Perspectives on Human Rights: A reply to Professor Issa Shivji

Rather reluctantly I have to write to say that I disagree with almost everything that Issa Shivji has to say. The reluctance is because I share Professor Shivji’s starting point: how can human rights discourse be wrested from those who use it to defend the dominant structures of society and reformulated to advanced the struggles of the oppressed? However, I find the actual content of his argument incoherent. It also fails to engage in any practical sense with the work of African human rights activists.

The philosophical basis of human rights

Shivji’s argument here is nonsensical. He writes: “The modern human rights debate - or discourse - is constructed on the philosophical foundation of the human being as an individual, and not as a social being.” Yet human rights, whether in the “dominant” discourse or any other, are clearly about people in relation to society. If individuals existed outside society they would have no need of rights. Shivji simply caricatures conservative human rights thinking, which doesn’t make his argument any more persuasive.

This shades into a historical misrepresentation of the actual content of human rights standards. This has the effect, paradoxically, of belittling the very struggles that gave rise to many of these rights. For example, freedom of association and assembly, which are classic “first generation” rights, were not actually a cunning imperialist plot foisted on the world during the Cold War, but the product of popular struggles for suffrage and labour rights. The ILO Conventions were important early human rights standards whose underlying principles were reflected in the Universal Declaration.

The dominant human rights discourse is ahistorical

Agreed. But, on the evidence of his article, so is Shivji’s. His outline of the global balance of forces at the time the Universal Declaration was drafted is no doubt illuminating. But he entirely misses the longer historical context. Human rights are bourgeois democratic rights. We all live in a world of bourgeois nation states, in which these rights are our principal claims (as individuals and as groups) against the power of the state. This is the reason why the classical human rights doctrine that rights are inherent and universal is actually of very great importance, especially to the weakest in society.

For Shivji human rights become nothing more than what will advance the struggle at any particular moment. He cites approvingly the approach taken with the Algiers Declaration, which “does not pretend to set any standards nor freeze these standards as enforceable rights of individuals to stabilise the status quo, but rather it consciously sums up people's struggles so as to legitimise them.” If I wanted to hit below the belt, I could ask who on earth remembers the Algiers Declaration. The serious point, however, is that if rights do nothing more than “sum up people’s struggles” then they immediately become redundant as a means of legal defence against the established power.

Exposing inconsistency and hypocrisy

Shivji’s approach removes entirely the possibility of challenging the inconsistency and hypocrisy of the most powerful nations and institutions in their application of human rights standards. If human rights are nothing more than a banner for popular struggle, we can no doubt use them to denounce US warmongering and support for dictators (for example), but not with very much effect. The argument against planned US and British intervention against Iraq, compared with, say, inaction over Palestine, is so powerful precisely because it rests upon legal standards that the US and UK purport to endorse. Radical human rights activists such as Noam Chomsky have used this line of argument to very great effect for many years. So, in their more cautious way, have mainstream human rights organisations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Logically, Shivji’s approach denies him the possibility of condemning such hypocrisy and inconsistency in anything other than moral terms.

Everything cannot be reduced to human rights

Paradoxically, Shivji ends up doing something that I suspect he rather abhors: he reduces all struggles for the betterment of humanity to human rights. I have a narrower view of the utility of a rights-based approach. I think it is an essentially defensive mechanism to secure the interests of the people within capitalist society. As a socialist, I do not believe that capitalism is capable of satisfying all human needs (including many that are contained within the canon of human rights law). But I don’t expect everyone working for human rights to agree with that opinion. To castigate their view of human rights because they do not share my political outlook – essentially what Shivji is doing – would be sectarian and counter-productive.

Finally, I know that Professor Shivji regards me as being hopelessly imprisoned within the “dominant discourse” on human rights. This letter will no doubt confirm him in that view. But I think if he were actually to listen to the debates among human rights activists in Africa and elsewhere, rather than sparring with the opinions, real or imagined, of right-wing US law professors, he would perhaps have more to offer us.

Richard Carver, Oxford Media Research