How do universal human rights play a role in peace making and preventing violence against women?
We can interpret religious or cultural contexts in many different ways. For example, we can look at the Koran, the Torah, or the Bible and find all sorts of things that can be said about how to treat people. But, certain interpretations have gained credence over time and now are accepted as fact. We sometimes accept these interpretations at face value due to our own ignorance. I, for instance, am ignorant about Hinduism. So, if someone made a claim about its tenets, I may lack the confidence to question it. I’ve heard people say, “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a Western document.” Actually, it isn’t. Islamists, Buddhists, Catholics Cambodians, etc. all participated in negotiating it so it’s truly a universal document. Instead of using the declaration as our lowest common denominator–the standard of where we should be–we pretend that cultural variations, like those in Islam, are acceptable because someone says so. We need to use the declaration to frame our discourse on
