Continued: IDEOLOGICAL REFUGE v JURISPRUDENCE OF INSURGENCY : CULTURAL RELATIVISM AND UNIVERSALISM IN THE HUMAN RIGHTS DISCOURSE

4.1. THE POLITICS IN IDEOLOGY
In its 2003 report submitted to the 59th session of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in Geneva on the most repressive regimes, ‘Freedom in the World’ categorised countries in accordance with their human rights records for the year. Thus, it rated Burma, Cuba, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria and Turkmenistan as the ‘worst of the worst’, while countries ‘near the bottom’ were listed as China, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Laos, Somalia, Uzbekistan and Vietnam, with countries like Chechnya and Tibet being placed between the two categories. The Executive Director in her report, made the following interesting statement: ‘The states on this year’s “most repressive regimes” list span a wide array of cultures, civilizations, regions, and levels of economic development. They include countries from the Americas, the Middle East, Central Asia, Africa, and East Asia’.

Reports and categorisations in this mould reflect a predominance of the basis on which relativism is criticised as ‘a shabby ideological cloak’ and refuge for the suppression and abuse of human rights. Upon close examination however, the epistemological frameworks of relativism may appear strengthened by analysis based on such data. In those lists, there is no European country, and the United States of America could not be there either! Countries which therefore emerge ‘good’ on such ratings are seen to share the socio-cultural basis which pre-dominates and determines the ideological paradigms of human rights as reflected in the declaration to various great extents. The ‘Americas’, Middle East, Central Asia, Africa and East Asia are all historically and culturally exogenous to the Euro-American ideology that permeates the data used it is contended, and the organisations undertaking the evaluation are viewed with suspicion since they are conceived, born, nourished and supported in locations whose geo-politics allegedly shape them largely.
If the first formal challenge to the UDHR was made by countries which have consistently appeared on ‘negative lists’ of human rights indices, and if these countries are not of similar socio-cultural heritage with the ‘dominant’ parties which emerge ‘clean’, then the politics in ideology may not lightly be ignored as relativists often contend. Challenging the universality of the declaration at the 1993 Vienna Conference, the submissions of objecting countries emphasized among other things; the Western nature of the overwhelming majority of rights declared as ‘universal’, the disregard for other cultural differences and normative perceptions of what is ‘universal’ in rights, and the unjust/imperial nature of the impositions of one standard of norms and perception on other societies .
The use made of the human rights language by Transnational Corporations, International Institutions and bodies like the United Nations and many of its agencies leaves little doubt over the politics involved in the ideological contests. As Benda Beckmann retorts, ‘Acceptance and implementation of human rights have become a frequent conditionality for financial and technical support.’ The repressive regimes on the other hand would latch on to cultural incompatibility to evade implementation of human rights ‘when the defensive shield of sovereignty threatens to become too weak’. This pattern which constantly plays out on the international scene betrays other interests that accompany particular ideologies. Such interests are largely political and economic. Thus one could interpose that requiring tenets such as ‘democracy’, ‘rule of law’, and ‘deregulation’ are indicative of the expansionist drive of the Euro-American influenced capitalist expansion in accordance with the postulations of Fukuyama. The opposition to universality of human rights on the other hand would appear to give some relevance, however little, to Huntington’s Clash of Civilisations. If none stands clearly on this, at least reference can be made to the Asian-Chinese and Islamic civilisations bits of that theses.
In the face of the annual human rights statistics and ideological stance of these ‘repressive’ countries that often argue on the premise of relativism, a deduction that the ideology is a ‘refuge’ would seem reasonable from an indifferent, complicit or tolerant view of the system produced by the ‘dominant’ universalist ideology, but not necessarily bereft of all merit in essence. The ‘face of law’ deserves attention in better appreciating critiques of universalism and relativism, and thus the politics permeating the undercurrents of law.

4.2. THE FACE OF LAW IN ASSESSING UNIVERSALITY AND RELATIVITY OF RIGHTS
A prima facie assessment of universalised legal regimes governing human rights globally leave one with little objections to the critique of the repression supposedly reliant on relativism. Critiques of law from the perspective of the relativist proponents however, leave one reconsidering the logic and justifiability of extensive or near whole-scale condemnations of relativism. This is exposed in asking a series of connected and derivative questions: ‘How were the universalised “laws” made’, ‘who were the participants in the making of the laws’, ‘what procedures were followed in the process and with what practical ultimate implications for interests of countries being represented’ and, ‘what are the after-effects of these laws in the context of global, regional and political interests of participants?’. The AAA and scholars like Cobbah, emphasise the neglect of ‘other’ cultural values, even though universalists like Donnelly will not deny such neglects.
An attempt at responding to those questions would highlight the assertions by critics, that the UDHR alongside most other human rights laws were drawn by a dominance of western participants , with a predominance of western socio-cultural ideological under-currents , in furtherance of mainly western interests and with reasonably suspected imperialist motives and tendencies . Ascribing a ‘legal face’ to what is primarily a particular culture and further declaring it ‘universal’ they contend, is logically dubious, ideologically imperialistic and positively subversive of the nature of law, read as a representation of the norms of people to whom it would apply. For it is a character of law in the contemporary world to reflect the values of the societies for which they are meant and the people to whom they are to apply.
In expounding on ‘Law and the Frontiers of Illegalities’, Nader touches on the contemporary use of law in furtherance of this mould of the universalist project in stating, ‘while theoreticians of imperialism recognize the uses of culture in the imperial project, it was and is specifically the rule of law discourse and practice that were and are key-stones of the continuing Euro-American civilizing project.’ But of course, universalism and relativism are fundamentally diametric in viewing and assessing laws which bear the ‘universal’ tag, since the universality of norms is equally impossible as cultural homogeneity is, in Tomuschat’s estimation. A simplistic consideration of international law in the forms of declarations, conventions, charters and resolutions would seem to be grossly myopic in a bid to appreciate the deep currents around the human rights discourse.
TO BE CONTINUED