AAA Statement On Human Rights

Following the horrors of the Second World War, a committee of the newly established United Nations created a Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which aimed to secure certain rights as universally protected rights that belonged to people in all nations. During the drafting process, the executive board of the American Anthropologist Association (AAA) submitted to the United Nations its “Statement on Human Rights,” which argued against the validity of any document that sought to be universal. Instead, the AAA used the idea of cultural relativism as a tool to argue that individuals form their personality in a cultural setting, therefore cultural differences must be respected as there is no technique for evaluating cultures and that standards

In arguing that one’s identity cannot exist outside one’s culture, the AAA ignores the various variables that play into the formation of one’s personal identity. While conceding that ethnicity, race, and religion are variables that are factored into one’s cultural identity, other factors such as sex and sexual orientation are not contingent on one’s culture. In fact, those factors are not mentioned in “Statement on Human Rights,” though the AAA inserted a loophole for avoiding biological differences by arguing that men are biologically the same. While the AAA is correct in saying that there is only one human species, there are biological differences between men and women, such as women having internal reproductive anatomy. In ignoring these biological differences between men and women, the AAA, in turn, ignores how these biological differences have been used as justification for upholding the patriarchy throughout diverse cultural entities. Thus, the toleration advocated by the AAA is not one applicable to all homo sapiens, but only to

Given that the aim of transnational justice is to address human rights abuses while also deterring against any future human rights abuses, the AAA makes the concept of it meaningless. If ideas of right and wrong are relative dependent on one’s culture, then no human right would be absolute, thus no violation could be justifiably prosecuted. While certainly not perfect, how would the world look like without any mechanisms for transnational justice? Would the violence against Rohingya Muslims be ignored since Myanmar could argue that it has a right to ethnically cleanse a population considered to be illegal immigrants? In allowing for extreme toleration, the AAA allows a backdoor for