Rights of Culture, Rights of Conscience

In this contribution I take up a particularly troubling issue in the theory of human rights. It is the issue of intervention to defend or uphold — or re-assert and re-establish — human rights. The issue is a troubling one because intervention in the affairs of others is always something we should be wary of, not least because history is full of unhappy episodes of intervention, from the Spanish in the Americas to the Chinese in Tibet. Indeed, so difficult and complex are the issues raised that one might be tempted in a discussion of human rights simply to separate the two matters — intervention and rights — and deal with them as distinct problems. To the extent that we deal with both, it might be argued, we should first work out what human rights are, and then turn to the very separate question of when and how we might intervene to support them. My contention in this contribution, however, is that the theory of human rights ought to incorporate a theory of intervention; and a part of the purpose of this contribution is to explain how this should be done.