Annotation

The article makes an attempt at comparing approaches to human rights in the East and the West from the standpoint of philosophy of law. The article consists of five parts. Part one gives a brief overview of the origination of the contemporary concept of universal human rights as it is reflected in international documents; origins of this concept and its correlation with the cultural relativism concept are reviewed. Part two is dedicated to sociocultural features of understanding human rights in the East and the West. Part three studies several most “upgraded” systems of ideas about human rights: the Islamic, Confucian and Buddhist ones, and makes an attempt at comparing oriental and western human rights concepts by the value criterion. Part four relies on the conclusions of part three that the western culture is focused on the man’s appearance, while the oriental one, on the inner world, so people from different cultures will have different tasks and different rights based on such tasks; this part attempts at a review of the content of fundamental human rights in the East. In the final fifth part, the authors conclude that cultural fundamentals of human rights are an integral part of the East and the West, and neither universalism nor relativism can be used as an independent approach. The reason is that the first one does not allow any variations in human rights, the second one is convenient in theory but hard to implement in practice. The paper suggests that an adequate solution may be the so-called relative universalism that combines the value of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as fundamental conditions for the origination and presence of rights and acknowledgment of importance of cultural and religious justification of human rights. Thus, this gives an opportunity to create conditions that are approximately similar for all countries, but to fill them with absolutely unique inner content and even a set of rights and obligations.