Religion and human rights: mutually exclusive or supportive?

Abstract

The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) makes no mention of religion as a possible basis for such fundamental rights. Although there was an attempt by the Dutch delegate Father De Beaufort OP to amend the pream¬ble with a reference to “Man's divine origin and his eternal des¬tiny,” this was rejected as being contrary to the universal nature of the declaration. For the Saudi Arabian delegate, the fact that the declaration began and ended with the human being, without any reference to God, was sufficient reason to abstain.

Indeed, Father Beaufort's formula would have been rather out of place. The Universal Declaration stems from a secular religion (religio in the classical sense of ‘binding'), which arose from two centuries of Enlightenment thinking. Its starting point lies in the fundamental freedoms of the individual which have to be protected against the power of the Sovereign (the State). Al¬though the text does refer in the final articles to the community and duties of individuals with respect to the community, the gist of the UDHR remains cen¬tred on the indi¬vidual.

In the period following the adoption of the Declaration the human rights pro¬ject was interpreted as a juridical challenge to legislate and to create procedural provisions for judgment of individual and state complaints. On the ba¬sis of an intrinsically neutral attitude towards the culture, regime and level of prosperity in the country concerned, human rights violations would have to be de¬nounced everywhere.