The Human Rights of a Suspect's Family, Revisited

Classes began this week, and I have no big complaints. I am in class primarily with undergraduates. I'm not the sort to paint with a broad brush, and there are a great number of truly insightful undergraduates. However, with so many undergraduates, some undergraduate things are bound to be said. Heaven knows such things get said in law school.

One highlight was the first class meeting of "Human Rights in Korea & East Asia." Our discussion of the differing conceptions of the terms "law" (or droit, loi, recht, or 법) and "human rights" (ditto for droit de l'homme and 인권) among cultures and languages was quite interesting. The term "human rights" evokes a different set of references and mental pictures for an English speaker than "인권" does for a Korean. This seems to be the first of at least two roadblocks to a universal concept of human rights.

The second is this: Even if we made the incredible leap of assuming that the English understanding of human rights was true and universal, implementing it across the globe would require resort to local language. One can call law "법" or one can call it "law," in which case it will just be mentally translated to "법" by locals.

But this is not the case. From my perspective, despite what a collection of dictators say, there are some human rights which are universal. Others are probably not, and the discussion of these usually tends toward non-Western thinkers claiming that international human rights is just a Western construct.

There is a tendency among many of us in the West, myself included, to dismiss these claims that our concept of human rights isn't universal. Between this class and a new article on the serial killer Kang, it occurred to me that other cultures recognize certain legal rights as human rights, where we in the U.S. simply don't. (For background see my earlier post, "Human Rights v. Right to Know.")

According to the latest article, the stature of that human right here in Korea is certainly slipping, but the still good law prohibiting the police from disclosing a suspect's identity was passed specifically to protect his or her family from humiliation - called a human right.

Besides the longstanding socialist argument for positive human rights (food, water, etc), has anyone encountered other examples of "human rights" recognized in the non-Anglophone world that we do not? I'm very interested in your considered comments.