Anthony J. Langlois, The Politics of Justice and Human Rights: Southeast Asia and Universalist Theory
| Date | 01 May 2003 |
| Published date | 01 May 2003 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2230.6603010 |
The early 1990s was an interesting period for the development of international human rights law and even more for international human rights as a movement. With the end of the cold war, human rights – or at least civil and political rights –‘took off’, both in the countries of central and eastern Europe where rights had previously been rejected as antithetical to communism and in those of the Americas where rights had often been suspended in the name of fighting communism. The growing number of accessions to the European Convention on Human Rights and the growing authority of the Inter‐American Commission and Court of Human Rights both testified to this development. However at this time, and in particular around the period of the 1993 Vienna Conference on Human Rights, a new line of resistance to the expansion of human rights norms and institutions arose. This went under the banner of ‘cultural relativism’ and suggested that, far from being universal, human rights essentially represented the values of the west. Broadly speaking, this cultural relativist charge had two main variants. One, primarily found in Africa and the middle east, challenged the universalist claims of the civil aspects of human rights, notably regarding equality, privacy and definitions of torture, arguing that these simply reflected Christian and European culture. The other, primarily found in South East Asia, rejected the universality of the political aspects, such as free expression and association, arguing that these again only reflected western ways of doing politics. The rapid economic growth of the ‘Asian Tigers’ in the 1980s and early 1990s bolstered the arguments of those advancing the latter view, apparently endorsing their claim that a distinctively Asian style of politics, shorn of many human rights standards, was more likely to bring prosperity to the region.
However, confidence in such views was punctured by the Asian financial collapses of the mid 1990s, especially as a lack of political and economic transparency – exactly the sort of thing a free press and an independent political opposition might provide – was revealed to be at the heart of the problem. International human rights discourse continued its advance, perhaps reaching its high water mark with the International Criminal Court statute of July 1998. After September 11 2001, though, this onward advance appears in jeopardy. As the United States strains to break free of the internationalism that began to...
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