1. Human Rights is an End In Itself and not Means to an End

We agree with Professor Upendra Baxi that human rights is an end it itself and not a mean to some designated end.

"The question is: should HRE (Human Rights Education) be regarded as an end in itself or a means to some designated end? The question (not so unimportant as pragmatists might think it is) needs careful contemplation for on possible answers to it will depend the future of HRE's legitimation, organization, accountability, autonomy, pedagogies, performance and implementation.

The choice is between saying that we ought to pursue HRE in itself as human right to better achieve all other human rights and fundamental freedoms or that we ought to promote HRE for ends like "good governance", "sustainable development", "economic progress", "democracy" and "transformation of civil societies". And the choice is critical, in the sense of the nature of national structuring of HRE, including of the very dispensability or expandability of HRE. If we were to regard HRE as a means for "economic" development in societies exposed to structural adjustment programmes, for example, only market-friendly rights will be germane to HRE endeavour; similarly, cultures which regard patriarchy as 'divinely' ordained may not consider a regendering of human rights cultures as critical to many of the 'ends' described above.

The choice has to be clearly made. I believe HRE is important because it is an end in itself. It is conceivable and a matter of not just ethical but also political judgment that as and when HRE mission succeeds it may ill-serve other postulated goals and ends. This is so because, as Roberto M. Unger has reminded us, rights typically have in history a destabilising function, a "context smashing" tendency. Neither of these features necessarily goes so far as to question the integrity or rationale of the nation-state itself but acutely interrogate all the processes of power and authority within state and civil society. HRE as an end itself seeks to reinforce the processes of empowerment of every human being in everyday life to experience freedom and solidarity, not fractured by grids of power and domination the civil society and state. The ability to perceive such freedom as not threatening all that is good, true and beautiful in human achievement is to my mind the summum bonum that HRE promises us. Mohandas Gandhi used to say that swaraj (independence, that is just self-rule) brings exercise of freedom in non-threatening ways to the Other. That, I think, is the spirit of human right cultures, too. Emmanuel Levians, in a different idiom, conveyed the same message to us when he evolved the notion of "difficult freedoms"; HRE, in these terms, is a movement to achieve the most difficult of these "difficult freedoms"." [Law and Society Review, February, 1995]

2. The Link Between the Universal and the Particular, the Abstract and the Concrete and the global and the Local.

The Draft Asian Charter on Human Rights has been drafted on the basis that the universal and the particular, the abstract and the concrete and the global and the local cannot be separated in any meaningful discussion on human rights. Human rights has to be relevant to the daily lives of all the people. On this basis the constant attempt to relate to each social context is at the very core of a meaningful activism for realization of human rights.

3. Articulation of Principles and Implementation by Way of Practical Action

While the international bodies have developed principles relating to human rights in international instruments, the central task is to realize these principles in actual life, in social context which in reality deny these rights.

Asian Human Rights Commission