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Universal Human Rights And Universal Rights

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Universal human rights are those that apply to everyone no matter where they come from, who they are or what they do. They are held by the individual person and protect them from other people and/or collectives (Bell,1999). Human rights instruments found today are also compared to those in religions and ancient civilisations that have contributed towards the understanding of human dignity (James, 2007). There are many arguments on whether human rights are universally achievable and if they have already been achieved. This essay will put forward different perspectives on this issue. Such as how the claimed universal human rights are not universal, why they are not, and solutions to this issue to help them become achievable.
The issue of …show more content…

Even though countries of the world have adopted these crucial rights that are universal, it does not mean they can continue to agree on a much wider range of rights to universally adopt. However, this also does not prohibit the possibility of this happening. On the other hand, just because all countries agreed to these rights, human rights violations still occur off the record and while institutions such as ‘Amnesty International’ and ‘Human Rights Watch’ try to expose these instance of abuse, this does not stop the situation occur, leaving these rights not actually universal at all because not everyone’s rights are respected (Bell, 1999).
Author Charles Taylor, thinks that the ‘thin’ list of current universal rights should be expanded. He thinks participants in a cross-cultural dialogue should remain impartial to try a reconcile differences and allow for more agreed up universal rights to be established (Bell, 1999). If this was to occur, then this would allow for the possibility for completely universal human rights to be established as people from different cultures with different views and ideologies would be able to come to some sort of agreement on what these rights should be. Charles Taylor states “we should agree on the norms while disagreeing on why they were the right norms, and we should be content to live in this consensus,

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