The Relationship of Human Rights and Human Responsibilities

This panel discussion was part of a symposium, "Human Rights and Human Responsibilities in the Age of Terrorism," held at Santa Clara University April 1, 2005. Panelists are responding to remarks by Kathleen Mahoney, chair of the board of directors, Rights and Democracy, Canada. Besides Mahoney, the panel included
Malcolm Fraser: former prime minister, Australia
Hans Kung: co-founder/director, Global Ethic Foundation, Germany
Bertrand Ramcharan: former United Nations acting high commissioner for human rights
Kirk O. Hanson: moderator, executive director, Markkula Center for Applied Ethics

KIRK HANSON: I think the first question to start with is about the complementarity between human rights and human responsibilities. We have used the term balance; others have said they are two sides of the same coin because you cannot talk about rights without responsibilities.

MALCOLM FRASER: I don't think it's two sides of the same coin because rights, as I have indicated, at one level, are the inalienable possession of each individual. It doesn't matter what the individual looks like; race, ethnicity, sex and all the rest are not part of it. At another level it is governments that must take decisions that enable people to enjoy rights. If rights were sufficient protection of themselves, we wouldn't have had the reversion since 9/11 and the total disregard for human rights that have been exhibited by too many countries that pretend to be democratic and freedom-loving. That has not been a protection for human rights. Human rights have been trampled upon. You should not act against people without evidence, without due process, without the rule of law. But that has happened in a number of countries since those terrible events in New York and in the Pentagon.

Let me say how I believe those events have dramatically underlined the need for a statement and acceptance of responsibility: If anyone is to enjoy any of the rights in the Universal Declaration, you've got to have somebody, some government, behaving responsibly. You cannot enjoy a right unless a government is prepared to respect that right because the government will have more power than you. So if rights are dependent upon a government behaving responsibly, what's the problem with trying to define that ethic, that responsibility?

When we first promoted this document, somebody said to me, "But you know people are so poor; they have so little. You're going to put duties on them." I said, "The document puts the greatest responsibility on those with positions of power and authority; on governments; on people in powerful institutions. There is a duty to protect, to respect, so people with nothing are going to get greater protection I believe.

If there had been a concept of responsibility, I believe that African states would have had to have access to European markets for their agricultural products—to give all people a fair go, to try and help those who are unequal, to help those who have nothing. We theoretically say this is a responsibility; we all believe in foreign aid, or most people do. Tony Blair says he is making Africa a personal commitment, but the one thing that Tony Blair could do is not done: advocate opening Europe's markets to products from Africa. It would be a responsible thing for him to do it.

People should speak truthfully. Is it wrong to accept that as an ethic and to say that it's a principle that leaders must also respect? I think one of the worst things that anyone can do—my country is guilty of it, I think America is, and I think Britain is—is not telling the truth about one of the most bravest things that any state can ever do, about going to war, and why they are going to war. Maybe if the British government had totally told the truth about Iraq, they would not have been able to make the decision to go to war. Is that wrong?

The Declaration of Responsibilities includes a sense of dignity and esteem for all others; nobody stands above good and evil; what you don't want to have done to yourself, don't do to others; respect life, avoid violence; every person is protected and precious; behave with integrity, honesty, and fairness; work to remove poverty, malnutrition, and ignorance. How can these concepts be wrong?

A final sentence: If the reversion and the destruction of human rights evidenced since 9/11 is to be reversed, I believe it will not be reversed by human rights advocates suddenly arguing now for further progress. Get rid of Guantanamo Bay, get rid of all the unlawful things that have happened, get rid of Australia's detention laws. I think it will happen if governments come to accept the idea of an ethic of responsibility.

HANS KÜNG: I would support what Prime Minister Fraser just said. It is already a little discriminatory just to use duty language, as I think Kathleen Mahoney has. That gives already the wrong impression. We did not make a declaration on duties, but on human responsibilities. I think you are very fortunate in English; you have three words to choose from. You have in German only one, pflicht, and that has been abused regularly. It has been abused by the Nazis, it has been abused especially by the Catholic Church, it has been abused by many people. In English, you have obligation. That's already much more personal; that is not just duty. The most personal term is of course, the third one, responsibility, which quite clearly goes beyond duty to the whole ethical issue. I very much agree with the position that we cannot go against the present terrible situation in human rights if we have only rights.

It is very difficult because the Bush administration is pretending they interpret rights. I think it's a question of responsibility. No person, no group, no organization, no state, no army or police stands above good and evil. All are subject to ethical standards. Everyone has a responsibility to promote good and to avoid evil in all things. If these things would be a little clearer, you would not have all these terrible abuses.

I think it would be better to speak about truth language. We had very Orwellian language in the official propaganda and in the media. I was often surprised how a lot terms were abused. They worked for peace and then prepared war. They were for human rights and they wanted to have their personal power. Every person has a responsibility to speak and act truthfully. No one, however high or mighty, should speak lies. That's not just a human right; that is a clear ethical pronouncement. Why should this not be declared officially as a responsibility?

There was a real debate over whether we should say something about lies in the declaration. Chancellor Helmut Schmidt asked me whether I thought we should include the statement, "No one, however high and mighty, should speak lies." Some of our group thought it was enough to speak in a positive way, to say for example, "Everyone should be honest." I was asked about my opinion, and I said there are two reasons why we should use also the negative language. First, God Almighty himself on Mount Sinai used negative terms in order to be very clear. Everybody is honest; of course we are all honorable people. You remember the speech of Shakespeare, "All honorable people." Now but not to lie, that's a different thing. The second reason is—and as an academic I was free to say it—politicians are renowned for lying. That turned out to be a convincing argument; everybody agreed it should be put into this Declaration.

Professor Mahoney quoted many extensions of human rights. I am for this development, enlarging the term rights. That's very legitimate. But why should we restrict everything to a paragraph of Article 29 of the Rights Declaration and not be allowed to make a Declaration of Human Responsibilities? Because it can be abused? Rights have been abused as much as duties. You can abuse everything; you can abuse music, you can abuse religion, you can, of course, also abuse obligation. But it is very difficult to abuse responsibility because that addresses you in your own conscience.

PROFESSOR HANSON: Professor Mahoney and Dr. Ramcharan, you have dedicated your lives to ensuring human rights. How can this concept of human responsibilities be integrated into your life's work?

KATHLEEN MAHONEY: My first response would be that it already has been. As I tried to make clear in my presentation, all of the human rights instruments contain the concept of responsibility. Human rights are grounded in, and derived from, ethical standards and standards of responsibility. They explicate what those responsibilities are. They explicate the state's responsibilities, the individual's, and the community's. But the overall framework, as I was saying, was within the context of the relationship of the individual to the state.

I don't think the human rights community is averse to the notion of responsibility. It would be highly contradictory because responsibility is what is required to implement human rights. To even try and separate them, to me, is just very artificial. The problem is to keep them within the same frame so that they do complement each other, so that you don't have a competition between the two, where you don't have one being used as yet another arrow in the quiver to limit human rights. It has always been the agenda of those who wish to override others and to exploit them and to abuse them to use whatever they have in their arsenal to do that, and they often do that through interpretations of competing rights.

For example, you say things like you must tell the truth. Well, the truth a relative concept. I mean what is the truth? The truth is a highly contested concept, particularly when you get clashes of culture and ways of living and fundamental premises of the various good books and so on. There are different interpretations.

MALCOLM FRASER: I'm sorry I shouldn't interrupt, but truth, if it's a judgment, might be a relative concept, but not if it's a fact, not if it's "Has somebody got a weapon of mass destruction to hang over your head?"

PROFESSOR MAHONEY: Okay. I mean we can always pick out an example and say, "This is the truth and this is a lie." But if you go into any courtroom in this city, in this country, in this continent, you will see people contesting facts. Judges make findings of facts. Anybody with a legal background knows perfectly well that that is the most crucial stage in any trial: What are going to be found as the facts? You have different people presenting different facts that they believe to be true, and depending on what those facts turn out to be, then the legal principle is applied to them and you get a result. So it's not as easy as that. I think that it is much more complex, much more nuanced.

I would say to create the motivation for the world to move forward in any kind of positive way, we must get people thinking in a paradigm of human rights and responsibilities together. They cannot be opposed to one another or we will end up in a quagmire of destroying both because there are too many different points of view with respect to both sides of that coin.

If they are in the same frame and one complements the other, Article 29 seemed to be an appropriate place for this discussion to take place. Maybe it's time now, 60 years later, to put some meat on the bones of Article 29, but not at the expense of these past 60 years of defining and refining what human rights are needed to create a world where people can live together in harmony and share the wealth of the world. That's my conclusion in coming out of this, that the complementarity must be there or else there will be a negative result as opposed to a positive one.

BERTRAND RAMCHARAN: My thoughts are flowing in the following direction: There are three concepts that are under discussion here. First, there is the concept of duty. As Professor Mahoney and Professor Küng have pointed out, this concept is in the human rights instruments. Then there is the concept of responsibility, and the concept of responsibility is being used in two senses. The first sense is to balance responsibility with rights, and the second sense is a responsibility to protect. The responsibility to protect is the subject of major recent proposals by a high-level panel established by the UN Secretary General. The third concept that is in discussion at this meeting is the concept of ethics. Of course, principles of ethics can run through duty and can run through responsibility as well.

I have looked at the papers of the InterAction Council, and I have looked at the text of this Declaration, and I want to pose the question in good faith to the drafters of this document: Do you think that it might be possible to cast this in the form of a universal declaration of ethics, or of principles of ethics? I have actually looked at this document, I have put it on the computer, and I touched it up without touching any of the articles. I think that it is possible to cast it as a positive statement of ethical principles, which would not lose their major thrust as ethical statements. Where I think the document runs into difficulties is the insistence of the document and the explanatory materials that responsibility should balance rights.

The introductory comment is: It's time to talk about responsibilities. It demands that rights and responsibilities be given equal importance to establish an ethical base. Maybe I can go along with that. "A better social order both nationally and internationally cannot be achieved by laws, prescriptions, and conventions alone, but needs a global ethic." Well I understand the thought behind this, but I would not put it this way. And a Universal Declaration of Human Responsibilities, which would complement the Human Rights Declaration, I honestly don't see the need to cast it as a balancing document.

By contrast, there is a statement here that the InterAction Council has been working to draft a set of human ethical standards since 1987. And I say, yes, I am in favor of that. So I wonder whether you run the risk perhaps of destroying the initiative by giving it too negative a connotation. Then in the preamble of the document itself: "Whereas the exclusive insistence on rights can result in conflict, division and endless dispute, and the neglect of human responsibilities can lead to lawlessness and chaos." I must tell you that that probably sounds good in the mind of the thinker, but it doesn't sound so well to me in the mind of a practitioner. I must say that the human rights movement would not react positively to statements of this nature, but I don't think that you need them.

There are also things that I certainly would not put into this document. There are things that I would not even put in a statement of ethical principles: "Sensible family planning is the responsibility of every couple." I mean who is anyone to say anything to any couple about such an issue?

Generally, I think that, in a positive orientation, it is possible to aim for something that might conceivably be supported by the human rights movement or that might conceivably be supported by the United Nations. So I place before you this core thought: Might it be that a universal statement of ethics would achieve your purpose, and why do you need this emphasis on balancing rights and responsibilities?

I have spent more than three decades in the United Nations working for human rights. I was in the Yugoslav peace negotiations for three and a half years, and I have been in other conflicts, so I have seen this issue a little bit. When I was acting High Commissioner of Human Rights for 14 months, every morning, I listened to the radio, I listened to the media, and on my mind was, "Where are today's crises that I must react to?" Now I am thinking about how the concept of responsibility might help to address those.

On December 10, 2003, I issued the Annual Human Rights Day statement of the High Commissioner. I said the state of human rights in the world is being impacted by six adverse phenomena. First there is bad governance; it's everywhere, all around us. I ask myself, What does the concept of responsibility do when it comes to bad governance? Okay, the responsibility of those in government, I can support that. Then my second adverse phenomenon is poverty. What does the concept of responsibility do for the victims who are poor? Yes, maybe those who have impoverished them have a responsibility; I can support that. My third problem was conflicts. Conflicts are caused by leaders, and the poor and the ordinary people suffer. So I am saying to myself again, yes, responsibility of the leaders who bring us into conflict. Then the fourth phenomenon is terrorism. Where does the concept of responsibility relate to the phenomenon of terrorism? Prime Minister Fraser made the case very eloquently that terrorism must be fought within the law, and I support that as a big argument. But I would pose the question, Does this line of reasoning necessarily lead us to a Declaration on Human Responsibilities? My fifth phenomenon is inequality. People don't respect one another, and they discriminate against one another. Perhaps there the principle of tolerance, the principle of respect would be of importance. Then my sixth phenomenon is what I call state violence. Governments are perpetrating, on their own people, torture, enslavement and forced disappearances, violence against women, and a variety of ills.

As a practitioner, as someone who carried this mantle for 14 months, I am looking at the world daily and I am saying that I want some assistance on the issue of bad governance. I want some assistance on the issue of conflicts. I want some assistance on the issue of poverty. I want some assistance on the issue of terrorism. I want some assistance on the issue of inequality, and I want some assistance on the issue of state violence.

At the earlier session, Professor Kung said, "We should use such an instrument [the Declaration of Human Responsibilities] within the UN; it should be used by NGOs." Well, when some of my friends that I was coming to this conference, friends I respect in the human rights movement, they put me on the defensive: "How could you possibly lend your support to such an initiative?" There is considerable disquiet about this document. There is considerable disquiet at a time like this, that we must be putting the emphasis on responsibilities.

I don't want to go too much on the negative. I want to look more on the positive side. I can look, if you let me say so, into the minds of the people who put this document before us. I can see the good faith behind it. It is the reason why I participated in a forum like this—because it gives an opportunity to bring the thinker and the practitioner together. I ask you to think hard whether a positive document can help in these circumstances.

My final thought is, if one studies the history of rights—Prime Minister Fraser referred to the Magna Carta, and Professor Küng referred to the drafting of the French Declaration of Human Rights. I have read these; I have read historical books on these instruments and I can see the thinking of philosophers is influencing practitioners. There are grievances, there are claims, there are negotiations, there is articulation of principles, and then there is recognition of principles or of rights. That's how we have had the great rights documents, and that's what is happening to this document. Whatever the thinker in the cloister thinks to herself or himself, this thinking has to be filtered through the world of the practitioner and the process of negotiation. And what I am seeing in today's world are these six phenomena that I mentioned to you, and I am saying to you that a statement of ethical principles can be helpful, but I think that in today's world, the timing is off to talk about balancing responsibility and rights.

PROFESSOR HANSON: Perhaps if it's all right with the panel, I can invite the audience to raise questions. Please.

STEPHEN DIAMOND (SCU professor of law): Thank you, this is a fascinating discussion. The word that I haven't heard raised yet is the concept of enforcement. I was very intrigued by Dr. Küng's discussion of fraternité, but fraternité had to evolve into a variety of other concepts to have meaning in the real world—into, for example, the right to freedom of association, one of the most important human rights, enforced through the international organization and through the adoption of labor law throughout the world. So from my point of view, I see human rights as a means to execute and enforce basic human responsibilities. To that extent, it seems to me that a Declaration of Responsibilities can be used to amplify the world's understanding of human rights. But without a means of actual enforcement, how meaningful are they? E. P. Thompson, the great British labor and social historian, suggested that the rule of law acts as a check on the arbitrary exercise of power. Would that were the case in the last two or three years, but nonetheless there is no question that one of the greatest fears the Bush administration had was that someone would attempt to enforce the rule of law—for example, through the actions of the General Assembly, after the Security Council reached an impasse, which would have been possible had a single state asked Jan Kavan for a meeting of the General Assembly to act to check the war and to check the legitimation of the war provided by the inaction of the Security Council.

So there is a question here about enforceability and about how we actually use the rule of law and understand it. It seems to me that is the singular advantage of law and rights over broad statements such as the UN Global Compact or codes of responsibility, etc. that we see emerging in discussions about the human rights abuses by corporations on the global scene. You need enforceability, and I wonder if you have thought about that in your deliberations or discussions or thoughts about this declaration.

HANS KÜNG: That is, of course, a very fundamental issue and it can also be answered in a very fundamental way. You can enforce the law, but you cannot enforce ethic standards the same way. I think we have to make the distinction between the level of the law. Here you have the competence of the lawyers, of the police, of the tribunals, and they have possibilities of enforcement which are well known. You do not have the same problems of the enforcement with ethical standards. If somebody wants to lie, well nobody sees it or can discover it. What is then the enforcement? Here we are not in the realm of the law, but in the realm of conscience, and that's a very different type of norm. On this level, you have first your own conscience, which is not always very pleasant if you go against an ethical standard. You can of course, manipulate your conscience, but not absolutely. It comes back in dreams. It comes back in family discussions, where sometimes a father is asked by his own children, "Is this true what you do in your business?" If it becomes a crime, then of course, it then also becomes a problem on the level of the law and then you have the enforcement of the law. But before that, you have the realm of conscience, which is different.

Basically the Human Rights Declaration is also—and I think we agreed on that—finally a moral appeal; it's not the law. I also belong also to the human rights community. I am a little disturbed if you speak in the name of the human rights community. Who is this? I think most people are for human rights, and they belong to the human community. In this case we have to ask why, despite all this expansion of human rights, we were not more successful in creating a better world. It is an absence of conscience; it's an absence of personal responsibility; it's an absence of ethics. Why should we not say so?

MALCOLM FRASER: On another level, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is not a legal document, and it's not enforceable. It is a statement of high principle, which pretty well every country has signed on to. But the conventions underneath it, which have been mentioned, and which Professor Mahoney mentioned, were designed to give the force of law to things that will make human rights practicable and enjoyable in many countries around the world.

There is a great deficiency in the process, which involves many, many countries including my own, because generally, if you look at the documents, countries have signed on to a document, and that doesn't mean they are going to apply it. For some countries, ratification involves building in the provisions of the convention into domestic law. Then whether it's a declaration of civil and political rights, for example, the provisions of that then become part of your domestic law. But for far too many countries, ratification does not involve building the standards and principles of those conventions into domestic law. And in those circumstances, the conventions designed to give substance to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in those particular countries are not enforceable. Nothing like enough attention has been given to that particular problem because many, many countries, and some important countries, are in that category.

KIRK HANSON: If we were to ask about human rights, would this be your response Dr. Ramcharan, Dr. Mahoney? Are conventions how human rights are embodied, and are they enforceable?

PROFESSOR MAHONEY: Well, sure. I think we were sort of going around in circles here, because it does take political will to make human rights happen. This is exactly how it works: You start with a general principle, and the Universal Declaration is just that. It is a general principle of standards and norms and ethics and values that the world decided, after the Holocaust of World War II, that people had to pay attention to or we would repeat history. Unfortunately we have repeated history to a large extent. But in any event, that was the thought and then those rather general concepts would evolve into more specific concepts. Then states, as they were able or as they were motivated, would take those concepts out of the international world and put them into their domestic world and make them law. In Canada we have done a lot of that. We have a large amount of international law now incorporated into domestic law. And when that happens, that means that people like me, or people I represent when I act for them, can take those principles to an implementing device, which is the courts, and argue that the state is not living up to the obligations that it said it would. Then a judge decides whether or not that is the case. If the judge decides that is the case, then there has been an advancement for human rights on the ground because somebody now can say to some newspaper or to some employer or to the government, "What you are doing is wrong. I have a relationship with you which requires you to treat me differently than you are treating me." That's called implementing human rights and this is the process.

To get back to the question, Why don't some governments do this? Some governments don't do this because they can either get away with it, they are governments that don't follow the principles of democracy, they are governments that ignore their people, or they are governments that reinterpret human rights to serve their own needs. Like this good and evil concept—we heard Mr. Bush in his first inaugural address say, "You are with us or you are against us." There is good in the world and there is evil in the world. Well, the people on the evil side are saying, "No, no, not us. We're good and you're evil." So it's all relative; people see the world from their own perspective. And what is needed is an umbrella over both of those two perspectives to say, "No, there are some universal values that can help define what good and evil are." But that's not good enough either because you have to have some teeth in that to enforce those concepts. And that's what human rights do when they are domesticated and put into the system such that people can then use them.

This concept, as I see it in any event, is a declaration of responsibilities that would help inform either politicians when they are making decisions on what they are going to do with these international norms or professionals—whether they be judges or doctors or lawyers or what have you—when they want to influence civil society. They could look at those norms and say, "Yes, that's what we want," and if our government isn't going to deliver on those, we're going to throw them out or we are going to go into the streets and demonstrate, like we have seen in the Ukraine, or we saw in many countries in Eastern Europe 10-15 years ago. To me, that's the way the system works.

To have an antithetical competing set of responsibilities on the one hand and rights on the other, to me is counterproductive and upsets this balance. The appropriate way to ensure that is an explication of what those rights are and what people need to have more of, whether they are the politicians or whether they are the ordinary person on the street, like you and I, wondering why our government isn't doing what we say.

In this country, there was just an election not too long ago, and the people spoke about the government's attitude towards security and the trade-off as between civil liberties and keeping the people secure. Obviously, the people in this country, at least the way in which they voted, indicate that they are prepared to give up a certain amount of their human rights in favor of security.

That's a highly contested topic all over the world. And how do we contest it? We look at human rights, and we measure what governments are doing against the human rights standards, and then we say to them if we disagree with what they are doing, "Live up to your responsibilities to adhere to these human rights norms." I don't think we are arguing against one another, but I think we have to see it in the overall structure in order to make sense of it.

BERTRAND RAMCHARAN: I think that the question you have asked about enforcement is a really fundamental one, and it comes from two angles. It comes from the angle of enforcement in such a document as has been proposed. And it comes also from the angle of how does such a document help us to enforce human rights better. From the point of view of the concept of enforcement that might go into such a document, if you look at the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the closing preamble paragraph reads something along the following lines, "The General Assembly proclaims this declaration to the extent that everyone, all individuals and all organs of society, shall strive by teaching and education, to promote the realization of the rights in this declaration."

Then on the other side, I am taking the concept of enforcement as to how it might feature in such a document. When the great enterprise was begun under the chairpersonship of Eleanor Roosevelt in 1947, they decided that they would work on an International Bill of Human Rights that would have three parts. It would have a declaration, it would have one or more treaties, and it would have measures of implementation—measures of implementation approximate to enforcement. Now it's a long story: Between 1948 and 1965 the United Nations did practically no enforcement. They said, it is not the business of the United Nations to confront governments. From 1965 to 2005, 40 years later, some halting implementation measures have been developed. And when you go to the Commission on Human Rights nowadays, you will find the states of the world in four categories. In the first category are countries like Canada, reasonably advanced in human rights, but still with issues to address. In the second category you will find countries that have made some progress, but they still have to go a far way. I would say that a country like Senegal would fall into that category. There are some countries that are at the starting point, namely they have just approached the starting point. And then there are some countries that have not yet approached the starting point. I went on a mission to the six countries of Central Asia, and the human rights idea is not even implanted in this society.

Where am I headed? When you go now to the Commission on Human Rights, the very states coming in as new states to the United Nations, they were pressing in 1965 that the United Nations must deal with violations of human rights. They are now saying the business of the United Nations is not to confront governments, but to cooperate with them. So from an enforcement angle, you have this unholy majority in the United Nations, and you have seen in the newspapers, the Sudans, the Zimbabwes. The measures of implementation of 1947, the battle for implementation tells us that we must find ways of protecting the people in Darfur, just to use that as an example. And so nowadays in the United Nations, developing countries are saying the right to development is the issue, the very countries that are massively violating human rights.

What I am basically saying to you is that when you put concepts such as responsibility into the milieu, you are putting them into a milieu of the kind that I have described. And so I made the point that enforcement can go into the document, in a positive sense, and I am saying to you that the battle for enforcement today tells us that those who are violating human rights use all manner of spurious excuses. Let me just say so that you don't feel good about this country either, when I was High Commissioner for Human Rights, there is a situation in Guantanamo and I am asking myself, "How would I impact on that situation?" And then there is a lot of legalese that is thrown out my way; this is a matter of humanitarian law and not human rights law. As the High Commissioner for Human Rights, I did something, if you would allow me to say so, that no previous High Commissioner has done, I took the initiative to write reports and submit them to the Commission on four situations, one of them being your Iraq. I can only tell you that the difficulties of doing such a thing in the world of power, they are not to be underestimated.

So this gentleman's question about enforcement is really an important one and it is for this reason that I say to you well-meaning ethicists, well-meaning leaders, help me and my colleagues in the human rights movement. I accept that you are a member of the human rights movement also. Help us to protect human rights.

Q: Is there a universally accepted definition of human rights? You are defining responsibilities, but is there a basic definition of human rights?

MALCOLM FRASER: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights would be the best definition and probably the most complete definition, the most widely accepted one.

DR. RAMCHARAN: I support Prime Minister Fraser. Sometimes you get debates about the universality of universal declaration. I have written and I have said that there is a democratic test of universality. If you asked anyone anywhere in any part of the world, "Do you want to be tortured? Do you want to be enslaved? Do you want to be discriminated against?" you would never find anybody answering in the positive.

When the declaration was being drafted, the then-director of the Human Rights Division, John Humphreys, collected materials on the legal, political, philosophical, ethical systems of some 66 countries. He boiled these down, and he circulated them in a document. So the ethical and legal wellsprings of the declaration come from all parts of the world.

I think that there is no better statement of universal human rights than in the Universal Declaration. I am not aware of any government that, at this time, is challenging the validity of the declaration.

KATHLEEN MAHONEY: I would add to that just one thought: I think it's important to understand human rights as not static but dynamic. The concept of rights is evolving with our societies because we're different than we were in 1948, when that document was drafted. There are different pressures in the world that didn't exist then, but exist now—for example, pressures on the environment. There is a need to look at rights in an expansionary way, in my view, because we live in an ever-changing world. So I agree that there is a definition of human rights in the Universal Declaration, but it is not the last word, and it is constantly going through reiterations and different generations of people as they come in.

I'll just make one more note: I often have been in debates in international gatherings where we hear these statements that Universal Declaration of Human Rights is just a Western concept and it doesn't reflect the world. But what is really interesting is when some of these despots like Saddam Hussein or Slobodan Milosevic get arrested and have to face the music, the first thing they claim is their human rights. They want to be presumed innocent; they want to have the rule of law applied to their trials; they want to have a decent prison environment; they want to have access to information; they want to be able to speak; and so on. So when push comes to shove, it doesn't matter where you are in the world. When people need human rights, they cry out for them. And so I find that the most eloquent evidence that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is indeed universal.