The Universality of Human Rights

               The universality of Human Rights is just a concept and claim rather than a reality, and the answer lies in the word “universality” itself. Although we might think of Human Rights as a universal concept that should be applied to, accepted, and agreed upon by all human beings in any place in the world, but the unfortunate truth that states’ politics, cultures, and religions still play major roles to impact people’s values and acceptance to certain concepts that are out of their traditional value systems.

Despite that Human Rights seek to promote equality for all humans without considering their race, religion, nationality or gender which theoretically can prove the universality of the rights, but we can say that the background of people affects their consent to Human Rights and their actual commitment to them. The declaration of Human Rights is relatively a new concept that challenges much older traditions, cultures and religions that already set their values upon people and it is hard to go against them especially in more traditional communities which are attached to their claims of their own sovereignty, culture or religion and find Human Rights threatening because they impose new values; some might call them western values, another might call them irreligious values and others might call them individualistic or capitalistic, according to where they come from and what background they have. 

In depth, Human Rights seek the protection of individual rights; not creating collective rights designed for specific groups, which means every human being is free to operate within or out of community, religion structure and give them the protection to practice their individual freedom which might be disturbing to the law and order of certain community, religion or political structure in certain places in our small world. 

In sum, although Human Rights are universal in their claim and nature, they are not in practice and reality, not because of the content of the rights themselves but in regard of the diversity the rights challenge, not only the religious and cultural diversity of the world but the political diversity as well, which make it hard to adopt a concept by different people from different backgrounds and value systems.