Christian Foundations of Human Rights

Samuel Moyn in his ‘Christian Human Rights’ argues that the Catholic Church’s endorsement of human rights in 20th century was a tactical appropriation of an ideology alien to Catholicism – and it was designed to stop Communism. In a 2016 symposium with him, I took a different view. Belief in human rights, this paper argues, was central to traditional Catholic moral and political theology – in particular, the Church’s use of human rights to oppose religious coercion by states had a clear basis within the Catholic tradition. The new factor was not simply fear of Communism, but a central feature of Vatican II - a novel complacency about the effects on human nature of the Fall.  Published in King's Law Journal, 2017

The study here focuses specifically on the tensions between Islam, Christianity, and liberal secularism in the context of human rights. On a theoretical level, the paper attempts to map out the contemporary argumentative logic that shapes the available narrative choices, highlight difficulties that arise in whatever direction is privileged, and draw out some potentially questionable assumptions that often seem to guide these scholarly arguments. From a ‘methodology’ standpoint, the paper seeks to foreground a series of difficulties when approaching the topic of law and religion that tend to be ignored and develops a tentative blueprint for potentially fruitful studies in the future. The dominant critique that I will develop is that international legal scholarship, when it seeks to explain or negotiate the apparent conflict between secularism and religion in relation to human rights, ultimately tends to rely on extremely parochial, if not metaphysical, arguments—what we might term, ‘transcendental nonsense’—that reinforces the authority of distinctly Western liberal institutional actors. Of course, to speak explicitly of theory and method in the study of international law and religion requires a certain letting go of immediate preoccupations, but my feeling here is that there is a certain rigidity or predictable rehearsal of rhetorical moves within contemporary debate around this subgenre that may require as a point of pragmatic necessity a certain stepping back and starting over at the beginning to inspect the analytical toolkits we carry with us into the field.

Das Buch des Harvard-Professors für Rechtsgeschichte wartet mit einer interessanten These auf. Moyns These lautet: Die Rede von den Menschenrechten hat als Grundlage eine bestimmte Vorstellung von Menschenwürde. Diese Vorstellung entstammt einem christlich-konservativen Denken, das sich in den 1930er und 1940er Jahren mehr und mehr verdichtete; zu eben jener Rede von den universalen Menschenrechten. Somit ist die Idee der universalen Menschenrechte, wie sie in sich in entscheidenden Texten des Völkerrechts findet, ein ausgesprochenes konservatives Projekt, sozusagen eine Rolle rückwärts nach dem Debakel von Nationalsozialismus und Stalinismus.

In den letzten Jahren ist der Einfluss christlicher Akteure bei der Erarbeitung der Allgemeinen Erklärung der Menschenrechte verstärkt in den Fokus gerückt. Um der internationalen Anerkennung willen verzichtete die UN-Menschenrechtskommission bewusst auf metaphysische Begründungen. Die im Dokument erwähnten "Pflichten gegenüber der Gemeinschaft" (Art. 29), welche u. a. die Russische Orthodoxe Kirche immer wieder betont, sind dem Schutz des Individuums vor staatlichem Zugriff nachgeordnet.

In the article the evolution of human rights both as a moral and legal concept is traced. The authors give an overview of historical changes in the social context and the emergence of different ideas on the human individual, human personality, equality, unity as well as on human community and society as a whole. Different approaches to law and legal institutions are explored and sources of legal standards and institutions on human rights are explained.