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In-Depth Information
(1981) and the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child
(1990). Alongside identifying individual rights, these regional charters
recognize the sociocultural responsibilities of individuals to their fami-
lies, communities, ethnic group, nation and region. For example, the
African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child (1990) contains
articles that focus on a child's responsibility to 'preserve and strengthen
positive African cultural values', 'to preserve and respect the family'
and 'to serve the nation and promote African unity'.
Critics have also suggested that RBD's emphasis on the individual
can lead to inadequate attention being paid to
collective
oppressions
that particular social groups may experience based on class, gender,
race, religion, kinship and other social relations. Feminists have argued
that the universal 'subject' of human rights conventions often takes a
man/boy as the norm, leading to gender-blind omissions. In order to
address more gender-specific concerns, the African Charter on the
Rights and Welfare of the Child (1990), for example, explicitly addresses
issues such as girls' unequal access to education.
Despite these critiques of the ethnocentrism of the rights discourse,
some commentators have refuted the assumed 'Western heritage' of
the concept of human rights and argued that the values associated
with recognizing an individual's rights and entitlements to well-being
can be found in all major religions and cultural contexts (Tomalin,
2006). Cultural relativism - the idea that 'culture' determines people's
rights and obligations and hence these can only be defined in relation
to a particular cultural, ideological and political context - has been
criticized for confusing human rights with human dignity, and for not
distinguishing between rights and duties. Furthermore, cultural rela-
tivists' refusal to accept some notion of common basic needs or entitle-
ments that are necessary to ensure everyone's well-being can be seen
as absolving them of taking a moral stance on crucial development
issues, such as poverty, marginalization and violence. Olson and
Sayer (2009) discuss the value of 'normative thinking' and call for
geographers (and other social scientists) to take a subjective, political
and ethical stance in relation to what constitutes 'human flourishing'
or 'the human good'. Drawing on Amartya Sen's and Martha Nussbaum's
notions of 'capabilities' ('the range of things people need to be able to
have and do to be able to flourish'), Olson and Sayer (2009: 192) argue
that 'universal' should not be equated with 'uniform' and a capabili-
ties approach does not deny that there is variation according to cultural
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