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Who Is The "Human" In Human Rights? The Claims Of Culture And Religion, Peter G. Danchin

Peter G. Danchin

Modern critiques of international human rights law force us to confront at least two conceptual puzzles in the area of the claims of culture and religion. The first concerns the two concepts, often run together, of the secular (or secularism) and freedom, and the question of how rights—e.g. the right to freedom of conscience and religion—mediate between these purportedly universal or objective positions and the imagined subjective claims of particular religious or cultural norms. The second concerns the question of what we mean by “human equality” and how this idea relates to deeply-situated issues of collective identity and culture. Such …