A Logical Critique of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Of course, the denial of human rights does not only result from a failure of understanding or of the imagination. It is often the result of a quite deliberate act of dispossession. The possession of human rights enables each of us to achieve our full potential; it entails the enjoyment of full citizenship, full participation in society and full claims to a share of society's resources. Denial of human rights involves dispossession at all these levels. It is because the struggle for human rights is never conclusively won that people everywhere need to be empowered to resist that dispossession.

2005

The purpose of this paper is to trace the history and development of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a global ethical standard. Human rights are predicated on human dignity. We live in a world that some people either because of wealth, education or power have treated their fellows with contempt. This has led to a rigorous search for dignity and personal worth. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted to check and redress wanton violations of personhood, which has continued to terrify the conscience of civilized humanity since the Second World War. With the horrors of Hitler's savagery and the heartless brutality and inhumanity which characterized the strategies and logistics of that war, human beings were reduced and transformed from persons into things. The specific aims of this study are to evaluate the raison d'etre of the Declaration, probe its history and travails, and proffer solutions to curb and ameliorate human rights violations in the 21 s...

International Journal of Political Studies, 2021

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), announced on the 10th of December 1948, was adopted by the UN General Assembly with the approval of 48 countries. The declaration, called the "Magna Carta of all humanity" by Eleanor Roosevelt, has gone through many difficulties from the day it was signed to the present day. Eventually, the declaration has made important contributions towards the universal acceptance, development, and protection of human rights. At present, the declaration continues to maintain its universality and importance in the same way. However, it is a matter of debate in what direction the existence of this declaration affects human rights. In this respect, this study examined why many people are suffering despite the presence of the UDHR. The first part of this study discussed the conceptual framework of human rights and examined the declarations that play an important role in the process leading to the proclamation of the Universal Declaration. Later, the study mentioned the role and importance of the UDHR and mentioned its contribution to developments in human rights as an inspiration for the new declarations that came after it. Finally, the study tried to explain the reason for the limited impact of the Universal Declaration by analyzing the adaptation process of the declaration and the difficulties it has experienced. In this context, it has been concluded that this declaration has a limited impact since the main reason for the continuation of human rights violations today is that the declaration is not binding, and sovereign states violate human rights. Nonetheless, it has been found that the declaration effectively has prevented significant human rights violations and gradually has increased its limited impact as a source of inspiration for new declarations and agreements.

Routledge eBooks, 2017

The Age of Human Rights Journal

With the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a new era began in the recognition and guarantee of human rights in the international area. However, since the moment of its approval, this text has received negative evaluations designed to relegate it to the background. The responses to these criticisms allow us to review their political and legal scope, and put it in value as a reference model in the field of human rights, delving into the pending issues to strengthen it. This is intended, on the seventieth anniversary of the Declaration, to insist that this remains an essential bridge to clarify standards that can serve as a basis for discussion between different cultures and ideologies and, therefore, an instrument that each generation must "reappropriate"

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights established liberalism as the fundamental governing philosophy for states around the world. Prior to this document, critics of liberalism insisted that liberalism does not comport with all cultures or nationalities and could not be universalized. Yet having passed the United Nation’s General Assembly without a single vote against, the authors of this document seemed to have accomplished the impossible. How did they meet their critics and win them over? This paper reviews arguments made during the drafting process that illuminate both the key struggles and hard fought solutions that answer that question.

Cuadernos Constitucionales De La Catedra Fadrique Furio Ceriol, 2008

Some Alternative and/or Complementary Declarations to The Universal Declaration of Human Rights «Respecting human rights involves a conscious effort to find our common essence beyond our apparent divisions, our temporary differences, and our ideological and cultural barriers».

DIFFICULTIES OF INTERPRETING THE CONCEPT OF "HUMAN RIGHTS": A LOGICAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL ASPECT, 2024

B a c k g r o u n d . The article examines the concept of human rights. This concept in modern philosophical discourse is both vague and imprecise. Although most authors recognize the lack of unanimity in the definition of the concept of human rights, few have tried to find out the reasons for this situation. The purpose of this study is to identify the sources of the problematic definition of the concept of human rights by means of a logical analysis of the concept and to propose ways to overcome the identified difficulties in the interpretation of this concept. M e t h o d s . A philosophical hermeneutic approach combined with a comparative and terminological analysis of the concept of human rights was used in the study. R e s u l t s . Human rights discourse is fundamentally open: it is normatively undetermined, and anyone can join it. It is therefore inevitably polyphonic and multilingual. As a result, this discourse contains very different understandings of the most important thing: what human rights really are. Efforts to find a universal definition of the concept of human rights seem to be an attempt to unite under one roof things that are poorly or not at all combined: different ontological understandings, different scopes of the concept, and different logical characteristics. C o n c l u s i o n s . The difficulty of logical analysis of the concept of human rights, i.e. its assignment to a specific type, and its unambiguous interpretation and definition, is related to: 1) the lack of definition of the limits of scope of the concept of human rights in philosophical discourse and the insufficient definition of the limits of this concept as a legal notion; 2) the need to assess the legitimacy of the retrospective extrapolation of the term ‘human rights' to the entire body of works created before the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in which it was not used (in the Ukrainian context, this aspect is not obvious due to historical and linguistic peculiarities); 3) different ontological understanding of human rights by different actors in the discourse that makes it impossible to combine their positions under the same umbrella (e.g. according to one position, human rights are seen as anthropological attributes of a person; according to another, they are norms regulating social relations). The above testifies to the complexity of an unambiguous logical characteristic of the analyzed concept. It seems that thе situation does not allow for a single definition of the concept of "human rights". It is assumed that it is not a single concept, but a plurality of concepts. In this case, the position of the discourse participant in relation to a certain system of criteria and its justification may be a way to overcome the difficulties we have identified.