Ayesha Mahmood Malik, UK,
Editor – Law & Human Rights Section
Human Rights – Has Might Always Been Right?
Thucydides, the ancient Greek historiographer writing in his treatise, The History of the Peloponnesian War, famously declares:
‘The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.’
It is considered one of the earliest formulations of political realist theory, long before Machiavelli arrived on the scene and epitomises the now well-known proverbial saying, ‘might is right.’
The history of empires and revolutions across antiquity are a testament to this: empires were built on the pretext of military supremacy, with the powerful acting in accordance with their self-interest and capability and imposing their preferred outcome, while the weak appealed towards the ideals of justice and universal norms. The expansion of the Roman Empire, European colonialism, the Napoleonic Expansion, the Spanish conquest of the Americas – were all rooted in territorial conquest driven by powerful states, given moral legitimacy retroactively in the language of divine mission, progress or civilising duty.
Human Rights as a Microcosm of Political Realism
This philosophical context is often considered divorced from the ‘moral high ground’ of human rights advocacy. What political realist theory suggests is that morality is merely a mask for power, driven and dictated by positional strength, not justice. However, when rights theory is held up to scrutiny, it appears as a microcosm of political realism: the rights of the powerful dominating the rights of the weak.
It was the same pretext that led Europe into the Second World War, with Hitler framing life as a struggle for survival, effectively arguing that strong states must dominate and the weak must perish. However, the scale of atrocities borne out of this Great War, the world thought its moral compass had been reset: a movement was set in motion to draft a universally accepted code of norms that would remain inalienable and uphold the dignity and rights of all human beings. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was the result, adopted by the United Nations on 10 December 1948, becoming the first modern document to declare a universal set of fundamental freedoms.
World Human Rights Day – Is it Truly Universal?
Today, 10th December is marked globally as Human Rights Day. It commemorates the significance of a document that issued forth from a supposed shift away from giving moral legitimacy to political hubris, to recognising the ideals of human dignity and justice. However, its language framing a ‘universal’ set of norms has not escaped scrutiny, in so far as the idea of a universal human rights has come to be associated with political freedoms that are archetypical of powerful western nations. Its critics have questioned the ‘universality’ of such rights and argue that by making such political freedoms the centrepiece of the UDHR, it effectively excludes the global south, failing to recognise the vastly different social and economic realities that play out between the developed and developing worlds, and the wide variety of cultural norms and practices in communities around the globe that may or may not always be compatible with a singular, ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to human rights.
The Rights Theory Paradox
The modern conception of rights theory has shown a preoccupation with the notion of individual rights, which are premised on the false notion of the individual as unrelated to others. Rights-centric discourse consumes itself with the recognition and enjoyment of rights, failing to perceive that the fulfilment of rights is in reality tethered to the discharge of their corresponding duties. As such, a hyper-focus on rights to the exclusion of the realities of the mechanism whereby rights are in fact realised paradoxically threatens the very ideals it seeks to uphold.
The paradox of rights theory becomes particularly profound when conceived against its historical backdrop – the UDHR being borne out of a need to align the principles of justice to egalitarianism. Yet, a closer analysis betrays its façade of universality and the exclusion of perspectives from less developed corners of the globe.
Righteousness – the True Harbinger of Rights
Juxtaposed against this fiercely contested jurisprudential legal theory is the jurisprudential structure of the Qur’anic discourse on rights, which urges people towards righteousness as the true means of fulfilling the rights of all creation. It shifts the focus away from self-consumed notions of individual liberties to that of serving the greater good and presents righteousness as the vehicle whereby this is achieved.
The Qur’an thus puts forward righteousness to denote the best of something:
‘And take provisions, but indeed the best provision is righteousness.’ (The Holy Qur’an, 2:197)
and
‘The garment of righteousness, that is the best.’ (The Holy Qur’an, 7:26)
Righteousness is thereby a moral obligation that anchors the human rights debate firmly to a place of moral inquiry, and endeavours to invert the historic cycle of morality being manipulated for political sabotage. It therefore seeks a reversal of injustices masquerading as moral justifications of blanket power and states that the true fulfilment of rights is born when the latter transform into virtues, a transcendence from merely possessing a right to becoming righteous.
About the Author: Ayesha Mahmood Malik is the Editor of the Law and Human Rights Section of the Review of Religions magazine. She is interested in Law and Religion, in particular Islam and Human Rights, the role of media in crisis reporting, International Human Rights and the import of religion on radicalisation. She has spoken frequently on these issues in the national media and various universities in the UK, including the University of Oxford and the London School of Economics. She is a graduate of Harvard Law School.
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