Of the 30 Articles in the Declaration, the first two set out that ‘[a]ll human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights’ and are ‘endowed with reason and conscience’, and that ‘[e]veryone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms’ set out, ‘without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status’. |
Articles 3–5 set out the rights to life and liberty, and against slavery or servitude, torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. |
Articles 6–12 lay down legal rights, to be recognised ‘as a person before the law’ and equality before the law, against arbitrary arrest, to be presumed innocent until proven guilty, privacy and protection against attack. |
Articles 13–15 concern the right to freedom of movement within one's country and freedom to leave it, the right to seek asylum, and the right to a nationality. |
Articles 16 and 17 establish the right to marry and have a family, and to own property. |
Articles 18 and 19 enjoin the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion, and to freedom of opinion and expression. |
Articles 20 and 21 establish a right to peaceful assembly, and the right to take part in the government of his [sic] country, such that the ‘will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government’. |
Articles 22 and 23 prescribe a right to social security, the right to work, equal pay for equal work, and the right to join a trade union. |
Articles 24–27 dictate rights to rest and leisure, to a ‘standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family’ [sic], to education, and to participate freely in cultural life. |
Article 28 specifies a right to a social and international order in which these rights and freedoms can be fully realised, while Article 29 commands a duty on the part of the rights holder to the community in which the development of his [sic] personality is possible. |
[while] it was once the case that rights were almost always associated with domestic legal and political systems, in the last half century a complex network of international law and practice (the ‘international human rights regime’) has grown up around the idea that individuals possess rights simply by virtue of being human, of sharing in a common humanity. (Brown, 2001, p. 599)
[I]t is difficult to see why we should accord equal respect to other cultures except on the basis of the equal human dignity that is due to the individuals who are members of those cultures. And if we accord them equal dignity, is it not as those capable of self-determination and as having a legitimate claim to an equal voice in their own collective affairs? To be sure, we have long since progressed from the simplistic Enlightenment assumption that equality denoted sameness. Indeed, the capacity for self-determination is precisely a capacity to be different, both individually and collectively, and a claim to have these differences respected by others. But that capacity also sets limits to the cultural practices that can be endorsed by the principle of equal respect … Without a strong principle of equal respect for persons, there can be no reason except power considerations why we should not treat cultural difference as a basis for exclusion, discrimination or subordination; with it, we are bound to take a critical attitude to those cultural practices that infringe it, and not merely because we find them different and alien from our own. (Beetham, 1999, p. 15)
Communitarianism | Cosmopolitanism | |
---|---|---|
Principle of human interaction | Cultural identity | Reason |
Basis of interaction | Plurality of intersecting cultures with incommensurable values | Single humanity with everyone having equal moral worth because all human beings share capacity for reason |
View of international system | System dominated by sovereign nation states that co-operate and conflict with one another | Suprastate public sphere and an arena of governance in its own right |
Preferred form of international authority | Sovereign state and interstate institutions, no strong legal and political authority above the state | Community of states upholding universal human rights and international law |
Basis for addressing common problems | Common problems are best addressed through co-ordination between states | Common problems governed by principle of universal rights and the related principle of universal international justice |
Concept of rights | Only have meaning in terms of the social fabric of the particular societies and cultures that proclaim them, they do not have universal meaning | Rights can have universal meaning when they are based upon human reason |
Values versus rights | Values for a society as a whole prevail over rights talk because the latter individualises and fragments social bonds | Universal rights prevail over particular values because they express universal reason |
Concept of international justice | Justice can at most be international, that is express cooperation between states and justice between states | Universal justice valid for every individual, justice as expression of universal human reason for humanity as a whole |