GLOB.IDEALIZATION MOND.IDÉALISATION - Faculty of Social ...

117 | Mond.Idéalisation
James Wellstead | Universal Human Rights
breakup of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. 62 Yet, the increasingly intense
flows of people, money and information have been a great impetus in the
turn toward the importance of the individual in the discourse of universal
human rights. While some authors contend that universal human rights, as
promoted and understood today, derive from the Western cultural priority of
rights for the individual (Rajagopal 2004), others have insisted that the shift
toward individualized human rights have instead been due to the
predominance of the nation-state and the market economy. 63
As
technological innovation and the entrenchment and expansion of the market
economy, Thomas Franck argues these shifts in human rights are not about
the legitimacy of the claim for universal human rights, but instead about:
changes occurring, at different rates, everywhere: universal
education, industrialization, urbanization, the rise of a middle class,
advances in transportation and communications, and the spread of
new information technology. These changes were driven by
scientific developments capable of affecting equally any society. It is
these trends, and not some historical or social determinant, that --
almost as a byproduct -- generated the move to global human
rights. 64
62 Noted as first occurring with the International Tribunal at Nuremberg and Tokyo, the
continued trend in international human rights law has been toward giving primacy to
‘fundamental’ individual human rights over rigid assertions of the sovereignty of the nationstate
(Held 1995a: 101-7).
63 Franck, Thomas M. “Are Human Rights Universal?” Foreign Affairs 80.1(2001): 191-204.
Donnelly (2003).
64 Franck 200.