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A KANTIAN ‘FOUNDATION’ OF HUMAN RIGHTS THROUGH THE IMPOSSIBILITY...
Main sponsors of this declaration were Singapore, China, S-Korea, and Malaysia.
Its forerunner is a statement entitled Our Shared Values prepared by Singapore
in 1990. This document comprises the BDHR of 1993 in nuce: “Nation before
community and society above self; family as the basic unit of society; community
support and respect for the individual; consensus, not conflict; and racial and
religious harmony.”
Apart from authoritarianism there are other features shared by both
declarations. They both prioritize culture-induced collectivities (e.g. family,
community, government) over the individual; they prioritize duties over rights;
they emphasize harmony as opposed to critical inquiry; and they don’t provide
any argument that could convince people who do not share their cultural
values. They are ‘shared values’, but shared only by specific regional in-groups
as they exclude the rest of the world. Again, we have here not an ethical concept
addressing all human beings, but only addressing those who contingently happen
to share similar cultural values. They are not human rights; they are expressions
of a certain, sometimes questionable cultural understanding of what ‘humanity’
means for them - for self-appointed speakers who pretend to speak on behalf of
‘their’ culture. People — individuals — living in the same region who happen to
have different views are simply excluded.
Some thirty years have passed since Our Shared Values, woven into the
BDHR for official presentation, has been promulgated. Meanwhile, the notion
of identifiable ‘Asian’ values has become obsolete, for various reasons.“ New
declarations from that region followed’, without, however, substantially changing
BDHR’s core message. Ihe Asian-value doctrine is still propagated in at least some
of its signatory powers until this day."
4 Prominently, Amartya Sen, in Human Rights and Asian Values. Sixteenth Morgenthau
Memorial Lecture on Ethics & Foreign Policy, New York, NY, Carnegie Council on Ethics
and International Affairs, 1997, 9, warns of oversimplification when using terms like ‘Asian
values’ or ‘Western values’.
8 For instance, the ASEAN Human Rights Declaration (AHRD), introduced in 2012 by
ASEAN Member states meant to complement the BDHR, insists on regional particularities
to be taken into account with regard to human rights. Article 7 reads accordingly: “..
the realization of human rights must be considered in the regional and national context
bearing in mind different political, economic, legal, social, cultural, historical and religious
backgrounds.” Yuyun Wahyuningrum of the Heinrich Boell Stiftung Southeast Asia
critically noted in 2018 that “[w]hile AHRD guarantees most of the rights, it also, at the
same time, protects the states from being accused of committing abuse and violation on
human rights.”
16 Just take today’s China’s main official political and social doctrine, the so-called Xi
Jinping Thought of 2017. I am not aware that Singapore or Malaysia have recently changed
their position in this context; patriarchal structures — ‘family values’ — still exist in now
democratic countries of that region.
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