On Friday, April 15, 2022 at 7:58:09 AM UTC-4, ltlee1 wrote:
"At a joint news conference after the 2+2 dialogue of top US and Indian ministers on Monday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken had said the US is monitoring some recent "concerning developments" in India, including what he called a rise in "human
rights abuses" by some government, police, and prison officials.
... Mr Jaishankar did not respond to the remarks at the conference but did so on Wednesday.
"Look, people are entitled to have views about us. But we are also equally entitled to have views about their views and about the interests, and the lobbies and the vote banks which drive that. So, whenever there is a discussion, I can tell you that we
will not be reticent about speaking out,...
I would tell you that we also take our views on other people's human rights situation, including that of the United States. So, we take up a human rights issues when they arise in this country, especially when they pertain to our community. And in fact,
we had a case yesterday...that's really where we stand on that," said the Foreign Minister.
...
The US Secretary of State's comments on human rights in India were seen as a rare direct rebuke by Washington of New Delhi in the middle of discussions over India's stand on Russia's Ukraine invasion. "
India's message to the US: Please don't lecture India on human rights. US can see itself a human right power, so is India. Indeed every nation is a human right power per its laws, written and unwritten.
American waste tons of ink on human rights. How many of them have really try to think through what human rights are?
Russell Kirk, America's iconic conservative, had given a talk explaining human rights and then published "The Illusion of Human Rights" more than three decades ago.
https://kirkcenter.org/politics-and-social-order/the-illusion-of-human-rights/
"By what standards are “human rights” to be measured? What, indeed, do we mean by this controversial phrase “human rights”? I offer you some reflections on this subject.
The phrase “human rights” first entered American politics, I believe, when President Woodrow Wilson opposed it to “property rights.” President Franklin Roosevelt similarly set human rights against property rights. Presumably President Jimmy
Carter had in mind such employment of the term by his predecessors when he set up a bureaucratic apparatus to sit in judgment upon the nations, reproaching client states for not attaining that perfection of human rights enjoyed in the United States of
America.
...
When politicians and publicists say “human rights,” to what concepts are they referring? Presumably they have at the back of their minds—supposing them to be reflective at all—either the concept “natural law,” or the concept “civil rights,
or both concepts.
Those two phrases can be defined more readily than can “human rights.” Yet at present the tag “human rights” is in vogue. It is incorporated into the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations. It even appears in translations of
documents issuing from the Vatican. And of course it is beloved by the mass media.
...
Yet actually the notion of “human rights” is not descended from the natural-law teaching that extends from Aristotle to Burke; nor is “human rights” synonymous with civil liberty.
...
To sum up my definitions, natural law is a theory of justice, derived from religious or quasi-religious convictions about the nature of man; while civil liberties are practical immunities at law, derived from a nation’s political development over a
long period of time. Superficially, the twentieth-century illusion of “human rights” may seem to be the child of these venerable parents. Yet in reality the notion of “human rights” is a bastard idea of recent birth. Its father was the UNO’s
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to which the government of these United States of America has refused to subscribe. Its grandfather was the Declaration of the Rights of Man, promulgated by the French Revolutionaries and Tom Paine—and also
rejected, in its time, by the government of these United States. Friends to natural law and to American civil liberties would be foolish if they should permit this illegitimate notion of imprescriptible universal “rights” to be foisted upon them. The
brat might work their undoing.
We ought to beware of supposing that all civil social benefits which citizens of the United States enjoy today are “natural” rights, universally applicable. Nor should we assume that the civil liberties of our own country might be exported to, or
thrust upon, cultures or countries quite different from our own. It would be inhumane for us to become fanatic ideologues demanding an inflexible universal pattern of “human rights.”
ln the current confused discussion of human rights in America and abroad, we need to remind ourselves of an observation by Dostoevski, in The Devils. Those who begin with unlimited freedom, Dostoevski says, must end with unlimited despotism.
...
ln international affairs, nevertheless, the United States needs to beware of what Sir Herbert Butterfield calls “righteousness,” a cardinal error in diplomacy—that is, national self-righteousness. The American Republic does not possess virtue and
power sufficient to thrust Americans’ notions of “human rights” upon all the world. Even a massive assertion of American power, a crusade for “human rights,” might destroy more than it could restore. America’s undertaking in Vietnam,
President Lyndon Johnson’s version of human rights, was a salutary lesson in this respect, if in no other. It is not the mission of the United States to establish universally some imitation of the American political and economic order. Every people
must find their own way to order and justice and freedom. As Daniel Boorstin has written, the American Constitution is not for export. He means that our Constitution grew out of the peculiar historical experience of the Americans. So it is with the
underlying constitution of every people. "
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