The Risk of Eroding the Foundations of Human Rights

Abstract

This contribution starts from the historical process that led to the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948, based on that of 1789), followed by increasingly specific ’Declarations’. Over the years, with the global expansion of the UN, the rights proclaimed in 1948 have increasingly been viewed as ’Western’ rather than ’universal’, and new rights have been claimed by African or Asian countries, such as rights referring to the family or the community rather than the individual. Meanwhile, in the West, the expansion of original rights to ethnic, gender or cultural minorities has led to a new fragmentation of the universality of the individual subject of rights. Identified as white, male, and heterosexual, historically playing roles of domination and subordination, the original subject is under indictment. ’Cancel culture’ strikes the protagonists of Western culture and history with all sorts of discrimination and removal, which even take the form of iconoclasm, to the point of undermining the very principles of the 1948 Declaration, including crucial aspects such as the central role of the individual and the person as the holder of human rights. The paradox is that this ’cultural war’ is being waged against the West not from the outside, as previously happened in history, but from within.