Pedagogy: Teaching Human Rights

by Makau Mutua

Among law school offerings, human rights law, and its teaching, most closely resembles a religious crusade. The text of human rights law itself – from the noble and high-sounding Universal Declaration of Human Rights to the latest declaration or resolution of a meeting of human rights scholars and practitioners – hearkens to a naturalist conception of the human being and the purposes of political society. To paraphrase Philip Alston, a claim that becomes a human right is endowed with timelessness, universal validity, and urgency. Louis Henkin affirms this view when he declares that human rights is the only political-moral idea our time that has received universal acceptance. While these are but only two views, they dominate our consciousness about human rights law, and hence how we should teach it. Virtually every scholarly work on the subject betrays the messianic and evangelistic credo that is now associated with human rights.

This conception of human rights – as a religion that is proselytizing – threatens the rigor and integrity of scholarship and teaching in the academe. Teachers of human rights see themselves as messengers of the gospel according to the UDHR, and as such go to great lengths to avoid being blasphemous. The sheer enormity of the brutalities and abominations that are reported every day from all regions of our globe only strengthen this fear of blasphemy. But yet the university is not a church – and must not be turned into a church. Nor is the university primarily a place for activist zealotry. For better or worse, the academe serves its purpose in society when researchers and teachers are able to pursue inquiries to their logical conclusions, conventions and political prohibitions notwithstanding. Sure, activists can be grown on campus but that process should only take place after choices are excavated and explored without favor or prejudice.

Human rights teachers, therefore, should not see themselves as establishing beachheads for a particular civilization. It is most essential that teachers first of all interrogate the human rights corpus and unravel its hidden sub-texts and far-reaching political and social agendas. What, after all, is the human rights project? Is it a glimpse of eternity, or will it usher the end of the human quest for the good society? If it is that fundamental of a doctrine, should we then take off our gloves when we teach it, instead of cowering to its supposed moral pre-eminence? Or is human rights just politics – a normative edifice that in fact seeks to yield a particular worldview and societal arrangements? If that is so, why then the resistance by human rights academics to spend more time picking apart the proposals of the human rights project?

Personally, I begin from the premise that the human rights movement, which includes its corpus and discourse, is marked by a damning metaphor. From this view, the sub-text of human rights is a grand narrative of an epochal contest that pits savages, on the one hand, against victims and saviors, on the other. The savages-victims-saviors construction is a three-dimensional compound metaphor in which each dimension is a metaphor in itself. Significantly, this metaphor and narrative rejects the cross-contamination of cultures. In other words, the metaphor is premised on the transformation by Western cultures of non-Western cultures, and not the fashioning of a multi-cultural mosaic. This self representation of human rights requires moral and historical certainty and a belief in particular inflexible truths. The UDHR, the grandest of all human rights documents, endows the struggle between good and evil with historicity in which the defeat of the latter is only possible through human rights. This is now popularly accepted as the normal script of human rights. But this grand script of human rights raises a multitude of normative and cultural questions and problems.

Although the human rights movement arose in Europe, with the express purpose of containing European savagery, it is today a civilizing crusade aimed primarily at the Third World. It is one thing for Europeans and North Americans, whose states share a common philosophical and legal ancestry, to create a common political and cultural template to govern their societies. But it is quite another to insist that their particular vision of society is the only permissible civilization which must now be imposed on all human societies, particularly those outside Europe. Once again, the "superior" Europeans and North Americans descend on "backward" natives in the Third World with the human rights mission to free them from the claws of despotic governments and benighted cultures.

The historical pattern is undeniable here. It forms the long queue of the colonial administrator, the Bible-wielding Christian missionary, the merchant of free enterprise, the exporter of political democracy, and now the human rights zealot. In each case the "native" culture is pushed to transform by the European culture. The local must be replaced with the European, the "universal." Are the connections between human rights and particular attributes of European-American culture, such as hedonism, excess individualism, free markets, and now globalization contingent, and not organic? Is, in fact, the text of human rights so open that it is up for grabs, allowing different interests to make whatever claims they wish on it? In other words, are non-European cultures better advised to adopt the human rights text to their specific contexts, but leaving its core in place, if they seek redemption from their own backwardness? Can they segregate the "good" from the "bad" in human rights and reject the baggage of the West, while building a culture that is free from the evils that deny human potential?

I believe that this inquiry, which is essential for an open academic investigation of human rights, is stunted by the conflation of scholarship and commitment to human rights by teachers of the discipline. Many of the teachers – including myself – have tangled connections with the human rights movement. This is one source of the problem. Teachers are unable to see themselves as skeptics of doctrine and instead many have become foot soldiers of the movement. Probing questions are treated with hostility, and could lead to "excommunication." This needs to change.

The human rights academe should reassess its relationship with the practicing "bar" of human rights. While strict separation is not necessary, there ought to be a recognition that we are not in the business of advocacy, but of scholarship and teaching – not preaching. This is particularly true of schools which have human rights programs or human rights journals. It would be a mistake to allow these to lapse into churches, places of worship where choirs are trained.