Intercultural translation of the human rights

Human Rights in the Islamic World

In the Islamic discussion of human rights, three different positions prevail:
1) One accepts the “Western” version of the human rights, government by law and democracy, and correspondingly relativises the Islamic religious law (sharia).
2) One insists on the absolute validity of the sharia law and relativises human rights to bring them into accord with it.
3) One attempts to bring together human rights and democracy with the Islamic religious tradition.

In 1981, the Islamic Council for Europe in Paris presented a Universal Islamic Declaration of Human Rights. In 1990, the foreign ministers belonging to the Islamic Conference meeting in Cairo issued the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam.

Both declarations take their start from the human rights as they have emerged in modern history, but they do not really address this tradition, because both of them regard it as self-evident that Islam already with the Qur'an contains an “ideal code” of human rights. The Cairo Declaration asserts unequivocally that all rights and liberties of the individual are to be measured by the sharia law.

The problem is, that the sharia contains provisions significantly restricting the human rights as they have emerged in Western history, e.g. in matters of religious liberty, family, inheritance and penal law. The application of the human rights is made to depend on the interpretation of the sharia law by the Islamic scholars (Ulama and Mullahs).

In the different Islamic countries, the relationship between religion and the state, and thus the influence of sharia jurisprudence, varies considerably. Consequently, the legal status of the human rights varies from country to country. In most Islamic lands, there are notable restrictions of the human rights.

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China

Confucianism is unfamiliar with the notion of a personal God, as taught by Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In China, from the beginnings, the notion of “Heaven” stands for the transcendent order of the world, a higher principle, by which the secular order of society is to be measured. Thus, at the time of Confucius (6th Cent. BCE), there was a clear set of duties for rulers and subjects, and the Chinese Emperor had to give account to “Heaven”.

With the end of the Chinese Empire and the establishment of the Chinese Republic in the 20th Century, the discussion of the human rights and democracy came to China. With Mao Tse–Tung's assumption of power in 1949, economic and social rights came to the fore, whereas, as in other communist countries, individual political and religious rights were flouted.

The notion of individual rights in the Western sense is by and large foreign to the Chinese tradition. In the 19th Century, a new word had to be created to express their notion. As late as 1991, the Chinese government insisted, in its paper Human rights in China on the priority of collective rights (e.g. to economic development) over against individual rights.

Today, efforts are made in many Asiatic countries to connect up the national cultural tradition with the notion of the human rights. Thus, along the lines of Confucian thinking, emphasis is put on the “Asian values“, highlighting the responsibilities of the individual for the whole society and the common good: Self-evidently, “human duties” are placed alongside human rights.

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