Natural or human rights are fictions’, and that ‘belief in them is at one with belief in witches and unicorns’”

Some objections have based on the practical failures or the huge gap between theory and practice of human rights movement, and questioned the idea of human rights itself, and have become cynical about the future of it. Some others have criticized human rights movement becoming a tool of government diverging from its revolutionary core. Furthermore, Douzinas accuses governments of hijacking human rights to legalize their abusive practices.

“There is another objection to equating human rights with liberal democratic and modern socialwelfare rights. The particular values and institutions which these embody have their roots in the Western tradition of culture and civilisation. But the Western is only one of a number of such traditions. Others are the Islamic, the Hindu and the Buddhist, to name only three, each of which is based upon a great religion” (Milne, 1993, 3). Milne acknowledges this objection that casts doubt upon any idea of human right which presents it as a universal ideal standard, and he believes that such an ideal must be drawn from a particular tradition of culture and civilisation. And the people who do not belong to this culture will have no reason to accept it (Milne, 1993, 4). This objection is known as critique of cultural relativism. The cultural relativists deny the possibility of any universal value and ethical norm, and identify human rights as merely and inherently with western culture (Kao, 2011, 11). American Anthropological Association (AAS) made a statement against the Universal Declaration during the process of drafting, and warned the committee members about the possible negative consequences of a universal declaration

The theory of human rights has led to various objections questioning both the theoretical foundations of human rights and the success of human rights movements. A rationally defensible idea of human rights must be able to meet all these objections. Some criticisms were so harsh that they have begun to talk about the dark sides of human rights or the end of a human rights utopia. Some express their reaction with the titles of their books as “The Last Utopia”, “The End of Human Rights”, “Who believes in Human Rights?”, “Can Human Rights Survive?” and “The Endtimes of Human Rights”.

“There is a continuous, developing notion of human rights running through this history—call it the ‘historical notion’. That is the notion with which I want to start. Start, but most likely not finish. I am looking for the notion of human rights that fits into the best ethics that we can establish, and it is unlikely that the notion that history has yielded is already in perfect form for its place in ethics. One of the first things that one notices about the historical notion is that it suffers from no small indeterminateness of sense. When during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the theological content of the idea was abandoned, nothing was put in its place. The term was left with so few criteria for determining when it is used correct, and when incorrectly, that we often have only a tenuous, and sometimes a plainly inadequate, grasp on what is at issue. Its indeterminateness of sense is not something characteristic of ethical terms in general; it is a problem specifically, though perhaps not uniquely, with the term ‘human right’. We today need to remedy its indeterminateness; we need to complete the incomplete notion, and thereby most likely change it” (Griffin, 2008, 2).