Are Human Rights Universal?

In the United States, the common person in the country has the privilege and access to basic human rights. As a result of this uniform access throughout the nation as a whole, as well as most of the other democratic nations in the world, the push to change how other countries treat people is apparent. For instance, when the people in a nation such as the United States see that the people of a culturally different nation are given less access to human rights, their inherent urge to call out the other nation to initiate change sometimes is misplaced because of their lack of understanding for the overlying culture of that nation. For instance, in nations such as Saudi Arabia, women do not have the same access to human rights as men mostly due to the fact that many of these countries all practice Islam or other faiths that justify giving women less rights than males. Thus, as Nhiana Lee states, governments such as the one in Saudi Arabia, “resist international norms they perceive as contradicting local cultural and social values, or their domestic political interests. Thus, the international human rights regime cannot dictate what countries do with their rights practices” (Lee 204). In this case it From this, we can gather that trying to impose human rights reform in countries that culturally justify rights disparities does not work because doing so would possibly be seen as an attack on their respective culture, which could lead to other more severe problems in terms of relations with that nation. In this way, human rights are truly culturally relative in our world.