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OCR
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. + 277 +
