Are human rights innate and universal?

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Are human rights innate and universal?
Living Human Rights

Post WWII on the 10 December 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was espoused by the General Assembly of the United Nations in order to agree on the notion that such atrocities that occurred throughout the Great War and the Second World War would not ever be reciprocated. The document that was drawn up in less than two years by the UN and Western states, and although ambitious it would guarantee a premise for life and living for every individual all over the world. The UDHR are founded on nobility, equality and reverence, and are said to be aimed at all cultures and religions within the West and East of the globe. However there is great discrepancy regarding …show more content…

The regularities of the Western world do not have the means to exist in many other parts of the world due to struggling economic and political development in non-Western states. To implement such variation in number of human rights proves an impossible task for poorer countries to afford a western influence of human rights existence. Lower (2013) argues that economic development must come before human rights as they “subvert social order and thus hinder development”. The Western influence on human rights is based on a background of economic and developmental stability, which unluckily does not apply to third-world nations. Sadly, not everyone has ‘natural’ rights whereby they are automatically entitled to certain liberties just because they are born human. Not all rights are equal just as not all inheritance and circumstance are equal. Culture, state and individual background create unavoidable injustices. Therefore from this point, it is evident that human rights are far from being universal as developing states do not have the means to support the UDHR, and independent fate restricts human rights to be innate.

At the present moment, it seems human rights are recognised as intrinsic, however to be carried out, government and politics exercise human rights. Human rights have a “morally innate” (Donnelly, 1992) entitlement however are politically constructed. Badiou, a French philosopher, argues that “civil servants of the UN” create

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