“Three Rights Traditions Walk into a Bar in Jakarta”: Inalienable Human Rights from the Perspective of Different Civilizations
- Timothy Samuel Shah is co-founder and the Director of Strategic Initiatives of the Center for Shared Civilizational Values (CSCV) and Distinguished Research Scholar in Politics at the University of Dallas.
- C. Holland Taylor serves as Special Advisor for International Affairs to the General Chairman of Indonesia’s Nahdlatul Ulama Central Board, KH. Yahya Cholil Staquf.
Excerpt
Many people assume that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 was an exclusively or primarily Western project, imposed on the rest of the world by the European and American powers that emerged victorious from World War II. Harvard Law professor Mary Ann Glendon’s 2001 book, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, suggests otherwise. It was not the great powers but small powers that pushed hardest for a declaration of rights. And it was often great powers—and one must acknowledge, great powers dominated by people of European ancestry—that did not like the idea of being pushed around by politically and economically weaker inhabitants of the Global South, who were just beginning to emerge from centuries of Western colonialism and other forms of oppression.1
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