Human Rights K

Wake Forest Debate Workshop
Index for Human Rights K

Index for Human Rights K ................................................................................................................................................................... 1
Human Rights 1NC 1/4 ........................................................................................................................................................................ 2
Human Rights 1NC 2/4 ........................................................................................................................................................................ 3
Human Rights 1NC 3/4 ........................................................................................................................................................................ 4
Human Rights 1NC 4/4 ........................................................................................................................................................................ 5
Africa Link ........................................................................................................................................................................................... 6
Dignity and Fundamental Rights Link ................................................................................................................................................. 7
Disease Link......................................................................................................................................................................................... 8
Disease Link......................................................................................................................................................................................... 9
Disease Link....................................................................................................................................................................................... 10
Disease Link....................................................................................................................................................................................... 11
FGM Link .......................................................................................................................................................................................... 12
FGM/Gender Rights Link .................................................................................................................................................................. 13
Freedom Link ..................................................................................................................................................................................... 14
HIV/AIDS Link ................................................................................................................................................................................. 15
Human rights are imperialist .............................................................................................................................................................. 16
Human rights rhetoric link ................................................................................................................................................................. 17
Human Rights deny agency ............................................................................................................................................................... 18
Infrastructure Link ............................................................................................................................................................................. 19
International Institutions Links .......................................................................................................................................................... 20
International Law Link....................................................................................................................................................................... 21
NGO’s Link ....................................................................................................................................................................................... 22
NGO’s Link ....................................................................................................................................................................................... 23
Rights Link......................................................................................................................................................................................... 24
Public Health Link ............................................................................................................................................................................. 25
Universalization Link ......................................................................................................................................................................... 26
Victim Link ........................................................................................................................................................................................ 27
Alternative and Impact ....................................................................................................................................................................... 28
Impact ................................................................................................................................................................................................ 29
Impact ................................................................................................................................................................................................ 30
Impact ................................................................................................................................................................................................ 31
Impact ................................................................................................................................................................................................ 32
Impacts ............................................................................................................................................................................................... 33
Impacts: Aff not Solve ....................................................................................................................................................................... 34
Impacts: Aff not Solve ....................................................................................................................................................................... 35
Alternative Solvency .......................................................................................................................................................................... 36
Alternative solvency for FGM cases .................................................................................................................................................. 39
AT: Perm/Alt Solvency ...................................................................................................................................................................... 40
AT: you reject all rights ..................................................................................................................................................................... 41
AT: State Good .................................................................................................................................................................................. 42
Aff Answers ....................................................................................................................................................................................... 43
Aff Answers ....................................................................................................................................................................................... 44
Aff Answers ....................................................................................................................................................................................... 45
Aff Answers ....................................................................................................................................................................................... 46
Aff Answers ....................................................................................................................................................................................... 47
Aff Answers ....................................................................................................................................................................................... 48
Aff Answers ....................................................................................................................................................................................... 49
Aff Answer......................................................................................................................................................................................... 50
Fast Track 2007 1

Human Rights 1NC 1/4

A. The affirmative’s use of foreign aid and development assistance is a tool to promote homogenous
culture and coerce recipients of the assistance
Mutua, Professor of Law at SUNY Buffalo, professor of law at Hilda L. Hurst, and visiting professor at Harvard, 2001
(Makau, ‘A Third World Critique of Human Rights’ Savages, Victims, and Saviors: the Metaphor of Human Rights, HARVARD
INTERNATIONAL LAW JOURNAL vol. 42: 201-245,
http://www.ceu.budapest.edu/legal/universalism%20and%20local%20knowledge%20in%20HR%202003/Makau_text.html,
Accessed: 6/21/07)
In scholarship by Western academics, the same sharp contrast is drawn between human rights and the cultural or political savage
who must be civilized by human rights. In a reflection of this view, industrial democracies in the last two decades have worked
to link human rights to aspects of foreign policy such as development assistance, aid, and trade with non-Western states.94
Such linkage requires the recipient, usually non-Western state, to conform aspects of its domestic laws, policies, or
programs to human rights or democratic norms. The coercive maneuver is intended to civilize the offending state. Thus
Western states frequently use human rights as a tool of foreign policy against non-Western states. The United States, which
Henkin calls "a principal ancestor of the contemporary idea of rights,"95 views human rights as designed to perform this
civilizing role in non-European states.96 Henkin argues that because individual rights "dominate [America’s] constitutional
jurisprudence, and are the pride of its people, their banner to the world,"97 such missionizing is perfectly normal.]
B. Public health only provides access and rights and for the rich
London, Senior Specialist and Associate Professor in Public Health, PHD in public health from the University of Cape Town
in South Africa, 2002
(Leslie, “Human Rights and public health: Dichotomies or Synergies in developing countries? Examining the Cause of HIV in
South Africa”, The Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics. Boston: Winter 2002. Vol. 30, Iss. 4; Proquest, pg. 677)
The nature of rights as a vehicle for accessing power is often neglected in critical discourse on human rights.45 By affording
access to claims on resources, there is no doubt that rights approaches have the potential to benefit those who are more vocal and
better organized, and therefore already have access to resources. For example, many of the groups using South Africa's human
rights machinery have represented powerful lobby groups in society, such as the tobacco industry, which took the South African
government to court for access to the information on which it based its smoking regulation. So, a "rights for the rich" scenario is
one that should be guarded against. Heywood and Altman have warned against "the possibility that even bona fide strategies for
achieving `human rights' might reflect some form of appropriation that has blunted their transformative potential."46
Fast Track 2007 2


C. The affirmative’s misguided vision of progress justifies unleashing violence on an unprecedented
scale, making species extinction inevitable
Walker, Professor of Political Science, 1993
(R.B.J, “Violence, modenrity, silence: from Max Weber to international relations,” The Political Subject of Violence, pp. 137-8)
So much, it is often said, for grand visions of Reason and Enlightenment, for hopes of progress and the end of ideology/history.
And so much evidence, also, for those who would point to the essential malevolence of human nature or the supposedly permanent
tragedies of the human condition. At the very least, contemporary patterns of violence might be read as affirmations that we still
live amidst a familiar contradiction. Visions of Reason and Progress have indeed found material expression in a political economy
of abundance, at least for some peoples, in some places. Yet we also live in a world capable of unleashing violence, even species
extermination, on an unprecedented scale. Despite all chauvinistic myopias, violence is indeed prone to erupt here quite as much as
there, in the urban ghettos of righteous capitals as well as in internecine cruelties far away, in the routines of everyday life as well
as the grand grotesqueries of war. Violence does not always know its proper place or its proper time. Versions of the contradiction
between Enlightenment and Despair have inspired influential currents of critical social and political enquiry for at least the past
century.' It continues to disturb and to provoke. The Somme, Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Bhopal, Chernobyl and Desert Storm all name
stains on a modem soul otherwise flushed with pride. Laments for a civilisation that is either late or posthumous celebrate the
established rules by which to stave off the barbarisms without. For much of this century, also, attempts to respond to this
contradiction have informed a broad but sharply contested front of critical enquiry, whether as nostalgia for a nobler past, as hopes
for a final victory of Enlightenment and emancipation, or as diagnoses/traumas of a postmodern condition that has either given in
to quiescent despair or, as I would prefer to believe, begun to be sceptical of the discursive currencies through which the
contradiction came to be articulated in the first place. The continuing resort to violence is posed most urgently as a problem for
policy, as a demand that something be done by established authorities. What is to be done about the continuing resort to force in
international disputes? What is to be done about indiscriminate terror by revolutionary groups or about the gross abuse of human
rights by claimants to the legitimate power of state? What is to be done about the cycles of destruction encouraged by, say, the
international arms trade, the debt policies of international banks, or the transnational traffic in illicit drugs? What is to be done
about continuing stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, even if some of the most obsolete and superfluous of these are being
dismantled with great fanfare? Specified as problems of policy, these are perhaps intractable enough. Yet as problems of policy,
they are also widely understood as indictments of a civilisation. They raise fundamental questions about the character and location
of political life in the late twentieth century. Not least, they raise questions about exactly who this 'we' is that is supposed to
respond to the patterns of violence that have become so familiar, so much a part of what has come to be taken for granted. Having
learnt to live with the contradiction, to take the possibility of a relapse into violence at the margins of our normal existence as a
condition of the continued possibility of our normal existence, problems of policy incite, or should incite, a profound unease about
how we have learnt to tolerate the inevitable presence of violence as the condition for its apparent absence in some places, and at
some times.
Fast Track 2007 3


D. Our advocacy is to reject the affirmative. We must reject the affirmative’s rhetoric to ever hope to
attain actually inclusive universal rights
Accessed: 6/21/07)
This paper has viewed the human rights text and its discourse as requiring the typology of state based on the ethos of
constitutionalism and political democracy.185 The logic of the human rights text is that political democracy is the only political
system that can guarantee or realize the fundamental rights it encodes.186 As Henry Steiner points out, the basic human rights texts,
such as the ICCPR, "should be understood not as imposing a universal blueprint of the myriad details of democratic government
but rather as creating a minimum framework for popular participation, individual security, and non-violent change."187 Fair
enough. The point then is that if this is were a game or sport, its essence would have been decided, leaving those who adopt it only
the option of tweaking or revising the rules governing it without transforming its purpose. But the regime must be played, and
cannot be rejected. It is in this construction that the savage-victim-savior metaphor comes to life.
Using political democracy as one medium through which the human rights culture is conveyed, one is able to capture the imperial
project at work. First, the choice of a political ideology that is necessary for human rights is an exclusionary act. Thus cultures that
fall outside that ideological box – no matter how big – immediately wear the label of the savage. To be redeemed from their
culture and history – which may be thousands of years old – a people must then deny themselves or continue to churn out victims.
The savior in this case becomes the norms of democratic government, however those are transmitted or imposed on the offending
cultures. Institutions and other media – and some like the United Nations which purport to have a universalist warrant, while others
like the United States Agency for International Development are the obvious instruments of a particular nation’s foreign policy and
its interests – are critical to the realization of the grand script and metaphor of human rights explored in this Paper]. It has,
however, been the argument of this Paper that the imposition of the current dogma of human rights on non-European societies flies
in the face of conceptions of human dignity, and rejects the contributions of other cultures in efforts to create a universal corpus of
human rights. Proponents of human rights should accept the limitations of working within the metaphor. Then they must
reject it and seek a truly universal platform.
Stepping back from the SVS rhetoric would create a new basis for calculating human dignity, and identifying ways and societal
structures through such dignity could be protected or enhanced. Such an approach would not assume – ab initio – that a particular
cultural practice was offensive to human rights. It would respect cultural pluralism as a basis for finding common universality on
some issues. With regard to FGM, for instance, such an approach would first excavate the social meaning and purposes of the
practice – as well as its effects – and then investigate the conflicting positions over the practice in that society. Rather than
demonizing and finger-pointing, under the tutelage of outsiders and their local ilk, the contending positions would be carefully
examined and compared to find ways of either modifying or discarding the practice without making its practitioners feel shameful
of their culture and of themselves. The zealotry of the SVS approach gives no room for such a considered intra-cultural dialogue
and introspection.
The purpose of this paper is not to raise or validate the idea of an original, pure, or a superior Third World society or culture. Nor
is it to provide a normative blueprint for another human rights corpus, although that project must be pursued with urgency. It did
not set out to provide a substantive critique of the Eurocentric human rights corpus, although doing so is necessary and must be
part of making a complete case the dominant Western human rights project. The Paper is rather a plea for genuine cross-
contamination of cultures to create a new multi-cultural human rights corpus. What is advocated here is the need for the human
rights movement to rethink and re-orient its hierarchized, binary view of the world in which the European West leads the way and
the rest of the globe follows in a structure that resembles a child-parent relationship. Nor does the paper mean to suggest that all
human rights communities in the West believe and work to ratify that hierarchy. Human rights can play a big role in changing the
unjust international order, and particularly the imbalances between the West and the Third World. But it will not do so unless it
stops working within the savage-savior-victim metaphor. Ultimately, the quest must be one for the construction of a human rights
movement that wins.
Fast Track 2007 4


E. The role of the ballot presupposes all their impact turns—the duty of intellectuals is to critically
oppose patterns of domination by rethinking the aspects of what it means to be human. It is only this
form of interrogation that allows us to cultivate society in terms of a renewed value to life
Gill, professor of political science, 2000
(Stephen, professor of political science at York University, Questioning Geopolitics, p. 130‐131)
So what is the role and duty of critical intellectuals in the social sciences and humanities in the context of global crisis?
Unfortunately too many intellectuals subscribe to or create orthodoxy that simply reinforces dominant power-knowledge
structures. Others simply ignore fundamental problems of authority and violence and, as such, indirectly subordinate themselves to
dominant power. By contrast, this chapter has been written from the viewpoint of a critical theory that seeks to develop a new
transnational historical materialist approach. So, from a critical perspective, what is the role and duty of critical intellectuals?
First, they must provide a clear and realistic analysis of the nature and logic of contemporary developments. Second, they
must speak out critically on the basis of their freedom to demand respect for questions of justice. Third, they must oppose
all patterns of domination that destroy the creative human spirit. And finally, they must find ways to develop new critical
perspectives. And at a time of social crisis, where social and political thought seems to be at an impasse as it stands transfixed
before the dilemmas of globalization, intellectuals need to use their creative imagination. They need to help us to rethink the
potentials in society that allow for creativity and greater human possibility—that is, rethink essential aspects of what it means to be
human. This means that political thinkers need to return to the imaginative task of innovation that has been central for the human
spirit since the beginnings of historical time.
Fast Track 2007 5

Africa Link
European conceptions of the inner workings of cultures and rights within Africa tend to be flawed and
racist. Westerners their agenda under the banner of manifest destiny
Accessed: 6/21/07)
Thus although this author admits that the official human rights corpus represents an aspiration to a higher form of human
intelligence, it is rooted in a deep-seated sense of European and Western global predestination.42 As put by Slater, European "belief
in the necessity of an imperial mission to civilize the other and to convert other societies into inferior versions of the same" took
hold in the nineteenth century.43 This impulse at possessing and transforming that which was different found a ready mask and
benign cover in messianic faiths. To European Christian missionaries, for example, Africans were "unlettered" natives in the
"technically barbaric and pre-literacy stage of cultural and social development."44 Hence the purpose of the evangelist was not
"merely to civilize but to Christianize, not merely to convey the Gifts of Civilization."45 By the nineteenth century, the discourse of
white over black superiority had gained popularity and acceptance in Europe:
The advocates of this discourse – Hegel German philosopher Georg Hegel most typically, but duly followed by a host of
"justifiers" – declared that Africa had no history prior to direct contact with Europe. Therefore the Africans, having made no
history of their own, had clearly made no development of their own. Therefore they were not properly human, and could not be left
to themselves but must be "led" towards civilization by other peoples: that is, by the peoples of Europe, especially of western
Europe, and most particularly of Britain and France.46
As if by intuition, the missionary fuses religion with civilization, a process that was meant to remove the native from the
damnation of pre-history and deliver him to the gates of history. In this idiom, human development was defined as a linear and
vertical progression of the dark or backward races from the savage to the civilized, the pre-modern to the modern, from the child to
the adult, and the inferior to the superior.47 Slater has captured this worldview in a powerful passage:
[T]he geological power over other societies, legitimated and codified under the signs of manifest destiny and civilizing missions,
has been a salient feature of earlier Western projects of constructing new world orders. These projects or domains of truth, as they
emanated from Europe or the United States, attempted to impose their hegemony by defining normalcy with reference to a
particular vision of their own cultures, while designating that which was different as other than truth and in need of tutelage.48
Fast Track 2007 6

Dignity and Fundamental Rights Link

The rhetoric of dignity and fundamental rights are under the guise of Western imperialism. They
perpetuate a fiction of neutrality while actually undergrid imposed notions of identity
Accessed: 6/21/07)
This paper argues that the sub-text of human rights is a grand narrative which is hidden in the seemingly neutral and universal
language of the corpus. For instance, the UN Charter talks in endearing terms about its mandate to "[r]eaffirm faith in fundamental
human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and
small."61 This is certainly a noble ideal. But what exactly does that terminology mean here? It is the view of this author that this
phraseology conceals more than it reveals. What, for example, are fundamental human rights, and how are they determined? Do
such rights have a cultural, religious, ethical, moral, political, or other biases? What exactly is meant by the "dignity and worth" of
the human person? Is there an essentialized human being that the corpus imagines? What historical and cultural materiale have
being used in constructing that individual? Is that the individual found in the streets and the slums of large metropolitan centers
such as New Delhi, Beijing, Nairobi, Boston, Mexico City, and London? Or is that the individual resident in rural Iraq, the slopes
of Mt. Kenya, the Brazilian rainforest, or the frigid plains of Siberia?
Does the human rights corpus provide a definitely universal signpost, an internationally recognizable silhouette, of the human
being it envisions? If it does, how is that being constructed, and what political, social, and economic arrangements does the corpus
intend to mount in defense of the "dignity and worth" of that person? Does the corpus, for example, imagine a particular typology
of state that best suits that ideal human being?] In addition to this herculean task, that of defining the prototypical human being, the
United Nations Charter put forward another pretense, that all nations "large and small" enjoy some equality, even as it ratified
power imbalances between, on the one hand, the Third World and, on the other, the dominant American and European powers, and
gave the latter the primary power to define and determine "world peace" and "stability."62 It is the argument of this Paper that these
fictions of neutrality and universality, like so much else in a lopsided world, undergird the human rights corpus and belie its true
identity and purposes. This international rhetoric of goodwill reveals, just beneath the surface, intentions and reality that stand in
great tension and contradiction to it.
This paper makes the case that the main authors of human rights have constructed a three-dimensional prism in which all the
angles of the prism are interconnected. These authors, who are the United Nations, Western states, so-called international non-
governmental organizations (INGOs),63 and senior Western academics, agree on the fundamental importance of human rights in
any society.64 This prismatic rendering of the human rights corpus and its discourse is one-directional and predictable. It is a black-
and-white construction that pits good and against evil. The first dimension of the prism depicts a savage and evokes images of
savagery and barbarism. The abominations of the savage are presented as being so cruel and unimaginable that their state is a
negation of humanity. Although in the story of human rights the state is presented as the classic savage, an ogre forever bent on the
consumption of humans, the reality is far more complex.6563, 67 (1997). Savagery in human rights connotes much more than the
state, the instrumentality that in human rights terms is necessary for the operationalization of savagery. States become savages
when they choke off and oust civil society.66]
Fast Track 2007 7

Disease Link
Killer virus narratives stabilize the western conception of the self by juxtaposing it off of colonialist
stereotypes of the unclean, disease-ridden other
Schell, phd candidate in literature, 1997
(Heather, Stanford, Outburst! A Chilling True Story about Emerging-Virus Narratives and Pandemic Social Change
Configurations 5.1, p. 93-133)
The virus narratives react to the suddenly friable self with several different strategies. They frequently fantasize about the
supposedly clear-cut days of high imperialism. Occasionally, they panic about the lived death of the subject. More rarely,
they dream about a world of achieved, utopian multiculturalism. The first and last response are relatively incompatible;
however, some notion of the primitive is common to all. As the ultimate non-self, the primitive plays a powerful role in
virus narratives. Marianna Torgovnick dissects the concept in a very useful way in Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern
Lives. The primitive as Other helps ground "the Western sense of self"; it is usually defined "as different from (usually
opposite to) the present. After that, reactions to the present take over." 81 Whatever "primitive" means in different
contexts, it says much more about Westerners and the Western world than about any other people or place. For virus
writers, the primitive represents the last bastion of the biological unknown, where iconoclastic viruses practice on local
populations in preparation for pandemics. Viruses living there are unhampered by our human rights regulations. The
primitive thus functions as the location of what Douglas calls "disorder," because creatures and possibilities develop there
in a way that the virus writers see as impossible back home. Those writers who seek solutions or at least comfort in colonial
fantasies have chosen the one era when the West felt it had attained some authority in the world of the primitive. White
men were confident then, at least through the tinge of nostalgia. They strode alone, confidently, through the bush, bagging
man-eaters that had been terrorizing villages, earning the perpetual gratitude of the natives with gifts of Christianity,
hygiene, and lighters. They knew who was who. Though they might venture into regions of ambiguity, ambiguity stayed put
when they went home. Disorder did not travel in those days. [End Page 115]
Popular science texts on viruses particularly seem to treasure imperialist imagery and forget its metaphoric origins. 82 The
virus experts in their writing are coded as the 1990s, postcolonial equivalent of big-game hunters. Rob Webster, for
example, "has been tracking flu viruses" for half a century; "he hopes to catch a pandemic flu in the act of emerging." 83
This phrase nicely captures the predatory connotations of "emerging," the newly coined expression for recently discovered
viruses. 84 Dennis Burkitt, a Scottish surgeon in Uganda who ultimately discovers a viral cause for a particular type of lymphoma,
undertakes "the Long Safari" to perform his "geographical biopsy." 85 Preston frequently refers to "virus hunters"--virile, driven
Western men who are nearly indistinguishable from the fictional characters in several centuries of colonial fantasy.
Consider this portrayal:
[Gene Johnson] spent years traveling across central Africa in search of the reservoirs of Ebola and Marburg viruses. He had
virtually ransacked Africa looking for these life forms, but despite his searches he had never found them in their natural hiding
places. No one knew where any of the filoviruses came from; no one knew where they lived in nature. . . . To find the hidden
reservoir of Ebola was one of Johnson's great ambitions. 86
This imagery employs the tropes of exploration, adventure, and treasure hunting. By playing on these tropes, the author
encourages readers to imagine viruses as they would an elephant graveyard or the source of the Nile. Hunting metaphors
associate virology and virus hunting with manly political activity on the world sphere, instead of high-tech but possibly
nerdy fussing with electron microscopes and computer analysis.
Fast Track 2007 8

Disease Link
Fascination with epidemics is due to our own anxieties about our increasingly complex world—these
tropes are more often than not used to bolster racist prejudices
Schell, phd candidate, literature, 1997
(Heather, , Stanford, Outburst! A Chilling True Story about Emerging-Virus Narratives and Pandemic Social Change
Configurations 5.1, p. 93-133)
Our current fascination with viruses springs from our worries about the future. Ultimately, the metaphor of the virus represents our
possible fates--the disintegration of self or of nation; Armageddon; the triumph of multiculturalism and the global community; the
ecosystem's anger at and vengeance for our meddling; the loss of [End Page 131] the unknown; or the escape of the unknown into
our society, where everything familiar will be destroyed in its path. We might indeed be coming to see the world as an integrated
system, but such integration jeopardizes boundaries many had believed to be real. Viral discourse raises the possibility of a type of
global busing, bringing the foreign into our neighborhoods through infection. At the same time, fear of such change (especially
change conceptualized as disease) could successfully stall it. Boundary thinking might seem stale to theorists, but it is not static.
People who crave boundaries can make boundaries real. Therefore, we must not rely on the current cultural vulnerability to
questions of identity as the onset of some automatic process that will ultimately dismantle traditional inequities.
An epidemic future might mean that we have to pay attention to peoples, cultures, economies, and ecologies outside our own
national borders. Unfortunately, an insistence on perceiving international relationships in terms of infiltrating viral infections limits
the effectiveness of our response. D. A. Henderson of Johns Hopkins has recommended the development of a "network of
international centers to detect the emergence of dangerous diseases and, if possible, to contain them." 144 Morse further suggests
that "development agencies should be educated to include emerging-virus considerations when evaluating major changes in land
use or when making decisions that will alter ecological equilibria or population densities. It may even be possible to develop
regular 'viral impact assessments.'" 145 While this proposal has some value, it targets only one factor of our experience of disease.
According to the World Health Organization, "it becomes more and more clear that morbidity and mortality due to these infectious
diseases are as much a function of the state of human development than they are of the virulence of the microorganisms which are
their biological cause"; populations living in poverty suffer from a disproportionate share of epidemic diseases. 146 Insisting on
some [End Page 132] inherently foreign viral geography might serve to prod us out of our myopic nationalism, but it can also be
too easily marshaled as spurious proof to bolster preexisting prejudices. Disease surveillance thus offers only a partial, problematic
solution to a quandary that will remain unresolved until we are ready to perceive our complex engagement with the world through
a different metaphor.
Fast Track 2007 9

Disease Link
The killer virus narrative reduces the body to an object that is only properly situated against the
normalized conception of the “clean and proper body” of the socialized individual
DOUGHERTY, assistant professor in English at Elizabethtown Community College, 2001
(STEPHEN, The Biopolitics of the Killer Virus Novel, CULTURAL CRITIQUE, SPRING)
As we discover, the body is subjected to so much violation in contemporary killer virus novels that it ceases to be a body, strictly
speaking. Rather, it is what is left over from itself after the virus has had its way, the irreducible residue of its own organic
functioning. One more revolting description will sufficiently prove the point. In The Blood Artists, Chuck Hogan describes a
doomed victim whose skin "rot[s] off his body in a fetid stink, marble-sized boils and violet tumorous ulcerations marking the dark
map of his flesh. It was less than flesh, a fungus that had grown up over a skeleton" (23). Flesh yet less than flesh, the body
becomes alien to itself in Hogan's novel. In its viscous reduction to ungovernable flows and seepages, it is transformed in its
totality into what Julia Kristeva calls the abject, those elements of the body that are susceptible in our culture to being symbolized
as impure, and whose symbolic refusal helps to constitute "the clean and proper body" of the socialized individual. 8 But at the
same time, the killer virus novel threatens to negate the logic of the abject, as well as the psychological register within which the
abject functions, because there is no proper body for the social subject left to be split off from that which does not properly belong
to it. [End Page 7] The body in the killer virus novel attests to its own permeability, a hallmark feature of literatures of bodily
anxiety. But more rad-ically, the virally infected body attests to its susceptibility to total collapse into an "outside" that no longer
functions to demarcate the condition of possibility for the "inside." The killer virus genre thus presents a world where the boundary
between the human as a biological entity and what lies outside it is profoundly unstable, so that man as a subject threatens to fall
back into the object world-- and more specifically, as we shall see, the animal world--that surrounds him.
The killer virus narrative reinforces racist/colonial notions of otherness

Maryk's dilemma, his capture by the double bind wherein his ministrations on behalf of man assure the destruction of the
environment that sustains man, is the dilemma of The Blood Artists. Indeed, as I shall consider in conclusion, it is a defining
contradiction in the killer virus novel more broadly. At the same time that killer virus texts pay homage to a progressive,
environmentalist agenda, and at the same time that they tacitly acknowledge the fragmentation and multiplicities of a postmodern
selfhood that is commensurate with the environmentalist ethos, they reinforce an integral and paranoid model of subjectivity
that harkens back to the high era of Western imperialism. Out of a kind of historical necessity, they also reinscribe the
complex of racist attitudes that nurtured this paranoid subjectivity. In terms of political imagination, then, the great failure
of the killer virus texts is that the only alternative to the posthuman condition they are capable of imagining is a return to
man on the imperial model--the white man hell-bent on subjugating both "nature" and other peoples whose less
technologically advanced social conditions threaten his fantasy of human dominion over nature. Like medical/cultural
discourse in the colonial era, contemporary killer virus novels represent brutal aggression against nonwhites as
epidemiological defense in the name of an endangered humanity. 19 Indeed, just as Donna Haraway warns that "[t]he residue of
the history of colonial tropical medicine and natural history in late twentieth century immune discourse should not be
underestimated" (223), neither can the lingering presence of colonial racist discourse in killer virus texts (the trade paperback
version of immune discourse) be underestimated or written off as a merely unfortunate generic idiosyncrasy. As with Zero's lesson,
we can avail ourselves of the unpleasant lessons that this racist presence speaks, but only if we confront it head on.[End
Page 18]
Fast Track 2007 10

Disease Link
Bacteriology serves imperialist ideology
The casualness with which Preston registers his nostalgia for the colonialist past and with which he expresses
colonialist/imperialist assumptions about, for example, the relative desirability of the English way and the hierarchical relation
between the province and the metropole, is striking. But it is not uncommon in the killer virus genre. Indeed, the image that
Preston conjures of the hot-waxed British Empire rolling into the twenty-first century on automatic pilot serves as an appropriate
figure for how our "postcolonial" moment is perceived, and valued, in the genre per se. In effect, killer virus novels ignore that
we have emerged from the colonial era and that the developing world is politically (if not economically) independent from
the old imperial metropoles. We witness instead a situation wherein, as Laura Otis puts it, "[b]acteriology serve[s] . . .
imperialist ideology" (5). The American scientists cum adventure heroes who boldly go forth to do battle with evil viruses
are the late twentieth-century version of the "microbe-hunters," the epidemiologists,[End Page 19] bacteriologists, and
related medical personnel who, Otis explains, were instrumental in nineteenth-century imperial expansion (5). 20 They stand
as ready reminders of the West's continued hegemony, and they also help to cultivate a properly fascinated loathing of the
Southern Hemisphere and its dispensable, disease-prone peoples.
The virtuous Dr. Pearse, ever obsessed with health and cleanliness, explains to a group of international reporters that
One of the lessons of what we now call the "antibiotic era" of the previous century was that as weaker microbes fall away, more
resilient ones survive and emerge, and sometimes with a vengeance. We will never eradicate viruses or bacteria from the earth, nor
should we. What we as a people must do is to seek to control viruses. (59)
In the context of the genocidal events that immediately precede Pearse's lecture to the press, however, it is not clear whether the
doctor is referring to the dark, infected people who suffer the brunt of the pain and the suffering in the novel's
representational world or if at the same time he is referring to the deadly microbes themselves. "America is no longer the
world's policeman," Pearse concurs with a British reporter; "it is its doctor" (59). But it's a fine line indeed between a good
doctor and a bad cop in The Blood Artists. At the beginning of the novel, Pearse and Maryk are directed by the CDC to
investigate a mysterious viral outbreak in central Africa. What they discover when they get there is a womb-like cave that "is
simply too hot to preserve" (42). Therefore both the cave and its surrounding ecological system must be destroyed. They also find
indigenous tribal people who, infected and uninfected alike, must be sacrificed for the sake of a greater, white humanity. "If we
don't stop it here, cauterize it, now," Maryk explains, "it's going to slip out of the jungle and march across the continent and the
planet" (43). But Pearse's kindness to a young African girl whom he allows to escape subverts Maryk's brutal vigilance. The
specter of pandemic disease that killer virus novels conjure as their stock-in-trade is certainly horrifying. But what is equally
horrifying is their recuperation of an imperialist model of Western selfhood in response to the dehumanizing threat of the virus. In
The Blood Artists, for example, Peter Maryk is the fantasy of the imperial self as a defended "Christian" stronghold. Due to his
[End Page 20] enhanced immune system, or what Pearse dubiously refers to as "the monstrous aberrance of [his] genetic
superiority" (49), Maryk is incapable of even catching a cold, let alone an exotic viral disease. In the body of Peter Maryk, or "Dr.
Peter Christian," the pseudonym he uses in an article that he and Pearse coauthor about his strange immunity, self versus non-self
recognition is perfect; the white Christian warrior is impregnable.
Fast Track 2007 11

FGM Link
Western representations of Female Genital Mutilation depicts cultures as savage and uncivilized and
further racist notions of barbaric African culture
Accessed: 6/21/07)
The human rights report is a catalogue of abuses committed by the state against liberal values.105 It criticizes the state for departing
from the civil and political rights obligations provided for in the major instruments. Its purpose is to "shame" the Third World state
by pointing out the gulf between the state’s conduct and internationally-sanctioned "civilized" behavior. This departure from
"good" behavior is stigmatized and used to paint the state either as a pariah or out of step with the rest of the civilized world.
Reports normally contain corrective measures and recommendations to the offending state. In many instances, however, the
audience of these reports is the West or some other Western institution, such as the European Union. The pleas of the INGO report
here pit a First World state or institution against a Third World state or a Third World culture. The report asks that the West cut off
aid, condition assistance, impose sanctions, or publicly denounce the unacceptable conduct of the Third World state.106 INGOs
thus ask First World states and institutions to play a significant role in "taming" and "civilizing" Third World states, even though
such a role relies on the power and economic imbalances of the international order which favors the West over the South.107]
But the human rights report tells another, more interesting, story about the target of the human rights corpus. In this story, the
report tells of several images of the savage, including the Third World state, the quintessential savage. Human rights literature is
replete with images of blood-thirsty Third World despots and trigger-happy police and security forces. Perhaps in no other area
than in the advocacy over "female genital mutilation"108 is the image of culture as the savage more poignant. First, the descriptions
of the practice are so searing and revolting that they evoke images of a barbarism that defies civilization. Of the three forms of
female circumcision practiced, two are described in particularly graphic and cruel language.109 Although the practice has dissipated
over the last several decades, it is still carried it out in parts of Africa and the Middle East. Given Western stereotypes of barbaric
natives110 in the "dark" continent, Western advocacy over FGM has evoked images of machete-wielding natives only too eager to
inflict pain on women in their societies. The speed, for example, with which the 1994 mass killings in Rwanda took place, and the
weapons used, have come to symbolize in the Western mind the barbarism of Africans. Gourevitch, an American journalist, was
one of the instrumental voices in the creation of this portrayal:
Decimation means the killing of every tenth person in a population, and in the spring and early summer of 1994 a program of
massacres decimated the Republic of Rwanda. Although the killing was low-tech – performed largely by machete – it was carried
out at a dazzling speed: of an original population of about seven and a half million, at least eight hundred thousand people were
killed in just a hundred days. Rwandans speak of a million deaths, and they may be right. The dead of Rwanda accumulated at
nearly three times the rate of Jewish dead during the holocaust. It was the most efficient mass killing since the atomic bombings of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki.111
Fast Track 2007 12

FGM/Gender Rights Link

Western conceptions of feminism and gender rights and seeped in essentialism and imperialism
Accessed: 6/21/07)
The impression left by the reports and the activities of powerful INGOs is unmistakable. While the West is presented as the
cradle of feminism, countries in the South have been constructed as steeped in traditions and practices which are harmful
to women. In one of her first reports, Radhika Coomaraswamy, the U.N. Special Rapporteur On Violence Against Women,
confirmed this impression when she noted that certain "customary practices and some aspects of tradition are often the cause of
violence against women."90 She noted that "besides female genital mutilation, a whole host of practices violate female dignity.
Foot binding, male preference, early marriage, virginity tests, dowry deaths, sati, female infanticide and malnutrition are among
the many practices which violate a woman’s human rights."91 All these practices are found in non-Western cultures. Among other
treaties, CEDAW is seen as a treaty of particular relevance to non-Western cultures because of their poor treatment of women.
Images of practices such as "female genital mutilation," dowry burnings, and honor killings have come to frame the discourse, and
in that vein stigmatize non-Western cultures.]
Elsewhere, the text of human rights points an accusing finger at the Third World. Non-European political and cultural traditions
which, which lie outside the liberal tradition, and do not yield political democratic structures, are demonized in the text of human
rights and its discourse. Take, for example, the view of human rights documents in the area of political participation. Here, the
human rights corpus expects all societies to support a pluralist, democratic society. Both the UDHR and the ICCPR, the two key
documents in the area of civil and political rights, are explicit about the primacy of expressive and associational rights in any
society. They both give citizens the right to political participation through elections and the guarantee of the right to assemble,
associate, and disseminate their ideas.92 This scheme of rights coupled with equal protection and due process rights implies a
political democracy or a political society with a regularly elected government, genuine competition for political of lice, and
separation of powers with judicial independence. While it is true that the human rights regime does not dictate the particular
permutation or strain of political democracy, it requires a Western-style liberal democracy nevertheless. Systems of
government such as monarchies, theocracies, dictatorships, and one party-states would violate associational rights and run afoul of
the human rights corpus.93 The human rights corpus raises the specter of political savagery when it rejects non-Western
political cultures as undemocratic.
Fast Track 2007 13

Freedom Link
The savior promises freedom but the their language ensures cultural and racial hierarchy and
domination. This rhetoric guarantees continued domination and racism. This evidence is specific to
Western imposition on Africa.
Accessed: 6/21/07)
The last dimension of the prism is that of the savior or the redeemer, the good angel who protects, vindicates, civilizes, restrains,
and safeguards. The savior is the victim’s bulwark against tyranny. The savior’s promise is simple yet complex: freedom. It is
freedom from the tyrannies of the state, tradition, and culture. But it is also the freedom to create a better society based on
particular values. In the human rights story, the savior is the human rights corpus itself but in reality the United Nations, Western
governments, INGOs, and Western charities like the New York-based Ford Foundation are the rescuers, the redeemers of a
benighted world.71 In reality, however, these institutions are merely a front. The savior is ultimately a set of culturally-based norms
and practices that inhere in liberal thought and philosophy. This Paper argues that the savage-victim-savior metaphor of human
rights carries racial connotations in which the international hierarchy of race and color are confirmed and revitalized. The
metaphor is in fact necessary for the continuation of the global racial hierarchy. One cannot exist without the other. Thus
the savages and victims are generally non-white and non-Western, while the saviors are white. This is an old truism which
has found new life in the metaphor of human rights. But there is also a sense in which human rights can be seen as a project for
the redemption of the redeemers, in which whites who are privileged globally as a people -- and who have historically visited
untold suffering and savage atrocities against non-whites -- redeem themselves by "defending" and "civilizing" "lower,"
"unfortunate," and "inferior" peoples. The metaphor is thus laced with the pathology of self-redemption.
Although it is not the purpose of this paper to address particularized national settings, suffice it to note that the savage-victim-
savior metaphor has deep historical parallels in the national histories of states where non-whites, and especially persons of
African ancestry, have been subjected to oppression, abuse, exploitation, and domination by whites.72 The history of South
Africa, as told by Nelson Mandela, is not just a testament to the co-operation of black and white South Africans against apartheid,
the system of official segregation.73 There is in that history a strong undercurrent of white benefactors, sometimes pejoratively
referred to as "do-gooders," a species of humans cut from the abolitionist cloth.74 During the darkest days of apartheid, many
individual white lawyers, white law firms, and white human rights organizations spoke for and defended black South Africans.75
Many whites became key leaders in what was essentially a black liberation struggle.76 In the United States, from the earliest days
of the enslavement of Africans by whites up to the civil rights movement, whites often played important roles in the struggle for
equality by blacks. As in South Africa, many American whites held key positions in the fight for civil rights.77 It seems politically
incorrect to consign white participation in these noble causes to the savior-victim-savage metaphor. But it is an unavoidable
conclusion that the metaphor largely describes their involvement. It would also be a tragic historical error not to recognize the
importance of those struggles to the liberal project and its centrality to democracy and the freedom of whites as a people
themselves.
The purpose of this paper is not to assign ignoble intentions or motivations on the individual proponents, leaders, or participants in
the human rights movement. Without a doubt many of the leaders and foot-soldiers of the human rights movement are driven by a
burning desire to end human suffering, as they see it from their vantage point. The white American suburban high school or
college student who joins the local chapter of Amnesty International and protests FGM in far away lands or writes letters to
political or military leaders whose names do not easily roll off the English tongue no doubt drawing partly from a well of noblesse
oblige. The zeal to see all humanity as related and the impulse to help those defined as in need is noble and is not the problem
addressed here. A certain degree of human universality is inevitable and desirable. But what that universality is, what historical
and cultural stew it is made of, and how it is accomplished make all the difference. What the high school or college student ought
to realize is that their zeal to save others – even from themselves – is steeped in Western and European history. It drove the
Christian crusaders and partly fired the imaginations of the colonialists. If one culture is allowed the prerogative of imperialism,
the right to define and impose on others what it deems good for humanity, the very meaning of freedom itself will have been
abrogated. That is why a human rights movement that pivots on the savage-victim-savior metaphor violates the very idea of the
sanctity of humanity that purportedly inspires it.
Fast Track 2007 14

HIV/AIDS Link
Outside HIV and AIDS development projects under the banner of human rights have limited
applicability in Africa. Piecemeal reforms pushed by imperialist human rights projects increase
inequality and tradeoff with other needed policies
In this context of a concerted attempt to redress widespread and systemic health inequalities inherited from apartheid, South Africa is facing the most rapidly
expanding HIV epidemic in the world. Policy responses to HIV/AIDS have been characterized by a lack of decisive leadership and
unproductive conflict between state and civil society, difficulty in prioritizing AIDS treatment and prevention during this period of
transition, and highly uneven program implementation through a quasi-federal political system.23
Most recently, two developments have focused attention on questions of treatment access for HIV In 1997, the South African Department of Health passed
legislation aimed in part at controlling drug prices. The legislation allowed for both parallel importation of drugs and the issuing of compulsory licenses for the
manufacture of drugs still under patent.24 Multinational pharmaceutical companies sought a court order against the government on the basis that sections of the
legislation abrogated patent rights and were contrary to agreements on intellectual property rights established through the World Trade Organization.25 However,
in the face of massive negative public opinion, the drug companies eventually withdrew their legal action, freeing the government to access antiretroviral and other
AIDS-related medication at cheaper prices on the international market.26 Nonetheless, although regulations for the legislation are still being finalized, the
government has indicated that it will not be purchasing antiretroviral medication for the public health sector.27 The second development has been a high profile
advocacy campaign for HIV-positive pregnant women to obtain treatment to prevent mother-to-child transmission, most recently culminating in a court action by
the Treatment Action Campaign against South Africa's Minister of Health to compel her to provide such treatment as part of the constitutional right of access to
health care.28 Thus, in government and civil society responses to the HIV epidemic, rights arguments have been central to key
developments in the use of human rights standards, particularly those contained in the South African Constitution, to inform legal
actions, underpin popular mobilization, and frame policy objectives. Questions then arise as to whether public health objectives are
best reached through such rightsbased approaches, and whether traditional public health approaches can integrate rights-based
approaches to promoting health, particularly when the health sector faces multiple other challenges, not least of all dealing with a
country in transition and with multiple sources of morbidity and mortality other than HIV. Three arguments in particular have been
advanced by various sources against the usefulness of a human-rights-based approach in addressing HIV in the region. These are
simplified for purposes of illustration as follows:
* human rights as a Western construct has limited applicability to societies with non-Western traditional values;
* human rights approaches allow vocal lobby groups to gain access to scarce resources and may increase rather than
decrease inequity; and * human rights, as illustrated with HIV/AIDS treatment access, tends to promote selective Primary
Health Care. Human rights as a Western construct
Although recognized internationally29 as a key element to HIV prevention and control, protection of the rights of people with HIV is not always accorded
equivalent priority at local levels. In some cases, arguments are explicitly made that human rights is a Western construct, and that its application to the HIV
epidemic is ill-intended.30 For example, as much as human rights activists criticize culture in traditional societies as a defense of privilege,31 "rights talk" has been
criticized as "legitimis[ing] pressures on indigenous communities to adopt ways more consonant with the sensibilities of elites, pressures which would have been
dismissed as eurocentric only a few decades ago."32 How might this criticism apply to HIV policy and programs? Condom use,
monogamy, and explicit sex education to young people have all been targeted as "not in our culture" concepts, interfering
directly with many of the rights approaches to gender equity and reproductive rights regarded as essential to HIV control.
Slightly more thoughtful analyses point to the way in which preoccupations with confidentiality among health-care providers in
the rural KwaZulu-Natal Province have undermined traditional communitarian responses to illness by preventing HIV from being
treated in an open manner.33 While there can be no doubt that the notion of human rights in its philosophical origins and its present-day incarnations under
the machinery of the United Nations does represent a construction deeply rooted in Western traditions, the question is whether it is incompatible with respect for
cultural differences. If "rights talk" also speaks to concentric circles of privilege14 that extend beyond groups and countries to questions of global privilege, rights-
based strategies can become tools to promote respect for cultural difference, while recognizing equality and fairness. For example, South Africa's Constitution
explicitly recognizes the right to participate in and enjoy one's culture,35 affording a legal standard under which to balance conflicting rights. Similarly, the African
Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights reflects an attempt to systematize the "historical tradition and the values of African civilisation" within various aspects of a
regional instrument to promote and protect rights.36 From a public health perspective, motivating community participation and behavioral change at individual and
community levels is critically dependent on creating trust in the message and the agent. Some of the more innovative HIV/AIDS work in South Africa to date has
successfully integrated traditional culture into programs and policies. For example, involving traditional healers in programs to address HIV has
met with promising success,37 as has placing developmental considerations above narrow biomedical and behavioral objectives in
innovative HIV projects involving South African miners.38 Human rights as increasing inequity One of the assumptions
underlying the arguments why the government cannot afford to pay for antiretroviral treatment is that it will meet the needs of a
highly vocal, well-organized lobby group and, by doing so, neglect the needs of less vocal, poorly organized, and more marginal
groups, thereby increasing inequity.39 For example, the Minister of Health40 for the KwaZulu-Natal Province argued at the
International AIDS 2000 Conference against public funding for antiretrovirals on the basis of cost: "What if we have money for
ARVs [antiretrovirals] but no money for clean water? How do we then treat [the resulting cases of] diarrhea?"41 From his
perspective, antiretrovirals were clearly unaffordable because they would exclude the possibility of more basic health-care
resources.42 Those within progressive nongovernmental organizations in the health sector have similarly warned of redirecting
resources away from more or equally important areas of health care,43 and similar sentiments have been echoed by members of
the publiC.44
Fast Track 2007 15
Human rights are imperialist

Human Rights legislate Eurocentric values and colonialism
Accessed: 6/21/07)
Human rights is little more than an exercise in which the good western state is juxtaposed against the illiberal, immoral and
draconian non-western one; a process said to derive from Eurocentric ideas of colonial superiority and domination, and sustained
today by the west and major human rights institutions. The first dimension of the prism depicts a savage and evokes images of
barbarism. Although not confined to the offending state, the state is portrayed as the overarching perpetrator, which chooses to let
‘illiberal, anti-democratic or other authoritarian’ culture run rife, in stark contrast to the ‘good’ western state who brings these
cultural driven atrocities to an abrupt halt
Fast Track 2007 16

Human rights rhetoric link

The rhetoric of human rights pits groups against one another. Under the guise of ‘rights’, Western
nations portray themselves as saviors and in turn use coercive measures to control and subvert non-
Western cultures
Accessed: 6/21/07)
The human rights movement,1 which includes its corpus and discourse, is marked by a damning metaphor. The sub-text of human
rights is a grand narrative of an epochal contest that pits savages, on the one hand, against victims and saviors, on the other.2 The
savages-victims-saviors (SVS)3 construction is a three-dimensional compound metaphor in which each dimension is a metaphor in
itself.4 Significantly, this metaphor and narrative rejects the cross-contamination of cultures.5 In other words, the metaphor is
premised on the transformation by Western cultures of non-Western cultures, and not the fashioning of a multi-cultural mosaic.6
This self representation of human rights requires moral and historical certainty and a belief in particular inflexible truths.7 As
eloquently noted by Mary Ann Glendon, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the founding document of the human rights
movement, "is already showing signs of having achieved the status of holy writ within the human rights movement."8 The UDHR,
the grandest of all human rights documents, endows the struggle between good and evil with historicity in which the defeat of the
latter is only possible through human rights.9 This is now popularly accepted as the normal script of human rights. In fact, there is
today an orgy of celebration of this script by prominent scholars who see in it the key to the redemption of humanity.10(1992). But
this grand script of human rights raises a multitude of normative and cultural questions and problems.
The SVS metaphor is vividly manifested in both the norms and the discourse of the human rights movement. The paper argues that
the compound metaphor of human rights – with its three sub-metaphors of the savage, victim, and savior – that the central purpose
of the human rights movement is to transform society into a particular Eurocentric prototype. It argues in all three sub-metaphors,
for example, that political democracy, as known in the West, is an organic part human rights. In other words, the paper contends
that "savage" cultures and peoples lie outside the human rights orbit, and by implication, the regime of political democracy. It is
this distance from human rights that allows certain cultures to create victims. Political democracy is then an essential panacea.
Other textual examples, which are anchored in cultural phenomena, such as "traditional"practices that appear to negate the equal
protection for women, are deployed throughout the Paper to illustrate the gulf between human rights and non-liberal, non-
European cultures.
As a civilizing crusade, the human rights movement is now a comprehensive cosmology on which legitimate statehood partially
rests. The adoption by the United Nations of universal human rights norms – a set of values that determine the fundamental
character of any state or society – ostensibly closes the book on the cultural biases of the human rights project. Unlike yesterday,
condemnations of human rights violations are longer just empty ritual. The United Nations, regional organizations such as the
European Union, the Organization of African Unity, the Organization of American States, and individual states of all cultural and
political traditions, including those in the Third World,11 have taken coercive measures against other states in the name of human
rights. Many non-governmental organizations in the Third World openly oppose human rights violations by their own states and
societies. In other words, non-Europeans now confront each other within the confines of their states over the enforcement of
human rights. The observance or denial of human rights now pits African against African, Arab against Arab, and Asian and
Asian. The human rights project is no longer just a critique of the Third World by the West.
Fast Track 2007 17

Human Rights deny agency

Western nations have imposed their authority on lesser developed nations. They seek to transform
natives into “normal” and desirable homogenous culture that denies human agency
Accessed: 6/21/07)
Although the human rights movement arose in Europe, with the express purpose of containing European savagery, it is today a
civilizing crusade aimed primarily at the Third World. It is one thing for Europeans and North Americans, whose states share a
common philosophical and legal ancestry, to create a common political and cultural template to govern their societies. But it is
quite another to insist that their particular vision of society is the only permissible civilization which must now be imposed on all
human societies, particularly those outside Europe. The merits of the European and American civilization of human rights
notwithstanding, all missionary work is suspect, and for Third World states may easily seem part of the colonial project. Once
again, the "superior" Europeans and North Americans descend on "backward" natives in the Third World with the human rights
mission to free them from the claws of despotic governments and benighted cultures.
The historical pattern is undeniable here. It forms the long queue of the colonial administrator, the Bible-wielding Christian
missionary, the merchant of free enterprise, the exporter of political democracy, and now the human rights zealot. In each case the
"native" culture is pushed to transform by the European culture. The local must be replaced with the European, the "universal."
Are the connections between human rights and particular attributes of European-American culture, such as hedonism, excess
individualism, free markets, and now globalization contingent, and not organic? Is, in fact, the text of human rights so open that it
is up for grabs, allowing different interests to make whatever claims they wish on it? In other words, are non-European cultures
better advised to adopt the human rights text to their specific contexts, but leaving its core in place, if they seek redemption from
their own backwardness? Can they segregate the "good" from the "bad" in human rights and reject the baggage of the West, while
building a culture that is free from the evils that deny human potential?
Fast Track 2007 18

Infrastructure Link
Building health infrastructure and increasing number of services doesn’t allow everyone to have
access to facilities and treatment. Only elites benefit
Despite such idealistic constitutional commitments, the practical implementation of such rights in post-apartheid South Africa
remains elusive.19 For example, although there has been a massive expansion of health facilities under the clinic building
program,20 a 2000 survey found that 20 percent of all clinics had no means of communication and thus would be unable to call an
ambulance or notify other facilities of a critically ill patient. Twenty-five percent of clinics lacked running water; and 8 percent,
electricity. In those clinics with electricity, 32 percent reported it was not working consistently over the past month.21 Similarly,
presentations made to the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Health evaluating abortion services introduced under recent
legislation showed that, despite the importance of such services as a potential means of access to reproductive rights, utilization of
these services was almost entirely confined to a relatively well-off educated urban class.22 As will be shown in the course of this
paper, realization of rights related to health and health care depends upon a range of factors, including interpretation of
legal provisions, political will, and judgments relating to the availability of resources.
Fast Track 2007 19

International Institutions Links

International institutions are tools of Western governments and do not culturally or politically
represent the Third World states that they legislate against. This reinforces the savage-victim-savior
mentality and undercuts the validity of any noble intentions. The affirmative cannot solve
Accessed: 6/21/07)
The purpose of this paper is not to invalidate the human rights corpus. Although the corpus springs from Europe, Third World
states have also participated in its legitimation, particularly at the United Nations, the institution most responsible for the creation
and universalization of human rights norms. Much, however, should not be made of Third World participation in the making of
human rights law, although some academics point to the increasing role played by non-Western states and cultures in the
development of human rights norms.24 The levers of power at the U.N. and other international law-making fora have traditionally
been out of reach of the Third World. And even if they were, it is doubtful that most Third World states represent their peoples and
cultures. In other words, a claim about the "universality" or "democratization" of human rights norm-making at the U.N. cannot be
made simply by looking at the numerical domination of that august body by Third World states.
The central claim of this paper is that as a fundamentally Eurocentric doctrine, the human rights corpus, though well-meaning,
suffers from several basic flaws which are captured in the SVS metaphor. Precisely because the corpus falls within the historical
continuum of the colonial project, in which a superior and a subordinate are essential actors, it undermines its basic claim of
universality. The human rights corpus therefore lacks a valid, universalist warrant, and cannot convey the face of neutrality for
what constitutes human rights or human rights violations. This inability for cross-cultural legitimacy is built into the arrogant,
abusive, and biased rhetoric of the human rights movement. Thus the use of the rhetoric makes the normative judgments it conveys
without a warrant of validity to Third Worlders, its primary addressees. Conversely, since the rhetoric is flawed in its internal
logic, even those who rely on it, the West or its addressors, wonder whether it will resonate "out there." This curse of the SVS
rhetoric has no bearing on the substance of the normative judgment being rendered. A particular leader, for example, might
properly be labeled a war criminal, but such a label may carry no validity because of the curse of the SVS rhetoric. Put differently,
the arrogance of the SVS rhetoric may undercut the validity of an action taken against a serious human rights violator. In
other words, the SVS rhetoric may undermine the universalist warrant that it claims, and thus engender resistance to the
apprehension and punishment of real violators. But the paper also makes another point, that the use of the SVS rhetoric is in
itself insulting and unjust because it draws from supremacist First World/Third World hierarchies and the attendant domination
and subordination which are essential for those constructions.
To be sure, however, the idea of rights and claims to their supremacy is not new. The culture of rights in the present milieu
stretches back at least to the rise of the modern state in Europe. It is that state’s monopoly of violence and the instruments of
coercion that gave rise to the culture of rights to counterbalance the abusive state.25 Cover refers to this construction as the myth of
the jurisprudence of rights that allows society to both legitimize and control the state.26] John Locke had captured several centuries
earlier a similar dialectic in his Two Treatises of Government.27 Human rights, however, renew the meaning and scope of rights in
a radical way. Human rights bestow naturalness, transhistoricity, and universality to rights. But this Paper lodges a counterclaim
against such a leap. Although this Paper is certainly informed by the works of critical legal scholars,28 feminist critiquers of rights
discourse,29 and critical race theorists,30 it differs from all three because it seeks to address an international phenomenon, and not a
municipal, distinctly American question. Thus it asks that the critique of human rights be based not just on American or European
legal traditions but also on cultural milieus other than those which spring from the Eurocentric well. The cosmological universes of
the indigenous, non-European traditions of Asia, Africa, the Pacific, and the Americas must be central to this critique.31
Fast Track 2007 20

International Law Link

International Law is founded on Europe as both the geographic and cultural center of the world.
Accessed: 6/21/07)
[The United States, which is a European state in another guise, suffers from this spell of manifest destiny just like its European
predecessors. American predestination is at least a century old. At the start of the twentieth century, for example, President
Theodore Roosevelt referred to peoples and countries south of the United States as the "weak, and chaotic people south of us" and
declared that it was "our [European American] duty, when it becomes absolutely inevitable, to police these countries in the interest
of order and civilization."49 The treatment of the Portuguese and Spanish-speaking Central and Latin America as America’s
"backyard" was instrumental in consolidating the psyche of the United States as an empire. William Alford has captured well this
American predisposition to cultural arrogance and domination.
In the last several hundred years, the globe has witnessed the universalization of Eurocentric norms and cultural forms through the
creation of the colonial state and the predominance of certain economic, social, and political models. International law itself was
founded on the pre-eminence of four specific European biases: geographic Europe as the center, and Christianity,
mercantile economics, and political imperialism as superior paradigms.50 Both the League of Nations and its successor, the
United Nations, revitalized and confirmed European-American domination of international affairs. In the post-War period,
non-European states were trusted or mandated to European powers or became client states of one or other European state.51]
Since 1945, the United Nations has played a key role in preserving the global order which the West dominates. A critically
important agenda of the U.N. has been the universalization of principles and norms which are European in identity. Principle
among these has been the spread of human rights which grow out of Western liberalism and jurisprudence.52 It is now an
accepted fact that the West was able to impose its philosophy of human rights on the rest of the world because it dominated
the United Nations in 1948.53 Yet the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the bible of the human rights movement, referred to
itself as the "common standard of achievement for all peoples and nations."54 The ubiquity of human rights norms is now
underscored by their identification with political democracy. The principal focus of human rights law has been on those
rights that strengthen, legitimize, and export the liberal democratic state to non-Western societies.55International Human
Rights in Context supra note 1, at 710-725. Some scholars have argued that democratic governance has evolved from a moral
prescription to an international legal obligation.56 According to Franck, the right to democratic governance is supported by a large
normative human rights cannon.57 He asserts that people almost everywhere, including Africa and Asia "[n]ow demand that
government be validated by Western-style parliamentary multiparty democratic process."58 He concludes, rather triumphantly,
that:
This almost-complete triumph of the democratic notions of Hume, Locke, Jefferson and Madison)in Latin America, Africa,
Eastern Europe and, to a lesser extent, Asia ) may well prove to be the most profound event of the twentieth century and, in all
likelihood, the fulcrum on which the future development of global society will turn. It is the unanswerable response to those who
have said that free, open, multiparty, electoral parliamentary democracy is neither desired nor desirable outside a small enclave of
Western industrial states.59
Fast Track 2007 21

NGO’s Link
Non governmental organizations target third world countries and ignore human rights abuses
perpetrated by the United States and other European countries that are notorious for violating civil
liberties
Accessed: 6/21/07)
Thus the human rights movement originated in Europe to curb what it deemed European savageries such as the Jewish Holocaust,
the "inherent" abuses of Soviet bloc communism, and the denials of speech and other expressive rights in a number of Western
countries. The movement grew initially out of the horrors of the West, and constructed there the image of a European savage. The
European human rights system, which is now a central attribute of European legal and political identity, is designed to hold
member states to particular standards of conduct in their treatment of individuals.20 It is, as it were, the bulwark against the re-
emergence of the unbridled European savage, the phenomenon that gave rise to, and fueled, the Third Reich. Today, however,
most of the activities of the ICJ and AI, and the other Western-based INGOs such as Human Rights Watch and the Lawyers
Committee for Human Rights, both based in New York City, and the Washington DC-based International Human Rights Law
Group, are focused on the Third World. [As a consequence, the predominant image of the savage in the human rights discourse
today is that of a Third World, non-European person, cultural practice, or state.
At first blush, there appear to be sufficient grounds for the INGOs’ unrelenting emphasis on Third World states as the foci for their
work. As a general rule, INGOs concentrate their work on the violations of civil and political rights, the species of legal
protections associated with a functioning political democracy, the state that is prevalent in the West. Admittedly, there are more
undemocratic states in the Third World than in the developed West. Third World despots have acted with impunity. The violations
of civil and political rights, and the wanton plunder of Third World economies by their leaders are a matter of public record. The
spotlight by INGOs here is appropriate, necessary, and welcome, particularly where local advocacy groups and the press have been
muzzled or suffocated by the state. There is no doubt that mechanisms for the protections of human rights are more fragile in many
Third World states, if they exist at all. But while this explains the work of INGOs in the Third World, it does not excuse their
relative inaction on human rights violations in the West.
Western countries, like the United States, are notorious for the violations of the civil rights of racial minorities and the poor,
although both Human Rights Watch and AI have haltingly started to breach the publicity and advocacy barriers in these areas.21
But such reports have been sparse and episodic, and have given the impression of a public relations exercise, designed to mute
critics who charge INGOs with a lopsided Third World focus. The ravages of globalization notwithstanding, INGOs have largely
remained deaf to calls for advocacy on social and economic rights.22 There certainly is no sufficient defense for their failure to
address the violations of economic and social rights by Western states.23 It is true, of course, that dominant public discourse in the
West generally opposed the mainstreaming of an agenda for economic and social rights, and instead demagoged them as inimical
to free enterprise. But in reality, most countries – socialist, capitalist, and Third World – have never seriously sought to fulfill
economic, social and cultural rights, even those, like the former Soviet Union, which rhetorically championed them.
Fast Track 2007 22

NGO’s Link
Foreign aid and development assistance is a tool to promote a homogenous culture and coerce
recipients of the assistance
Accessed: 6/21/07)
The image of the savage is also painted impressively by INGOs in their work through reporting and other forms of public
advocacy. The focus here is not on domestic human rights NGOs in the Third World because as a rule many are copycats who
mimic their predecessors in the North.102 In any case, NGOs in the South largely operate from the same template as their more
established counterparts in the North. Typically, INGOs perform three basic functions: investigation, reporting, and advocacy.103
The focus of human rights NGOs is usually human rights violations in a Third World country, where the "investigation" normally
takes place. Generally, a Western-based INGO -- and they are all based in the political and cultural capitals of the most powerful
countries in the West104-- sends a team of investigators called a human rights mission to a country in the South. The mission lasts
anywhere from several days to a few weeks, and collects data and other information on human rights questions from victims, local
NGOs, lawyers, local journalists, human rights defenders, and government officials. Information from these "local" sources is
usually cross-checked with more "objective" sources, by which it is meant Western embassies, locally-based Western reporters,
and other Western interests such as foundations. Upon returning to the West, the mission systematizes the information and releases
it in the form of a report. None of the major INGOs have located their offices in the Third World.
Fast Track 2007 23

Rights Link
Rights based frameworks for health fail. Declarations to incorporate health care policies in Africa
under the banner of human rights rarely meet their lofty goals to change infrastructure and poverty
There are strong international frameworks on rights related to health, health care, and AIDS, including a number of African
statements.80 Many, if not all, go beyond the protection of rights of individuals (nondiscrimination, confidentiality, and combating
stigma) to incorporate broader questions of social and economic rights. As such, these frameworks reassert the need to address
many of the fundamental problems of development and poverty. Not surprisingly, the various frameworks have tended to remain at
the level of lofty declarations, rarely making much difference in reality.
Why is this the case? Numerous obstacles exist to their practical implementation, including global economic trends, international
agendas driven by efficiency rather than equity concerns, and economic and social policies at national level, such as limits on
social spending, bureaucratic inertia; persistence of conservative public health paradigms (manifested in ongoing calls for
notification and attacks on confidentiality), and an unwillingness by the state to recognize and engage as equal partners emerging
social movements around HIV One of the difficulties in implementing a rights-based approach to public health is that broad
frameworks tend to be too general to operationalize or be used to evaluate everyday policymaking and planning. They are thus
easy to ignore. The lack of clarity as to how human rights informs and shapes responses to important public health challenges both
for developed and developing countries threatens to uncouple a potentially mutually beneficial link between human rights and
public health.
This paper has illustrated through the use of tools developed at the Francois-Xavier Bagnoud Centre for Health and Human Rights
that analysis of the South African government's response to antiretroviral-linked mother-to-child-transmission prevention programs
can identify departure points for synergy between public health policies and human rights imperatives. Such synergies lie not only
in the traditional protection and respect of rights that are predominantly civil and political, but more importantly in proactive
measures to fulfill socioeconomic rights, such as the right of access to health care, or to the highest attainable standards of health.
Further development of these tools may provide a corpus of knowledge to assist policymakers in integrating a human rights
framework in their practice to the betterment of the living conditions and health of people, particularly in developing countries.
Fast Track 2007 24

Public Health Link

Public Heath policies shape human rights
Despite growing advances in medical technologies, health status inequalities continue to increase across the globe.1 Developing
countries have been faced with declining expenditures in health and social services, increasing burdens posed by both
communicable and non-- communicable diseases, and economic systems poorly geared to fostering sustainable development for
the poorest and most marginalized.2 Under such circumstances, the challenges facing health practitioners in countries in transition
are complex and diverse, and require the balancing of many conflicting imperatives.3 This is particularly so in relation to the
development of public health policy, where equity, redress of past inequalities, and the goal of social justice may seemingly be
pitted against macroeconomic adjustments required for national economic development in an increasingly globalized economic
order.4 For example, pressures to deregulate as part of a market-oriented development philosophy will increase the risks from
occupational hazards in populations desperate for paid employment.5 Similarly, efforts to reduce government regulation in the
private health sector as part of monetarist policy options in developing countries have led to massive expansion of poorly planned
private health care with hugely adverse effects on access to and equity in health care for the majority of people in Asia and sub-
Saharan Africa.6 South Africa, recently emerged from decades of systematic racial discrimination, is an example of a country
grappling with many conflicting imperatives in a period of profound transition.7 On theone hand, moves towards equity8 have
promoted the rapid expansion of infrastructure, such as primary care clinics, water supply in rural areas, and sanitation services.9
Yet on the other hand, conservative macroeconomic policies have curtailed public expenditures in key areas.10
Under these circumstances, do the concepts and discourse of human rights offer opportunities for public health practitioners to
negotiate better conflicting imperatives in restructuring health care in countries in transition? Can human rights serve as a tool for
the achievement of more traditional public health objectives such as equity? Much of public health thinking presumes health to be
a right but does little to address the practical implications of such a link. For example, Chen and Berlinguer take as given that
health is a right "and, as such, equity in health should have pride of place. Human values such as universality, social solidarity and
social justice provide effective moral bases for global health equity."11 But does human rights necessarily promote equity? Or
does the language of human rights, particularly referring to socioeconomic rights, represent an unattainable vision that obstructs,
rather than realizes human well-being in countries where resources are increasingly constrained?
To explore this question, this paper will use as a case study various policy responses to the HIV epidemic in South and Southern
Africa, focusing specifically on where rights arguments have been used, explicitly or implicitly, to justify policy. First, I will
revisit the conceptual framework for the relationship of health to human rights in the South African context, outlining the way in
which human rights has been central to the discussion of HIV/AIDS policy. Then, I will evaluate three critiques of human rights
approaches (human rights as a Western construct, human rights as fostering inequity, human rights as promoting selective Primary
Health Care12). The implications for how we conceive of a human rights approach to public health will then be examined by
adapting existing models for integrating human rights approaches in public health programs13 to the introduction of antiretroviral
treatment in mother-to-child-transmission prevention programs in South Africa. Finally, from such an analysis, I will draw generic
lessons to identify how human rights approaches can operate synergistically with more "traditional" public health principles of
equity and efficiency.14 While the focus throughout is on South Africa as a developing country in transition, lessons for
application in wealthier countries may be evident. Human rights has emerged in the past decade as a powerful discourse in many
parts of the world for achieving the conditions necessary for the attainment of good health.15 Many of the most important
international human rights documents make explicit reference to health care as part of a panoply of internationally recognized
rights. Mann and colleagues have outlined a triangulating relationship between human rights and public health in which:
* health policies and programs are recognized as having a major potential impact on human rights, both beneficial and adverse;
* human rights violations lead directly and indirectly to adverse health impacts; and
* the promotion of human rights and the practice of public health are complementary and indivisible approaches to protecting and
advancing the well-being of people."
At face value, therefore, public health policy appears to have many reasons to take advantage of the synergism between human
rights and heath promotion.
In South Africa, human rights principles have been extensively elaborated in the Bill of Rights in the Constitution,17 which
provides an extended degree of attention to health, health care, and the conditions underlying health.18 The Constitution
guarantees a right of access to health care, and to a number of the conditions necessary for health (e.g., water, housing), and the
right to an environment that is not harmful to one's well-being. Children receive special provisions, including basic health care,
nutrition, and shelter, and no-one may be refused emergency medical care.
Fast Track 2007 25

Universalization Link
Campaigns to universalize human rights continues the campaign of Western cultural and political
dominance
Accessed: 6/21/07)
Franck presents the apparent triumph of liberal democratic nationalism as the free, uncoerced, choice of non-Western peoples. But
this Paper argues that human rights, and the relentless campaign to universalize them, present a historical continuum in an
unbroken chain of Western conceptual and cultural dominance over the past several centuries. At the heart of this continuum is a
seemingly incurable virus: the impulse to universalize Eurocentric norms and values by repudiating, demonizing, and "othering"
that which is different and non-European. By this argument, the Paper does not mean to suggest that human rights are bad per se or
that the human rights corpus is irredeemable. Rather, it wants to suggest that the globalization of human rights fits a historical
pattern in which all high morality comes from the West as a civilizing agent against lower forms of civilization in the Rest of the
world. 60 But the Paper does not pretend to provide a coherent formula for the creation of a new human rights corpus. What it
offers is a signpost of the way forward.
Fast Track 2007 26

Victim Link
The victim is portrayed as weak, powerless, lazy, and passive. Human rights defines the other as
helpless and continues a cycle of exploitation.
Accessed: 6/21/07)
The view that the "native" is weak, powerless, prone to laziness, and unable on his own to create conditions for his development is
a recurrent theme in Western representations of the "other." Early in the life of the organization, an International Labor
Organization report concluded, for example, that indigenous peoples could not by themselves overcome their "backwardness." It
noted:
[I]t is now almost universally recognized that, left to their own resources, indigenous peoples would have difficulty in overcoming
their inferior economic and social situation which inevitably leaves them open for exploitation.135
There is a tendency in human rights literature to paint victims of human rights violations who are mostly in the Third
World as the product of backward, repressive, and authoritarian cultures which cannot correct themselves. In the culture
of the human rights movement, whose center is in the West, there is a belief that human rights problems afflict people
"over there" and not people "like us." The missionary zeal to help those who cannot help themselves is one of the logical
conclusions of this attitude.136 The view that the human rights corpus is about ordering the lives of non-European peoples has a
long history in international law itself. More recent scholarship by a number of enterprising scholars establishes this link between
international law and the project of the control of non-European societies and cultures.137 Since the inception of the current
international legal order some five centuries ago, there have been outright challenges by non-European cultures to the logic,
substance, and purpose of international law.138 The development of human rights, arguably the most benign strain of international
law, has only blunted, but not eliminated, some of those challenges.
Fast Track 2007 27

Alternative and Impact

We must interrogate the totalitarian impulses behind the affirmative in order to ever progress.
Reflection is necessary to avoid their problematic zealotry
Accessed: 6/21/07)
It would be a mistake to see this paper as being merely about the language of human rights or the manner in which the human
rights movement describes its goals, subjects, and intended outcomes. It is not a plea for the human rights movement to be more
sensitive to non-Western cultures, whatever that means. But nor is it a wholesale rejection of the idea of human rights.32 Although
it grapples with all those issues, the paper is fundamentally an attempt at locating -- philosophically, culturally, and historically --
the normative edifice of the human rights corpus. If, as the author believes to be the case, the human rights movement is driven by
a totalitarian or totalizing impulse, that is, the mission to require that all human societies transform themselves to fit a particular
blueprinted straight-jacket, then there is an acute shortage of deep reflection and a troubling abundance of zealotry. This vision of
the "good society" must be vigorously interrogated and contested.
Fast Track 2007 28

Impact
Coercive public health should be rejected
Morreim, Medical Ethics Professor, University of Tennessee, 2000
(E. Haavi, Promoting Health Behavior, ed. Daniel Callahan, p. 59 (HARVAF2241)
More fundamentally, government restrictions on citizens' freedom should not be the preferred mechanism for enhancing health.
When government says "We forbid you to do X because you might burden the rest of us," it invites major intrusions on human
liberty to live as one sees fit. Enforcement could also be highly intrusive, with spying and prying to see who's smoking on the sly.
And the invasions can penetrate beyond conduct into private beliefs and values. Health is just one value alongside others ranging
from risky sports to admittedly unhealthy ethnic diets. And not everyone agrees what health is." Medical concepts of health and
illness are based on scientific notions that can conflict with religious and folk perspectives.
Fast Track 2007 29

Impact
PUBLIC HEALTH DISCOURSES LEGITIMIZE DISCRIMINATION AGAINST THOSE
STIGMATIZED AS RESPONSIBLE FOR THEIR OWN ILL-HEALTH
Payne, Senior Lecturer, University of Bristol, 2006
(Sarah The Health of Men and Women, p. 36 (HARVAF2247)
The term “obesity” is a social and subjective construct, and anti-fat stigma in the popular media, public health policy, and among
health professionals helps to construct a discourse in which obese bodies and their owners are constructed as immoral,
unacceptable and responsible for their own health problems, while also being a source of disguised fascination. Anti-fat bias or
discrimination appears to be more acceptable than bias against members of minority groups, reflecting the individualization of
obesity as a problem. Campos (2004) for example, suggests that anti-fat bias has replaced other forms of discrimination that are
now prohibited in civil society – racism and class bias in particular. Higher rates of obesity among ethnic minority and poorer
populations means that the same groups in society are discriminated against and reviled, but this is legitimized by the “war on fat,”
and the apparent neutrality of the obese body. Obesity and anti-fat discourses are also gendered, however. Research suggests that
women are more likely than men to feel stigmatized by obesity, and are more likely to be perceived negatively, with white women
reporting the most stigma.
Fast Track 2007 30

Impact
PUBLIC HEALTH EMPHASIS ON EPIDEMICS USED TO JUSTIFY CONTROL OF
UNDESIRABLE “OTHERS”
Lupton, Social Sciences Lecturer- University Western Sydney, 1995,
(Deborah, The Imperative of Health: public health and the regulated body, p. 65 (HARVAF2248)
Like demography, the relatively new field of epidemiology employs statistics to serve as a modern, rationalized technology to
counter epidemics. The word “epidemiology” originates from the same etymological roots as “epidemic.” To label a collection of
cases of an illness or disease an “epidemic” or “outbreak” is to give a certain meaning to these cases. The word “epidemic, in
particular, connotes a highly contagious disease, spread invisibly and without warning; its most potent exemplar is the Black
Plague, a disease which still has cultural resonance for its sheer magnitude of destruction, its association with fear and panic,
divine retribution and evil. “Epidemic” suggests the potential for sudden, exponential spread, for societal disorder, the need for
harsh and decisive measures to be taken to keep the disease in check. An “epidemic logic” takes over, which seeks immediate
action to the threat, including the proliferation of regulatory practices which both construct and seek to contain the object of fear:
“Under the logic incited by epidemics, forms of regulatory intervention into the lives of bodies and populations which might, in
other circumstance, appear excessive can now appear as justified forms of damage control and prophylactic protectionism.” This is
especially the case when mysterious epidemic disease is the focus, for concern about the source of disease, and its mode of spread,
inspire irrationality, suspicion and stigmatization, in which “personal fear may be translated into collective witch-hunts.” Central
to epidemic logic is the definition of Other, the source of infection, who is then problematized as an object of exclusion of
confinement.
Fast Track 2007 31

Impact
PUBLIC HEALTH REGULATIONS OFTEN TARGET POOR AND MARGINALIZED GROUPS
Lupton, Social Sciences Lecturer- University Western Sydney, 2003
(Deborah, Medicine as Culture, p. 33 (HARVAF2249)
Those of foreign nationality, the poor and the working class have historically been singled out for attention by public health
authorities as agents of disease, requiring forcible “hygiene” programs sometimes involving the destruction of their homes and
isolation from the rest of society (Lupton, 1995). In the early twentieth century, for example, immigrants to Canada were
especially targeted by quarantine regulations and subjected to medical examinations upon arrival, thus marking them as the
dangerous, potentially contaminating Other. Even in contemporary western societies, public health acts devised decades ago are
instance of this occurred in 1989 in Australia, when a section of the New South Wales Public Health Act of 1902 was instituted to
detain for a time a sex worker who had publicly admitted to being HIV positive but not willing to enforce condom use among her
clients.
Fast Track 2007 32

Impacts
THEIR PLAN JUSTIFIES OPPRESSION AND MASS KILLING
Der Derian, Professor of Political Science, University of Massachusetts, 1995
(James, ON SECURITY, Ronnie Lipschutz, ed., 1995, p.24-5. (MHSOLT1239)
No other concept in international relations packs the metaphysical punch, nor commands the disciplinary power of "security." In
its name, peoples have alienated their fears, rights and powers to gods, emperors, and most recently, sovereign states, all to protect
themselves from the vicissitudes of nature -- as well as from other gods, emperors, and sovereign states. In its name, weapons of
mass destruction have been developed which have transfigured national interest into a security dilemma based on a suicide pact.
And, less often noted in international relations, in its name billions have been made and millions killed while scientific knowledge
has been furthered and intellectual dissent muted.
THEIR PLAN JUSTIFIES OPPRESSION AND MASS KILLING

Der Derian, Professor of Political Science, University of Massachusetts, 1995
(James, ON SECURITY, Ronnie Lipschutz, ed., 1995, p.24-5. (PDNS2001)
No other concept in international relations packs the metaphysical punch, nor commands the disciplinary power of "security." In
its name, peoples have alienated their fears, rights and powers to gods, emperors, and most recently, sovereign states, all to protect
themselves from the vicissitudes of nature -- as well as from other gods, emperors, and sovereign states. In its name, weapons of
mass destruction have been developed which have transfigured national interest into a security dilemma based on a suicide pact.
And, less often noted in international relations, in its name billions have been made and millions killed while scientific knowledge
has been furthered and intellectual dissent muted.
Fast Track 2007 33

Impacts: Aff not Solve

IMPOSSIBLE TO UNDERSTAND THE VALUE OF LIFE INTRACULTURALLY UNLESS ONE
STARTS FROM IDENTITIES AND VALUES WITHIN THE CULTURE
Airhihenbuwa, Professor Biobehavioral Health, Pennsylvania State University, 2006
(Collins O. , Healing Our Differences: the crisis of global health and the politics of identity, p. 7-8 (HARVAF2563)
In Soyinka’s (1975) Death and the King’s Horseman, the king’s horseman was to honor the king’s death by “committing death”—
that is sacrificing his own life, not unlike the Christian missionary who turns a child against his family, community, and culture in
the name of moral rescue in Chinua Achebe’s (1958) Things Fall Apart. The missionary in this case, the White district officer,
convinces the king’s horseman that it is sacrilege for the king’s horseman to sacrifice his life for the king even though his entire
world has been nurtured under this virtue. At the brink of capitulating to the external invasion of values that is being forced on his
father under Western eyes, the king’s horseman’s son hears about the news and returns from Europe to save his father from the
impending cultural abrogation. He confronts the missionaries’ hypocrisy in exalting, as the penultimate form of leadership and
character, a ship captain who knowingly goes down with the ship in the name of the valor. For the son, it would appear that
Western culture values the ultimate sacrifice – committing death—if such a sacrifice is in the interest of honoring a property (a
boat) rather than a cultural institution (royalty). Thus, it is not possible to understand the value of life and death intraculturally
unless they are understood from within the identities that cultured these values.
SUCCESS OF PUBLIC HEALTH INTERVENTIONS NECESSITATES UNDERSTANDING THE

SOCIO-POLITICAL CONTEXT
McKinlay & Marceau, New England Research Institute, 2004
(John B. and Lisa D., Political and Economic Determinants of Population Health and Well-Being, eds. V. Navarro & C.
Muntaner, p. 203-4 (HARVAF2564)
This chapter has a straightforward message: if public health is to be even more successful in the 21st century, it must comprehend
the magnitude of the forces against it and the strategies used to engineer its defeat. We all know that our preventive interventions
must be appropriate to their sociocultural context, yet we ourselves tend to overlook the sociopolitical context of the public health
enterprise. Interventions designed to prevent youth from smoking are certainly important, but in macroeconomic terms they
overlook the social determinants of disease and appear relatively unimportant. In our view, the scope and likely success of future
public health activities (including preventive interventions) will be shaped by at least three factors. 1. Awareness of the magnitude
of the macroeconomic forces working against us. Important lessons can be learned from our recent defeat at the Battle of Tobacco.
It provides a vivid case study in the politics of public health and an opportunity to gain some strategic advantage. If public health
can learn some lessons from this battle—perhaps even think the unthinkable and adopt some of the successful strategies of our
opponents – then future defeats may be avoided. The victory cost tobacco interests about $40 million – a paltry sum in relation to
national public health and medical care expenditures. Big Five tobacco certainly got value for money. 2. Understanding the
changing structure and functioning of the US state (or government apparatus), from pluralist umpire to antileviathan. The state
appears to be losing some of its ability to act on behalf of and protect the public health: its primary allegiance is shifting, and this
will profoundly shape the content and politicoeconomic context of public health in the 21st century. 3. Willingness for the field of
public health to rethink its posture of “value-neutrality” and “objectivity” so as to encompass the types of social action necessary
to effectively modify the social determinants of health. Planned sociopolitical action must be an appropriate adjunct to a
scientifically based public health, and no longer threateningly antithetical to it.
Fast Track 2007 34

Impacts: Aff not Solve

EFFECTIVE HEALTH INTERVENTIONS REQUIRE GOOD KNOWLEDGE OF THE SOCIO-
CULTURAL ENVIRONMENT WHERE THEY WILL BE IMPLEMENTED
Green & Frankish, University of British Columbia, Department of Epidemiology, 2001
(Lawrence W. and James C, Critical Issues in Global Health, eds. C. Koop, C. Pearson & M. Schwarz, p. 326-7 (HARVAF2565)
Another lesson of the late twentieth century is that the concept of "best practices," when imported from biomedical research on
human organisms to population health circumstances, does not hold the same constancy across the more varied social, cultural, and
political circumstances in which public health and lifestyle issues operate. To understand causal complexity in the twenty-first
century, health promotion and disease prevention will have to examine distal causal relationships as chains or linked sequences
involving multiple short-term effects or operations (Logan and Spencer, 1996). Although health-related behavior is often a
"proximal" cause of ill health, researchers, practitioners, and policymakers need to take account of the complex causal pathways
along which these proximal causes lie and allow for the infinite variations that arise in each locality and era. Health promotion
interventions will place particular emphasis on the educational functions of enhancing local ability to assess needs and resources
and building capacities at the several levels of individual, family, institution, and community (Green and Kreuter, 1999; Hamilton
and Bhatti, 1996; Trickett, 1997). The "evidence" in evidence-based practice will be as much the locality-specific social evidence
as the generalizable biomedical, epidemiological, and evaluative research evidence from afar.
Fast Track 2007 35

Alternative Solvency
Must reexamine the savage-savior-victim metaphor to ever progress towards inclusive international
rights
Accessed: 6/21/07)
Increasingly, the human rights movement has come to openly be identified with the United States, whose chief executive now
invokes human rights virtually every time he addresses a non-European nation.182 In fact, President William Jefferson Clinton’s
speeches on human rights came to resemble lectures and sermons, very much in the savior mode.183 This is the wrong course. [The
human rights movement, and its "ally" the American presidency, must abandon the savage-savior-victim metaphor if there is going
to be real hope in a genuine international discourse on rights. The relentless efforts to universalize an essentially European corpus
of human rights through Western crusades cannot succeed. Nor will demonizing those who resist it. The critiques of the corpus
from Africans, Asians, Moslems, Hindus, and a host of critical thinkers from around the world are the one avenue through which
human rights can be redeemed and truly universalized. This multiculturalization of the corpus could be attempted in a number of
areas: balancing between individual and group rights, giving more substance to social and economic rights, relating rights to
duties, and addressing the relationship between the corpus and economic systems. This is not the place to develop those
substantive critiques. That calls for another project. But raising these issues is important. It is not, as some may suppose, taking
refuge behind left-liberal-communitarian political correctness. Further work must done on these questions, and the corrupting
influences of the individualism of the human rights corpus, to chart out how such a vision affects or distorts non-European
societies.
Ultimately, a new theory of internationalism and human rights, one that responds to diverse cultures, must confront the inequities
of the international order. In this respect, human rights must break from the historical continuum -- expressed in the metaphor and
the grand narrative of human rights -- that keeps intact the hierarchical relationships between European and non-European
populations. Berman is right in his prognosis of what has to be done.
[[t]he contradictions between commitments to sovereign equality, stunning political and economic imbalances, and paternalistic
humanitarianism cannot be definitively resolved logically, doctrinally, or institutionally; rather, they must be confronted in
ongoing struggle in all legal, political, economic, and cultural arenas. Projections of a unitary international community, even in the
guise of the inclusive U.N., or a unified civilizational consensus, even in the guise of human rights discourse, may be provisionally
useful and important but cannot indefinitely defer the need to confront these contradictions.184 ]
Fast Track 2007 36

We must abandon the grand metaphor of the savage-victim-savior that the affirmative engages in to
construct an effective discourse on international rights.
Accessed: 6/21/07)
Thus any pretense of consensus, as expressed in the current human rights corpus, is a falsehood. The savage-victim-savior
metaphor is an "othering" process or maneuver that creates inferior clones, in effect dumb copies of the original. However, I
concludes by contending that since an international discourse on human dignity is desirable and inevitable, it is imperative that the
grand metaphor be abandoned and the mask of the false consensus lifted so that a new genuine consensus can be constructed. I
suggest here ways in which a new consensus might be attempted.
Human rights law frames the state as its primary target.78similar obligatory language. Thus although states voluntarily enter into
treaty obligations, they are bound by them once ratified. Although voluntarily entered into, human rights treaties are binding on the
state. The state is both the guarantor and subject of human rights. Underlying the development of human rights is the belief that the
state is a predator that must be contained, otherwise it will devour and imperil human freedom. From this conventional
international human rights law perspective, the state is the classic savage. But it is not the state per se that is predatory, for the state
in itself is simply a construct that describes a repository for public power, a disinterested instrumentality ready to execute public
will, whatever that is. There is a high degree of fluidity in the nature of that power and how it is exercised. For instance, a state’s
constitutional structure could in its configuration require a particular form of democratic government. Or a state’s constitution
could reposit public power in religious bodies and clerics, as has been the case in the Islamic Republic of Iran.79 But a state could
through revolution or some other device be Islamic today and become secular tomorrow. Since the state in this metaphor appears
to be an empty vessel, the savage must be located beyond the state.
Fast Track 2007 37

Embracing local truths is necessary to avoid the pitfalls of sweeping human rights generalizations
Accessed: 6/21/07)
The state must be unmasked as being a mere proxy for the real savage. That leaves the historically accumulated wisdom, the
culture of a society, as the only other plausible place to locate the savage. This author has argued elsewhere that culture "represents
the accumulation of a people’s wisdom and thus their identity; it is real and without it a people is without a name, rudderless, and
torn from its moorings."80 In this sense, culture is a set of local truths which serve as a guide for life’s many pursuits in a
society. In other words, the validity of a cultural norm is a local truth, and judgement or evaluation of that truth by a norm
from an external culture is extremely problematic, if not altogether an invalid exercise.81 But culture itself is a dynamic and
alchemical mix of many variables, including religion, philosophy, history, mythology, politics, environmental factors, language,
and economics. The interaction of these variables -- both within the culture and through influence by other cultures -- produces
competing social visions and values in any given society. The dominant class or political interests that capture the state make it the
public expression of their particular cultural vision. That is to say that the state is more a conveyer belt than an embodiment of
particular cultural norms. The state is but the scaffolding underneath which the real savage resides. Thus when human rights norms
target a deviant state, they are really attacking the normative cultural fabric or variant expressed by that state. The culture, and not
the state, is the actual savage. From this perspective, human rights violations represent a clash between the culture of human rights
and the savage culture.
Fast Track 2007 38

Alternative solvency for FGM cases

Our alternative is a better way to approach the question of FGM
Accessed: 6/21/07)
These images are critical in the construction of the savage. Human rights opposition and campaigns against FGM, which have
relied heavily on demonization, have picked up where European colonial missionaries left off.112 Savagery in this idiom acquires a
race, the black, dark, or non-Western, race. The Association of African Women for Research and Development (AAWORD)
opposed female circumcision but sharply denounced the racism inherent Western-led anti-FGM campaigns. This new crusade of
the West has been led out of the moral and cultural prejudices of Judaeo-Christian Western society: aggressiveness, ignorance or
even contempt, paternalism and activism are the elements which have infuriated and then shocked many people of goodwill. In
trying to reach their own public, the new crusaders have fallen back on sensationalism, and have become insensitive to the dignity
of the very women they want to "save."113 AAWORD vigorously questioned the motives of Western activists and suggested that
they were twice victimizing African women. It just stopped short of asking Western activists to drop the crusade. It suggested that
the savage-victim-savior metaphor was in operation here and angrily argued, in part, that: They [Western crusaders] are totally
unconscious of the latent racism which such a campaign evokes in countries where ethnocentric prejudice is so deep-
rooted. And in their conviction that this is a "just cause," they have forgotten that these women from a different race and a
different culture are also human beings. And that solidarity can only exist alongside self-affirmation and mutual respect.114
As illustrated by the debate over FGM, advocacy across cultural barriers are an extremely complex matter. Making judgements
across the cultural divide is a risky business because the dice is always heavily loaded. Not even the black-white pretense of
human rights can erase those risks. But since that is what precisely the human rights movement does -- make judgements across
cultures -- there is an obligation to create truly universal standards. Otherwise, the human rights enterprise will continue to present
itself as a struggle between the cultures of non-Western peoples and the "universal" culture of the West.]The metaphor of the
victim is the giant engine that drives the human rights movement. Without the victim there is no savage or savior, and the entire
human rights enterprise collapses. The victim, who provides the human rights project with a purpose, is at the center of the human
rights corpus. The basic purpose of the corpus is to contain the state, transform society, and eliminate both the victim and
victimhood as conditions of human existence. In fact, the human rights regime was designed to respond to both the potential and
actual victim, and to create legal, political, social, and cultural arrangements to defang the state. The human rights text and its
discourse present political democracy, and its institutions of governance, as the sine qua non for a victim-less society.
At the international level, the U.N. pursues civilizing campaigns that ostensibly seek to prevent conditions that create human
victims, to "save succeeding generations from the scourge of war,"115 and to "establish conditions under which justice"116 can be
maintained, and to "reaffirm faith in "fundamental human rights."117 Human rights treaties are therefore a series of obligations in
which states undertake not to create victims. In order to avoid victimizing those under it, the state is burdened with three basic
obligations for every basic human right: to avoid depriving, to protect from deprivation, and to aid the deprived.118 The first
obligation, being "negative," may be the least costly, and mainly requires self-restraint; the latter are "positive" and demand the
expenditure of more resources and the implementation of programs.Human rights law protects against the invasion of the inherent
"dignity and worth" of the potential victim. Whether an individual, a potential victim, is guilty of some offense or not, the state is
not permitted to violate his naturalist attributes without abiding by certain norms. The state’s culpability extends to individuals and
entities within its jurisdiction, whether or not the violation can be traced directly to it. Thus, for example, the state’s failure to
prevent or punish domestic violence is a human rights violation. But in human rights literature, the victim is usually presented as a
helpless innocent who has been abused directly by the state, its agents, or pursuant to an offensive cultural or political practice.119
The most visible human rights victims, those that have come to define the term, are subjected to the now numbingly familiar set of
abuses: arbitrary arrest and detention; denials of the rights to speech, assembly, and association; involuntary exile; mass slaughters
and genocide; discriminations based on race, ethnicity, religion, gender, and political opinion; and denials of due process.120
Fast Track 2007 39

AT: Perm/Alt Solvency

Its not that all universal rights are bad, rather it is the process we take to achieve them. We need to
embrace a multicultural approach and reject Eurocentrism as the STARTING POINT for rights
Accessed: 6/21/07)
In the era of globalization, it is impossible to hold the line against cultural penetration and counter-penetration. "Transcendent" or
"universal" norms and values are inevitable. But whether those norms and values will be truly "transcendent" and "universal" must
necessarily be determined by the process through which they are created. Will, for example, American and European practices of a
frenzied consumerism come to define the rest of the world and be presented as a "universal" phenomenon? Should the rest of the
world succumb to unremitting individualism and perverse hedonism which seem to characterize so much of the Western world? In
other words, will practices and norms which are specific to one culture be globalized into universal mores? In human rights, does,
in effect, one size fit all? Without a doubt, a universal language of human rights is inevitable, and even desirable. The question,
however, is how humanity gets to that universal language. In this exercise, a sober evaluation of the current human rights corpus
and its language is not an option. After all, the present doctrine, practice, and theory of human rights have been deeply and
irretrievably distorted by American and European domination of the globe, the tragedies of the Cold War, the ubiquity of free
markets, and the credo of individualism. It would be utter hypocrisy not to recognize the human rights corpus as one of the
products of the Empire – the American Empire to be precise – and as a continuation of the Age of Europe.33
A central assumption of this paper is that there is an urgent need for a human rights movement that is multi-cultural, inclusive, and
deeply political. Thus while it is essential that a new human rights movement de-center Eurocentrism, it is equally important that it
also addresses pathologically and deeply lopsided power relations among and within cultures, national economies, states, genders,
religions, races and ethnic groups, and other dispossessing cleavages. Such a movement cannot treat Eurocentrism as the
starting point and other cultures as peripheral. There has to be a basic assumption about the moral equivalency of all cultures
as the point of departure. Francis Deng has correctly pointed out that to "arrogate the concept [of human rights] to only certain
groups, cultures, or civilizations is to aggravate divisiveness on the issue, to encourage defensiveness or unwarranted self-
justification on the part of the excluded, and to impede progress toward a universal consensus on human rights."34 The re-
constructionist project of this Paper is based on the assumption that as currently constituted and deployed, the human rights
movement will ultimately fail because it is perceived as an alien ideology in non-Western societies. Besides hypocritical
non-Western states and elites steeped in Western ideas, the movement does not deeply resonate in the cultural fabrics of
non-Westerners. A human rights movement that "wins" must be moored in the peoples’ cultures.
Fast Track 2007 40

AT: you reject all rights

Its not that all rights are universally bad. We must focus on genuine reconstruction of individual
liberties instead of western imperialist conceptions of human rights
Accessed: 6/21/07)
The idea of human rights – the quest to craft a universal bundle of attributes that all societies must endow all human beings with –
is a noble one. The problem with the current bundle of attributes lies in their inadequacy, incompleteness, and wrong-headedness.35
There is little doubt that there is much to celebrate in the present human rights corpus just as there is much to quarrel with. But
genuine reconstructionists must not be mistaken with cynical cultural manipulators who will stop at nothing to justify repressive
rule and inhuman practices in the name of culture. Yash Ghai powerfully exposed the distortions by several states of Asian
conceptions of community, religion, and culture to justify the use of coercive state apparatuses to crush dissent, protect particular
models of economic development, and retain political power within the hands of a narrow, largely unaccountable political and
bureaucratic elite.36 Such cultural demagoguery is clearly unacceptable as is the insistence by some Western academics and
leaders of the human rights movement that the non-West has nothing to contribute to the human rights corpus and should accept
the human rights corpus as a gift of civilization from the West.37
Fast Track 2007 41

AT: State Good

No link. Its not the state that is the problem and we don’t reject state entities in totality. Vampire
cultures feed on authoritarian imposition and warp the transformative potentials of statehood.
Accessed: 6/21/07)
Although the metaphor may suggest otherwise, it is not the state per se that is barbaric but the culture which supports it and the
bed on which it rests. The state only becomes a vampire when "bad" culture overcomes or disallows the development of "good"
culture. The "good" state controls its demonic proclivities by cleansing itself with, and internalizing, human rights. The "evil"
state, on the other hand, expresses itself through an illiberal, anti-democratic, or some other authoritarian culture. The redemption
or salvation of the state is solely dependent on its submission to human rights norms. Thus although the state is the guarantor of
human rights, it is the target and raison d’etre of human rights law.67 The real savage then is not the state but a normative and
cultural deviation from human rights. It is in the theory and practice of the one-party state, military junta, controlled or closed
state, theocracy, or even cultural practices such as the one popularly known in the West as female genital mutilation (FGM)68 that
savagery inheres, and not in the state per se. The state itself is a neutral, passive instrumentality -- a receptacle or an empty vessel -
- that conveys savagery by implementing the project of the savage culture.
The second dimension of the prism depicts the face and the fact of a victim as well as the essence and the idea of victimhood. A
human being whose "dignity and worth" have been violated by the savage is the victim. The figure is that of a powerless, helpless
innocent whose naturalist attributes have been negated by the primitive and offensive actions of the state or the bed of culture in
which it is steeped. The entire human rights edifice is both anti-catastrophic and reconstructive. It is anti-catastrophic because it is
designed to prevent more calamities through the creation of more victims. It is reconstructive because it seeks to re-engineer the
state and the society to reduce the number of victims, as it defines them, and prevent conditions that give rise to victims.69 The
classic human rights document – the human rights report – embodies these two mutually reinforcing strategies. The human rights
report by an INGO is usually a catalogue of horrible catastrophies visited on individuals. As a rule, each report also carries a
diagnostic epilogue and recommended therapies and remedies.70
Fast Track 2007 42

Aff Answers
Mutua is wrong. He ignores the various dynamics of rights and engages in the same otherizing process
he attempts to kritik
De Brennan, Researcher for College of Law and Business Australian Expert Group in Industry Studies 2005,
(Sebastian, ‘Critique, Culture and Commitment: The Dangerous and Counterproductive Paths of International Legal Discourse’,
Law, Social Justice & Global Development Journal (LGD) Feb 28, 2005, http://www.go.warwick.ac.uk/elj/lgd/debrennan,
Accessed: 6/21/07
If we are to accept that international human rights constitutes an offshoot of international law generally, then could it be that a
more balanced account of human rights law is one that recognises that even hundreds of years ago, the SVS metaphor, was perhaps
not as prominent as certain accounts would lead us to believe? Rather than being helpless victims that the self-important colonial
powers could save, the Aboriginal peoples of America were fully capable of exploiting the manoeuvring room created by colonial
competition in order to sustain the value of their product.14 Although an important factor commercial necessity was not the sole
determinant of this normativity. In reality a fundamental shift had taken place. A shift from perceiving Aboriginal peoples as
barbaric beasts to peoples who were more than capable of participating in trade, negotiation and the shaping of their own destiny.
This should not seem striking – for such is the fluidity of international law.
In asserting that the human rights rubric is grounded in a SVS metaphor, scholars such as Mutua ignore the dynamism of
international law and in doing this they employ the very ‘othering process’ they so detest. In one of the truly great works
highlighting the perils associated with this ‘othering’, Edward Said notes a distinction between the Orient (the Arab) and the
Occident (the European).15
Orientalism can be described as a way of coming to terms with the Orient. Orientalism is a style of thought based upon an
ontological and epistemological distinction between the Orient and the Occident. In a fashion not dissimilar to Anghie’s,
Orientalism is described as a western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient. Said presents
compelling empirical evidence emanating largely from the Egyptian colonial experience, which illustrates the deplorable way in
which the Arab population was ‘othered’. The British, he quotes, are not merely ‘there for the sake of the Egyptians, though we are
there for their sake; they are there also for the sake of Europe at large’.
In sustaining the self-righteous approach vis-à-vis the Oriental, it never occurs to the European to let the Egyptian speak for
himself, to personally appraise the utility of European presence. Rather the oriental is presumed incapable of ever appreciating the
good things that are being done by the noble colonial occupiers. And when the oriental does comment he is seen as an ‘agitator …
who wishes to create difficulties’.
Egypt for Britain was not just another colony; but rather a confirmation of western imperialism; it was until English intervention
the quintessential example of Oriental backwardness, which was to become an exemplar of English knowledge and power. The
British claimed that they had imbued the Oriental with moralistic behaviours; although exactly how this new found moral
prosperity was to be measured no one ventured to say. Nevertheless, the message was clear: ‘Subject races did not have it in them
to know what was good for them’. In a nutshell, there are westerners and there are Orientals. The former dominate; the latter must
be dominated; which usually translates into having their land occupied, their international affairs rigidly controlled, their blood and
treasure put at the disposal of one or another western power.16
The Oriental discourse smacks with the paternalism. Orientals or Arabs are described as barbaric, aggressive, gullible, devoid of
energy and initiative, intriguing, an object to be studied, cunning, unkind, backward, dishonest, lethargic and suspicious. This
stands in juxtaposition with the flawless clarity, directness, rationality and nobility of the Anglo-Saxon race. Orientalism then, is
knowledge of the Orient that places the oriental in a class, a manual for scrutiny, study, judgment or discipline. And so again we
can see that Mutua’s SVS metaphor is not a new one. It is bundled up deeply in the colonial enterprise, and yet we know that the
age of colonialism as it was has come to an end. 17
Fast Track 2007 43

Aff Answers
Their alternative is bad. Mutua attempt is too simplistic. He doesn’t account for diversity intrinsic to
the human rights movement. He creates the west as a Great Satan and simultaneously closes off good
avenues for change. Their alternative precludes actions to prevent the next Hitler, Pol Pot, and Bin
Laden
Accessed: 6/21/07)
Furthermore, it would seem that Mutua becomes consumed by the simplistic explanations that characterise Orientalism. These
explanations fail to accurately capture the diversity intrinsic to the human rights enterprise. More than this Mutua enlists a
process of reverse Orientalism. For example, in describing the victim component of the SVS prism, Mutua stresses the way in
which the west generally presents them as helpless, powerless people whose naturalist attributes have been negated by the
primitive and offensive actions of the state and the rampant culture therein. He proceeds to inquire into the nature of human rights
reports, which routinely feature a catalogue of horrible catastrophes, coupled with a diagnostic epilogue and recommended
therapies and remedies. In fairness, however, it would seem his article is also one of hyperbole. If Mutua wishes to make a
charge against human rights architects as dramatising the role of human rights victims, he also does a good job in creating
his rather sensational Savage Victim Saviour paradigm. [Ostensibly, all human rights groups are tarnished whether it is
embassies and intelligence agencies, UN peace keeping forces, relief and development NGOs, national and international human
rights groups, faith groups, academics and the media. From the outset the west becomes a monolithic beast intent on expansion,
always materialistic and devoid of any moral wellbeing, an apologist for previous generations, a human rights fraud. With one
sweeping brush, the Great Satan comes to town!
Can we continue to see the west as the ‘Great Satan’ or as a homogenous entity devoid of the diversity that we know is eminently
existent? Viewed from the vantage point of the new millennium it is not at all clear that the depictions serve us well. Amid the
contemporary global flows of trade, politics, migrations, ecology and mass media, the accepted nexus of authentic
culture/demarcated field/exotic locale has unravelled.18 ]
Multiculturalism has become a common feature of a number of western states throughout the world. It cannot be that the
newcomers to nations such as the United States, Germany, Britain, France, Canada and Australia (and this list is by no means
exhaustive) simply leave their ‘old ways’ and values at the doorstep and yet stagnant models like the SVS prism would suggest
that this is the case. We know that in all of the above countries migrations and external influences have affected everything from
the food it consumes, to the medicine taken, to the management practices utilised by its organisations. Is it realistic then to see the
field of human rights law as privileged?
Although purely anecdotal, the author’s own experience of the human rights corpus is far from a Eurocentric one. Even in China
and Arab States there is a growing and vibrant academic community with a keen interest in international human rights law.19 At
the human rights conferences and gatherings the author has attended he has been struck by the sheer diversity and incredible
backgrounds of those in the room. At any given event it is not unusual to find migrants, some of which have felt the brunt of
human rights abuses first hand, ex-refugees, academics (domestic and visiting), government representatives and so on. For all the
appeal of Mutua’s SVS paradigm can it be that a subversive saviour complex enjoins those present?
One may make the sweeping claim, as indeed Mutua does, that human rights are synonymous with Eurocentricism and
neoliberalism. Is it then fair to claim that the whole of the third world is best characterized by dictatorship or totalitarian
rule? Far from being productive, generalizations of this nature fail to tackle the crucial questions, namely: How do we stop
the next Hitler? How do we stop the next Pinochet? How do we stop the next Pol Pot or how do we stop the next Bin
Laden?20
Thus, the field of human rights law is an increasingly flexible instrument. It can move from the human rights issues of remote
Rwanda and then return to the challenges of the European Balkans. In the globalised era, people affected by human rights
atrocities assertively and proactively present their cases to the rest of the world via the Internet and other mediums. These callings
have acquired a new mobility. Today it is not unusual for indigenous peoples, for example, to present their tradition and human
rights struggles with new-found immediacy and authority. Frustrations at working within the nation state have led some indigenous
communities towards establishing international linkages and relations with other indigenous communities.21 Moreover, gone are
the days where the state could censor everything (although undeniably some still try). Contemporary computer technology has
rendered the flow of information a difficult commodity to regulate and this has led to the amelioration of so-called fundamental
truths which hold the human rights enterprise as flawless or beyond reprimand. In contrast to the stagnant conception of the SVS
metaphor, bundled up with the colonial attitudes of the nineteenth century, Stuart Hall has observed:
We know that cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories, but like everything which is historical (in this case the
human rights movement) these identities undergo constant transformation. Far from being eternally fixed in some essentialised
past, they are subject to the continuous ‘play’ of history, culture and power (emphasis added).22
Fast Track 2007 44
Aff Answers
International Institutions are not all dominated by the West
Accessed: 6/21/07)
The Eurocentric basis of the SVS metaphor does become somewhat inflated in an increasingly internationalising legal order. For
instance, Shaw indicates that in the last 20 years, the former European hegemony has, to a large extent, depleted.23 Thus, the
composition of, for example, both the ICJ and the Security Council of the United Nations mirror such developments. Article 9 of
the ICJ statute points out that the main forms of civilisation and the principal legal systems of the world must be represented within
the Court, and there is an arrangement that of the ten non-permanent seats in the Security Council five should go to Afro-Asian
states and two to Latin American states. The composition of the International Law Commission has also recently been increased
and structured upon geographic lines.
The influence of the non-western states has perhaps been most pronounced within the General Assembly where they constitute the
majority of the 185 member states. The content and scope of the various resolutions and declarations emanating from the
Assembly are proof of their impact and contain a record of their fears, hopes and concerns.24 In fact, some commentators have
criticised the operation of ‘one state one vote’ enshrined in Article 18 UN Charter,25 especially when it is realised that in many
cases the combined populations of two-thirds of the member states may be far less than the remaining one-third. Many members of
the UN have populations of fewer than 2 million, whereas China has a population well over 1 billion.26 The argument often goes
something like this: ‘Why should Nauru ostensibly enjoy the same voting rights as a populous and powerful nation such as India?’
In light of these imbalances there have been widespread calls to reform the UN so as to reflect, more accurately, current power
relations.27 While these calls for reform must be welcomed, the complicated mechanisms for amendment of the Charter, coupled
with the presence of the veto, make any change unlikely. Furthermore, we cannot forget that the UN is already rampant with deal
brokering – a situation that is unlikely to change regardless of the alternative methods heralded. In this deal brokering process,
smaller, less powerful nations often exert influence largely disproportional to their size. If the recent inability of the globally
dominant U.S. to secure a Security Council Resolution to go into Iraq taught us anything, it should have taught us that being ‘big’
does not necessary equate to securing votes.
Fast Track 2007 45

Aff Answers
The metaphors indicted by Mutua are inaccurate. Third World nations no longer play the victim.
Smaller nations have agency to help themselves. Mutua
Accessed: 6/21/07)
Therefore, while the power imbalances amongst states remain a fundamental concern in the human rights context28 – it cannot be
maintained that the demarcations drawn by Mutua are as chronic as he would have us believe. The SVS metaphor presupposes a
world in which the Third World has little input into the creation of human rights law. As can be seen, however, the Third World
does participate, and that participation continues to grow. It is, in the author’s opinion, no longer realistic, nor in the interests of the
Third World to portray it as a group of states devoid of any capacity to shape their human rights objectives. Increasingly it is not
the western state acting as the saviour for the embroiled third world nation. To the contrary, it is the Third World nation realising
that it has the potential to save itself!
Fast Track 2007 46

Aff Answers
Mutua falls victim to his own western educational criticisms
Accessed: 6/21/07)
For all the charges that Mutua makes concerning the SVS metaphor and the biases therein, even he is forced to concede ‘there are
more undemocratic states in the Third World than in the developed West’. However, he seems to get back on track by quickly
pointing out that ‘while this explains the work of INGO’s in the Third World, it does not excuse their relative inactivity on human
rights violations in the West’.29 This argument overlooks the fact that many of the nations in the west possess more sophisticated
municipal options for human rights redress than their Third World counterparts.30 This is not to say that the west should not be the
subject of greater scrutiny – it should – but any realistic appraisal of the INGO system recognises that resources in these
organisations are scarce and therefore will be by nature targeting those areas with more alarming human rights abuses.31 Again,
this is not because they want to operate within the SVS paradigm, nor disrupt the local cultures within the Third World, nor some
covert operation to promulgate the westernisation of the world, but rather because pragmatic decisions have been made as to where
their resources might be used best. Surprisingly, Mutua is also dismissive of INGOs and senior academics. Mutua’s criticisms of
the INGO’s are damning. In brief, he contends that these are highly westernised entities and that their operations are laced with the
SVS metaphor. For example, he is quick to illustrate how many of the workers within INGOs are educated in the West and
therefore carry SVS biases into their human rights’ duties. There is an irony in this criticism for a quick gloss of the footnotes
reveals that a number of his impressive qualifications come from those institutions most revered in the western world including
Harvard – an institution perceived as the bastion of western knowledge as we know it today. Does this mean that he himself has
fallen foul to the very SVS model he wishes to expose? It seems trite to argue that merely because one has been educated in the
West they are rendered in incapable of exercising critical judgment or effecting their human rights obligations objectively.
Contemporary education is increasingly being measured – and rightly so – by its ability to incorporate critical discussion,
acknowledge power relations and to ‘turn the gaze inwards’ so to speak. It is doubtful whether those colonial worldviews
permeating the 19th century and discussed by Mutua are still omnipresent today? As Glenn points out, increasing awareness in the
west of the traditional character of western thought now places western thought beside, and not above other forms of thought.
Increasing juxtaposition with other traditions reveals their own diversity, and measure of internal rationality. It is no longer
considered scientifically or intellectually accurate, and as a consequence no longer politically correct, to speak of ‘primitive’ or
‘advanced’ societies or peoples, as western sociology and anthropology traditionally did. Particular practices must be identified,
and opposed or defended. Simultaneously, western society has brought about the material conditions for increased contact amongst
traditions. A process of reaction accompanies the process of globalization and development, as efforts to expand western
information more frequently encounter other forms of information. All sides have a stronger sense of identity – for best or worse -
and all sides are influenced by the process. They cannot remain what they were.32
As mentioned, Mutua also questions the agenda of academics (of which he is one) in the human rights corpus. Although there is a
great deal to be said of the ‘publish or perish’ phenomena gripping the academic world, it cannot be refuted that intellectuals like
Mutua have done much to mobilize the human rights endeavour; a mobilisation process that has been impartial to various SVS
biases. In this diffusion, non-European discourse has played a seminal role. Frequently non-western intellectuals are less than
ready to accept western conceptions in totality and expressly attempt to avoid the onset of SVS influences by relating questions of
human rights to specific national conditions. Useful contributions have not only been produced by non-western academics and
human rights advocates, with cutting pieces being delivered by people from all parts of the globe. Indeed, the emphasis Mutua
places on the need for human rights work to come from within may be slightly overstated. Of course, there are longstanding
convictions that one cannot be objective about one’s own society,33 something that may affect all human rights workers whether
western or non-western. But the issue seems to transcend this.
Fast Track 2007 47

Aff Answers
Mutua’s argument isn’t accurate. He rejects any attempts to help as guided by ulterior motives. This
leads to nihilism and inaction.
Accessed: 6/21/07)
It would seem, therefore, that Mutua has even construed the role of the Good Samaritan as being one rooted in the SVS metaphor.
His article then, virtually rejects all prospects of altruism, or at least questions the motives for such activity. And yet surely the
person handing out food in war torn Afghanistan, western or not western is doing a good thing? Can we really say that either side
is aligned to a savage or a saviour, even if we do resort to such outmoded and arbitrary categories? It may be that some people
engaged in human rights enterprises do so because such activities give them a sense of satisfaction or usefulness and it must be
asked: is there really something wrong with that? But this does not hold that they want to be a saviour or some kind of divinity
status. For chances are no one will remember them when they die in the name of another, as was the case for Jesus Christ or other
celebrated saviours throughout history.
All of the great traditions, of which the human rights tradition is one, generate opposition within aimed at the improvement or
transformation of that tradition. Even after his rather scathing critique of the human rights enterprise, Mutua appears to assure us
that his work is not rooted in nihilism and offers, in the author’s opinion, one of his most constructive arguments. He states:
The idea of human rights – the quest to craft a universal bundle of attributes with which all societies must endow all human beings
is a noble one. The problem with the current bundle of attributes lies in their inadequacy, incompleteness and wrong-headedness.
There is little doubt that there is much to celebrate in the human rights corpus just as there is much to quarrel with. In this exercise
a sober evaluation of the current human rights corpus and its language is not an option – it is required.
The problem here, though, is that Mutua has exceeded even his own calling. He has not just provided a sober evaluation; he
has virtually destroyed the human rights entity, as we know it today. Thus, INGOs are not to be trusted, nor are senior
academics. Arguably, even the lady handing out food amidst gun battles in Iraq is also complicit in the subversive SVS
metaphor.
As long as the SVS metaphor is seen as the staring and end point of analysis, research and public policy, the result is usually to
polarize the distinction - the western human rights worker becomes more western – the Third World worker more ‘Third World’ -
and limits the human encounter between different cultures, traditions and societies. 39 No longer do we have ordinary human rights
workers. Instead we are presented with human rights saviours (European men in shining armour) coming to save the victims (the
helpless women from the Third World). Far from being either accurate or productive, this fallacy accelerates the polarisation
process in a field where cohesion is needed more than ever.
Fast Track 2007 48

Aff Answers
Mutua’s argument is nihilistic. He says no human rights organization can be trusted, neutral, or well
intentioned. This problematic approach damages everyone’s welfare.
Accessed: 6/21/07)
Accordingly, Mutua’s article, while both engaging and challenging is unnecessarily and unrealistically grim. In painting the
Savage, Victim, and Saviour metaphor Mutua engages in a process of reverse ‘Orientalism’, effectively employing the very
othering process he seeks to expose. The SVS metaphor has very much been ameliorated, if not completely redefined by the Third
World itself, the forces of globalization and the increasing interdependence of many of the dominant world traditions. Although
Mutua must be commended for walking the plank of political correctness – a walk that is too seldom taken by those in our
profession - an argument which holds that the whole human rights corpus runs rampant with a SVS metaphor is unequivocally
nihilistic. For Mutua essentially suggests that no one can be trusted: The UN, INGOs, senior academics and even the politically
and ideologically neutral human rights worker handing out food during serious times of conflict. In this regard, we are left with the
reactionary abandonment of all prospect of an egalitarian, democratic and just society – a proposition that needs to be challenged
for the welfare of all.
Fast Track 2007 49

Aff Answer
Developing infrastructure provides an opportunity to bridge the divide between treatment and
prevention.
Thirdly, the possibility that HIV treatment access may in fact drive the establishment of infrastructure in areas that need it most
appears to have escaped its critics. For example, introduction of a pilot mother-to-child-transmission prevention program in
Khayelitsha, Cape Town helped to drive a process of managerial integration of multiple service providers into a comprehensive
district-based program with a full range of curative, tuberculosis, maternity, sick baby, and healthy baby services.61 Moreover,
where pregnant women are being tested as part of trial projects, the spin-offs in raising community awareness and prompting
others to come forward for testing appear to be significant.62 Of course, the challenge is to ensure that such ripple effects are also
enjoyed in rural areas, where the needs are greatest. But rather than citing infrastructural deficits as the reason for not
implementing HIV treatment programs, improving treatment access should be welcomed as an opportunity to extend such
infrastructure. In this way, public health is able to meet meaningful population health objectives by also supporting the attainment
of a human right to health. Development of infrastructure provides an opportunity to bridge the dichotomy between treatment and
prevention.63 The current exclusive emphasis on prevention, at least to the exclusion of antiretrovirals from the South African
government's agenda,64 fails to take advantage of real opportunities to extend access to health care.
Fast Track 2007 50

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Fast Track 2007 51

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Wake Forest Debate Workshop

Index for Human Rights K

Fast Track 2007 1

Human Rights 1NC 1/4

Fast Track 2007 2

Human Rights 1NC 2/4

Fast Track 2007 3

Human Rights 1NC 3/4

Fast Track 2007 4

Human Rights 1NC 4/4

Fast Track 2007 5

Fast Track 2007 6

Dignity and Fundamental Rights Link

Fast Track 2007 7

Fast Track 2007 8

Fast Track 2007 9

The killer virus narrative reinforces racist/colonial notions of otherness

Fast Track 2007 10

Fast Track 2007 11

Fast Track 2007 12

FGM/Gender Rights Link

Fast Track 2007 13

Fast Track 2007 14

Human rights are imperialist

Fast Track 2007 16

Human rights rhetoric link

Fast Track 2007 17

Human Rights deny agency

Fast Track 2007 18

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International Institutions Links

Fast Track 2007 20

International Law Link

Fast Track 2007 21

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Public Health Link

Fast Track 2007 25

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Fast Track 2007 27

Alternative and Impact

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Fast Track 2007 32

THEIR PLAN JUSTIFIES OPPRESSION AND MASS KILLING

Fast Track 2007 33

Impacts: Aff not Solve

SUCCESS OF PUBLIC HEALTH INTERVENTIONS NECESSITATES UNDERSTANDING THE

Fast Track 2007 34

Impacts: Aff not Solve

Fast Track 2007 35

Fast Track 2007 36

Fast Track 2007 37

Fast Track 2007 38

Alternative solvency for FGM cases

Fast Track 2007 39

AT: Perm/Alt Solvency

Fast Track 2007 40

AT: you reject all rights

Fast Track 2007 41