Donnelly, J. (2013). Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice. (pp. 100-101).

Ithaca:
Cornell University Press.

Description: In this section Donnelly talks about how the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, particularly articles 3-12 that focus on life, liberty, and personal security, are
universal on a conceptual level due to being so intertwined with basic requirements of
Human Dignity. (100). He then goes on to discuss cultural relativism by asking people which
rights their society or culture rejects, which he says no more as four of those rights has been
suggested should be removed. (100). Donnelly’s final point in this section addresses the
issue of cultural relativism not being about the inability to accept the rights on a conceptual
level but rather to the limitations in applying them in a practical sense, and how view on
those limitations vary. By using an example of the United States courts dealing with live
animal sacrifice by practitioners of Santeria to highlight that every society places limitations
on rights, in this instance it was a limitation on religious liberty. (101).

Implications: Donnelly argues that it is not a case of the Declaration of Human Rights not
being universal but rather how those rights are applied in practice across societies and
cultures through key functions which include:

1. Addressing the connectedness of rights regarding life, liberty, and personal

security to basic requirements of Human Dignity.
2. Asking which of the rights in the Declaration actually don’t apply and/or are
rejected to a particular society/culture, and only receiving feedback that a
limited number don’t apply.
3. That all societies place limitations on those rights.

These functions provide points to think about in regards to the idea that it may not be a
case that all the rights that appear in the Declaration enforce sameness, but rather only
some of those rights. Despite there being a limited response in regards to how many rights
in the Declaration don’t apply to someone’s society, that small amount shows that there
may indeed be some rights that do enforce sameness across cultures. The idea of placing
limitations on the rights presented suggests that due to their being interpretations even
amongst the societies that the ‘sameness’ is being modelled from, there is a flexibility in
how the rights in the Declaration are applied in a society. Which in turn could allow for a
restriction of one interpretation of human rights being enforced across all societies, while at
the same time still having a baseline set of rights to protect people.
Useful Quotes: “In more than thirty years of working with issues of cultural relativism, I
have developed a simple challenge that I pose to sceptical audiences. Which rights in the
Universal Declaration does your society or culture reject? Rarely have I had a single full right
(other than the right to private property) rejected. Never has it been suggested to me that
as many as four should be eliminated.”