The Spatial relativity of the universal human rights

Human rights has become one of the important items of the global agenda in the post Cold War era. The spatial objections towards universality of the human rights thought altered into the determining factor of that agenda. The uniformative attitude shown by the West in the human rights discourse produced its own rival. The development of a common Eastern identity by the geographies fixed as non-West is a reaction to the totalitarian inclines of the West. So that, contrary to the orientalist discourse, by means of human rights, the East gained the opportunity of developing its own independent identity. In this study, the two different dimensions of the spatial objections towards universal human rights thought has been regarded. The first is the Chinese official human rights view that stresses development right. According to this view, universality of the human rights can not be restricted to the Western perception. In other words, human rights are universal and its Western conceptualisation is only one of the ways to realise universal human rights. The second is the legitimation of the tradition thanks to the human rights in the Neo- Ottoman discourse. Human rights which are the production of the modernity is not denied, however, it is tried to prove that human rights are not originally Western. So that, in the Neo-Ottoman discourse, human rights are being used as a mean of vindication of the tradition. Consequently, as seen in both examples, the spatial objections in the human rights area are focusing on the Western character of these rights rather than its universality.