Title and Author

Andrew's Thoughts

The Hutus and Tutsis are the two dominant ethnic groups in Rwanda, comprising 84% and 15% of the population, respectively. As the Tutsis have been recognized by the Belgian government as more “white-skinned” and intelligent, they were resented by the Hutus. Since 1959, the Hutus have been massacring the Tutsis, attempting to purge them from Rwanda in an act of ethnic cleansing.

The atrocious acts committed by extremist Hutus against Hutu moderates and Tutsis were able to continue mostly due to the US’s reluctance to intervene. The disaster in Somalia in 1993, where the US had eighteen of their troops slaughtered, effectively restrained US support of peacekeeping in Africa. Power mentions, “even before the deadly blowup in Somalia the United States had resisted deploying a UN mission to Rwanda.” Further, the US went on to draft PDD-25, a presidential decision directive that specified stringent conditions for US interventions in peacekeeping missions, leaving almost risk of harm to US soldiers.

Even after the evidence of genocide became uncontroversial, and “Jean-Pierre” informed the UN and its member states of an imminent genocide, the word “genocide” was carefully avoided “for fear of being obliged to act.” The United States stood by and did not lend a hand even as 8000 Tutsis were being massacred daily from April to July, 1994. Power has observed, “…staying out of Rwanda was an explicit US policy objective.” If the US had, in fact, used the term “genocide” in its description of the Rwandan situation, it would have been legally obliged to act by the Genocide Convention of 1948. Article 1 of the Genocide Convention binds the ratifying nations with this statement, “The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish.” Thus, the international community must use various methods, including force if necessary, to prevent the crime. If only the international community had showed interest in helping the Rwandans stop the genocide, hundreds of thousands of lives could have been saved.

Increasingly, the free market (namely the manufacturing category) is seeing an increasing awareness around the globe of the concept of human rights for laborers, in sweatshops and assembly factories. There is a hot debate about the role of business in society; Milton Friedman posited that, “the only social responsibility a corporation must abide by is maximizing profits for the benefit of its shareholders.” (Schoenberger 21-2) Though it is still “alive and powerfully influential today”, I cannot imagine how that could be the only ethic of multinational corporations; surely the sweatshop laborers deserve some recognition and basic working conditions.

This relates to the concept of situational ethics, which are “executed in a policy of expedience that exists only to serve the company’s core social mission of maximizing profits” (Schoenberger 23). It is true, in fact, that “the vast majority of businesses…follows an ethos that essentially puts rational self-interests first.” (Schoenberger 23). Levi Strauss has carefully nurtured its international image to that of a humanitarian company. However, outsourcing and the work conditions of labor contractors overseas threatened to debunk that image and tarnish their name. As with many things, the name does not imply the truth; the free market is not truly free, as companies from the so-called “free-market” are still bound by minimum wage and maximum working our restrictions, as well as basic sanitation requirements.

I do think that multinational corporations should be responsible for working conditions in factories overseas; this is a social responsibilities problem. If companies subcontract overseas, they have the moral and legal requirement to maintain its worker’s basic working conditions, minimum wage, and maximum hours. As with the Saipan case, Levi Strauss did not oversee the Saipan factory working conditions, and it escaped being blemished only by its public image of humanitarianism.

In her tractate on Legal Pluralism and Transnational culture, Merry repugns the aforementioned idea, using the Ka Ho’okolokolonui Kanaka Maoli Tribunal as an example. Merry is suggesting that international laws on human rights should be universal, bridging international and cultural divides. As Merry writes, “there are two sides to the process” of reconstructing a new human rights conception out of the obsolete Western conception: “incorporation of local understandings”, and “addition of global legal discourses”. Indeed, as theorists and philosophers start mixing local and global philosophies, winnowing away undesirable parts, the human rights concept should become acceptable to all individuals and nations. This is related to the concept of transnational culture, in which different cultures are increasingly overlapping and becoming blended into each other.

The US annexation of Hawaii during the late 1800’s threatened Hawaiian culture and language. A desire for sovereignty emerged during the recovery of Hawaii: “The political movement demanding sovereignty grew out of a much larger and older renaissance of Hawaiian culture, language, arts, dance, and music.” The core of Merry’s article is on legal pluralism, the recognition of different cultural, religious, or ethnic groups during the formation of a law. Merry writes, “The claims of state law to be the ultimate authority are themselves challenged. The legal subject is no longer defined only by state law but also by local, transnational, and even natural law.” This illustrates well the idea that the influence of legal pluralism extends even above state law. I also find it uplifting that President Clinton signed Public Law 103-150 in 1993, formally apologizing to native Hawaiians for the United States’ human rights abuses and violations of international law.

As Wilson says on page 11, “all societies are characterized by ‘legal pluralism’ – being subject to overlapping local, national, and transnational legal codes.” ( Wilson 11) Thus Wilson claims cultures are not distinct, concrete entities. Rather, they have no definite boundaries, and they overlap in all facets. Universalists would seek to find common elements among cultures and congregate them, forming a trans-cultural rights document that would apply universally. In sharp contrast, relativists think of cultures as hermetic, discrete, and disparate. Wilson states that cultural relativists seem to hold a nineteenth-century notion of culture as discrete and homogeneous, as the product of isolation, and as the basis of all difference and similarity between human beings (Wilson 9).

An-Naim approaches this issue from a relativist point of view, as opposed to Wilson’s neutral view, stating that the fundamental cause of human rights violations is a deficiency of cultural legitimacy of human rights standards. He argues that a universalist perspective is futile based on his supposition that any “common core of human rights” will serve as no more than a weak “least common denominator.” The example An-Naim brings up in his thesis is the definition of “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment”. In his argument, he discusses the difference between Muslim and North American ideologies, two radically different cultures, and their forms of punishment for crimes. Muslims follow Qur’anic punishments, deemed to be cruel and inhuman in Western civilization, while Westerners deem imprisonment punishment enough for most evil doings. An emphasis is placed on illustration of the need for a cross-cultural approach to deal with these cultural differences while imposing international law, and the difficulty of coming up with a method if implementation.

At the closure of his article, An-Naim seems to have adopted a more universalist view in that he starts advocating a cross-cultural approach, saying that “while total agreement on the standard and mechanisms for [the cross-cultural approach’s] implementation is unrealistic in some cases, significant agreement can be achieved and ought to be pursued as much as possible.”

Sahlin said, “The cultural self-consciousness developing among imperialism’s erstwhile victims is one of the more remarkable phenomena of world history in the later twentieth century.” Culture has different meaning around the world, thus leading to the phenomenon of cultural relativism. In a more general cognizance, all different interpretations of culture revolve around a core concept of a set of behaviors that govern how a population or nation acts and behaves. Some of the different senses in which culture is used are “the high art that is enjoyed by a happy few” (refinement aesthetically and intellectually), “ultimate values” (brought about by diminishing religious grip), and “open, syncretic, and unstable” (brought about by the Berlin school of thought; they claim culture cannot express unchanging status or character). In a more cynical sense, Kuper claims that culture obstructs globalization and modernization, explains illogical actions of people and disappointing political failures.

A point that was interesting to me was that culture is almost always defined in opposition to something else, such as resisting or opposing modernization. Does that in any way imply that culture is iniquitous? Culture is used to explain the differences between human races, gender, or other characteristics. One of the strongest rival theories is Darwinism . Darwin argued that human differences could be explained biologically, while culture was a derivative of “fundamental racial differences”. Boas was a proponent of the “classical culture”. He states “We become what we are by growing up in a particular cultural setting; we are not born that way. Race, and also sex and age, are cultural constructs, not immutable natural conditions.

As an ending note, Kuper states the phrase “We Are Our Genes.” Based on the fact that culture, or the surrounding environment, shapes the phenotypic expression of those behavioral genes, I do not agree with Kuper’s idea that if two people have the same genes, they will necessarily act or behave in the same way. I believe that from more modern realizations and definitions of culture will emerge a hybrid definition that combines classical and scientific interpretations.

However, General Amin, Ugandan dictator in 1972, also made the decision to oust 23,000 Asians who considered themselves Ugandan citizens. It was mainly that incident that drew international attention, as the Asians, when denied citizenship, would become stateless people. Aggravating these incidents are the reports that expellees caught carrying some money were humiliated, stabbed, or shot.

The underlying concern was, “Is the expulsion of Ugandan Asians reason enough for international intervention?” As Robertson said, “To change this traditional attitude into a new doctrine which recognized that international standards concerning the fundamental rights of the individual have been established by international law and that international remedies are available if those standards are not respected…” Perhaps Article 9 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights could be evoked: “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.” Despite the portion in General Amin’s Statement Relating to the Expulsion of Ugandan Asians” that says, “The Government took this decision purely in the interests of the economy of this country…”, we could still argue that the expulsion of Ugandan Asians is “arbitrary exile”, taking Amin’s explanation to be incomplete or irrational.

There is an obvious bias in when world superpowers decide to intervene and protest: there was a previous time when 200,000 Africans were evicted from Uganda, while the superpowers observed and took no action. Now, when 55,000 British citizens were expelled, the United Kingdom protested vehemently. However, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, declined to report the Ugandan situation to the UN council under the UN Charter, Article 39: “The Security Council shall determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression and shall make recommendations, or decide what measures shall be taken in accordance with Articles 41 and 42, to maintain or restore international peace and security.”

The United Nations Charter was one of the major documents for world order after the two world wars; it was the start of the concept that states will treat their subjects precisely as defined under international law. The development of the institutions of the UN generally occurred after enormous abuses of core human rights, events which drew international debate and discussion. The job of the UN is to consider, discuss and recommend. Would their judgment not be clouded if, as I suspect, they know that their “recommendations” may be merely shrugged off by the sovereign state in question? So far, the UN has not proved very effective in stopping major core human rights violations, and I do not think they will become more efficient unless they devise a procedure to enforce the international law and make definite decisions about when to draw the line between intervention and non-intervention.

This is closely related to Immanuel Kant’s dogma, in which he emphasizes individuality and personhood, is a strong support for modern human rights theories, and he prioritizes universality over all else.
 
The positivist philosophy was one that commanded my contemplation the most. The two faces of the philosophy was especially interesting: the methodology of positivism is useful for drafting international laws since the human rights declarations are designed by sovereign states themselves and then imposed on the subjects, but it also provides no room for individual rights and status and disregards the subjects inherent rights that extend above sovereignty. Positivism seeks establish laws with no regard for internal morality seeks to The Nazi anti-Semitic genocide is a good example: the morality of their actions is thrown away in favor of a positive law imposed by the state or sovereignty.
 
Rights Based on the Value of Utility quite disturbed me when I first was studying it, as I could not imagine how such a visionary mathematical equation could be used by governments to maximize the happiness output. I think the doctrine of the later utilitarian thinkers was far more rational, as the main concern then would be to improve the economy and general welfare. Still, the backbone of all Rights Based on the Value of Utility philosophies was the concept of lumping or aggregating everything together, while disregarding individuality (in direct opposition to Kant’s ethic).
 
Shestack’s list of philosophic bases for human rights is surely not exhaustive, as there are a myriad of theories, but he does a fantastic job of summarizing the most significant ones. Certainly the future development of new philosophies and theories will lead to a more mutually agreeable consensus on the concept of human rights.