Human Rights and Religious Faith in the Middle East: Reflections of a Christian Theologian

This article will address one aspect of the continuing argument about the foundation and meaning of rights: the conflict between the universality of rights standards and the particularity of moral perspectives rooted in religious traditions. The modern charter of rights, formulated by the United Nations in 1948, is called the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. One philosopher has defined rights as those rights which are held equally by all beings.' That is, they are rights which exist and should be respected universally, wherever beings exist, independent of the economic, social, political, cultural or religious context in which they live. In other words, as the theologian Jurgen Moltmann has put it, human rights point to a universal community in which alone they can be realized. 2 It is true that most of the nations of the world are in formal agreement with the list of rights proposed in the Universal Declaration, and many have ratified the two U.N. covenants which seek to translate this Declaration into binding legal standards. It is not at all clear, however, that those who give formal assent to the Universal Declaration understand these rights in the same way, nor that they would rank these rights in the same order of priority. This question has surfaced in recent discussions among philosophers and social scientists about the foundation and meaning of rights