Zaid: No such thing as Western standard of human rights

Former law minister says Chief Justice Arifin Zakaria's references to the Western standard of human rights is "misguided thinking."

PETALING JAYA: Chief Justice Arifin Zakaria should stop referring to the West when speaking about human rights in the country as there is no such thing as a Western standard of human rights, said former law minister Zaid Ibrahim.

He said this when asked to comment on a speech made by Arifin at the ceremonial opening of Malaysia’s Legal Year 2016 today in which the Chief Justice said critics should not measure local court decisions using the Western standard of human rights as these did not always match Malaysian values.

“CJ (chief justice) says we cannot use Western human rights standards in our courts. How about using human as a standard?” Zaid tweeted today.

When contacted by FMT, Zaid described Arifin’s statement as “misguided thinking”, and argued that human rights applied to all regardless of which part of the world an individual lived in.

He said, the standard of human rights was determined by the United Nations (UN) after the two world wars and other similar incidents that took place over the years.

He said the UN also took into consideration the degree of cruelty humankind had to endure during these incidents.

“There is no Eastern and Western standard. This is what I call misguided thinking. All these international human rights standards came from the North, East, South and West.

“So stop labelling this (human rights) as Western because the whole world adopted this standard. If you can’t accept it, just admit it but don’t label it as a Western standard,” Zaid said.

Arifin in his speech had insisted that Western values and human rights standards could not be the benchmark in Malaysia, and explained: “…the standards applied by way of comparison are those of mature, Western orientated democracies.”

Arifin also said that the application of Western norms were not always in accordance with the values and cultures in Malaysian society, citing the Human Rights Commission Act 1999, where he said that human rights in Malaysia was defined as fundamental liberties as stated in Part 2 of the Federal Constitution.