Human rights are nothing more than ethical assertions

The notion of human rights guides us all. But is that enough to bar Sam Kutesa, Uganda’s foreign minister who is due to be become president of the UN General Assembly, from office? Sholto Byrnes asks

On June 11, Sam Kutesa, Uganda’s foreign minister, is due to become the president of the United Nations General Assembly – and already there have been howls of protest from the US Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and Human Rights Watch, as well as a petition demanding the Obama administration deny Mr Kutesa a visa. The reason? Uganda passed a new anti-homosexuality law in February that has attracted much condemnation. While the key mover behind the act was Yoweri Museveni, the country’s president, Mr Kutesa has been the face of its defence. Senator Gillibrand labelled the appointment “disturbing”, while a HRW spokesman commented: “There are real concerns about Sam Kutesa’s commitment to the values embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), including his defence of Uganda’s profoundly discriminatory anti-homosexuality law.”

For many, the case is clear cut. Who wishes to speak in favour, or even in neutral tones, of anyone who is against “human rights”, still less a person who transgresses that semi-sacred text, the Universal Declaration of those rights?

But there are three problems with this seemingly obvious stance. First, the regarding of the UDHR as an immutable document, a tablet of stone inscribed with prophetic revelation, as it were, when in fact it is a text written by and signed by people of their time, at a certain time, when consensus about exactly what “human rights” consisted of was different to what it is today. Second, everyone agrees with “human rights”, but you don’t have to dig beyond the surface of that universality to be aware that opinions of what they are vary wildly from continent to continent and country to country. Third, the question of what rights truly mean – if they have any status at all beyond that which their strong appeal to sentiment suggests – if they are not enshrined in law.

On the first point, while the subsequent behaviour of many countries that signed up to the declaration showed that they had no real intention of abiding by it, rather fatally undercutting the idea that there was unanimity on its claim to authority, it is also clear that many approach it almost as believers do a holy text. And in order for them to elevate the UDHR to this status, it may be necessary to do so. The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, understood this when he wrote: “The language of the Universal Declaration is unthinkable without the kind of moral universalism that religious ethics safeguards …. Take away this moral underpinning, and language about human rights can become either a purely aspirational matter or something that is merely prescribed by authority.”

The trouble is that the declaration has no such underpinning, and the contingent nature of its undoubtedly stirring and uplifting articles is underlined by the very case in question. Mr Kutesa’s commitment to the UDHR is doubted because of his country’s anti-homosexuality laws; but while Article 2 states that “everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind”, at no point do those rights and freedoms include same sex relations – because in 1948 homosexual acts were against the law in most of the world and open support for gay rights was minimal.

The second point, that opinions as to what human rights consist of vary, follows on from the first. China is regularly lambasted for human-rights abuses, but as far as the country’s State Council, which recently issued a report titled “Progress in China’s Human Rights in 2013”, is concerned, they’re doing rather well, with the Guangming Daily opining that it showed “the confidence that the Chinese type of socialism has on the issue of human rights”. The Bangkok Declaration of 1993 and the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam of 1990 both offered sharply different views on the issue, from an East Asian and an Islamic perspective, respectively, while the record of those most vocal about human rights has often been equivocal. The reverence in which Myanmar’s opposition leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, was held for many years was second only to Nelson Mandela; but now, when it comes to the treatment of the Muslim Rohingya minority in her country, she has been so silent that the executive director of Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth, has observed: “The world was apparently mistaken to assume that as a revered victim of rights abuse she would also be a principled defender of rights.”

Lastly, let us not forget that one of the countries most enthusiastic about condemning the use of torture abroad has also been one of the most active in promoting its use in the “war on terror” – the US.

Then there is the problem of the status of human rights. Some act as though they are truths taken to be self-evident, although any position justified by mere assertion is on shaky grounds. But even one of the world’s most celebrated economists and philosophers, Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, conceded to me in an interview that human rights were no more than “ethical assertions”, while when discussing human rights with the British philosopher Baroness Warnock, she shook her head and said emphatically: “The word right properly belongs to the law. You can look up whether you have a right or not and find out.”

So if rights are contingent, and not timeless and universal – which is why pretty much every society on earth thought it perfectly acceptable to practise slavery until a few hundred years ago – we have to accept that different countries are going to take different views on what “human rights” should be. We can disagree as vociferously as we like, and there may be all sorts of reasons not to take to Mr Kutesa. But his country’s regulation of personal relations is not sufficient reason to bar him from UN office.

If it were, one would have to exclude candidates from many parts of the world – which only goes to show that the UDHR may be a wonderful and inspirational document, but the rights of which it speaks are no more than hopes. To treat them as facts on which we all agree is simply incoherent.

Sholto Byrnes is a Doha-based editor and commentator