Can Human Rights be universal?

Abstract

The human rights discourse lies at the heart of the legitimacy and accountability of any political organization. As a powerful idea, it has come to be associated as an integral part of leading a worthwhile life. It is the product of the abstract natural rights theory originating in seventeenth-century Western Europe calling for the birth of homo politicus or the political man. Two centuries between The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of The Citizen (1789) and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) reflect the debates that were to come later. Prime among them is the nature of human rights itself.