The argument presented from the “Asian view” of human rights is that of the precedence of socioeconomic rights over civil and political ones. The basic logic behind this argument is that poverty and illiteracy must first be alleviated for civil and political rights to have any value; that civil and political rights are irrelevant to the poor, illiterate and destitute masses. Therefore the state has responsibility, or authority, to give precedence to its economic development, which will ultimately benefit its citizens. Economic development to alleviate starvation and instability takes precedence and thus it essentially gives the state the right to restrict its citizens political and civil rights for the sake of political stability.
However, this argument runs into quite a few problems. First, it assumes the equivalency of the state’s economic development and the citizen’s socioeconomic rights where there is no such equivalency. This false equivalency is not only due to the fact that economic development is a right held by the state and socioeconomic rights are ones held by citizens, but it is also a matter of what and who these rights ultimately apply to.
The state's right to economic development does not guarantee the citizen the rights to freedom from want; it does not guarantee that they will not be hungry nor poor nor illiterate. These rights are afforded to the citizen through their socioeconomic rights, which are instituted to protect the vulnerable and marginalized communities. What the right to development ignores and what socioeconomic rights restore is economic equality. For these reasons, this argument's attempt to equate the two just simply is not true.
Secondly, this argument suggests that one must choose between socioeconomic and civil-political rights, that it must be one or the other. This should not be so — in fact, the two sets of rights are intended to go hand and hand, the erasure of one has detrimental implications for the other. Disregarding a citizen's civil and political rights will inherently infringe upon their socioeconomic rights. The poor and illiterate must voice their dissatisfaction with the state of their socioeconomic rights, and this would be them exercising their civil and political rights. The two sets of rights are essentially indivisible.
A citizen's socioeconomic rights, if he or she does not have any civil and political rights, can be taken away from them at any given moment. This argument assumes the erasure of one will bring about the other, when in reality a politically repressive government can also starve its impoverished population. Taking away one set of rights in no way guarantees the other. In fact, without the citizen's civil-political rights, that citizen then has no ability to hold the state accountable for their inability to provide those socioeconomic rights to their citizens.
If this argument is taken at its value, then it essentially dismantles the concept of the universality of human rights. The argument states that in certain governments, and in certain cultures, the deprivation of civil-political rights can benefit the society in its social and economic realm. This argument then disregards the concept that human rights apply to every culture and society in their entirety, as it is picking and choosing which of those rights it wants to accord to its citizens.
The challenge that the Asian values debate poses to a human rights movement is such that it undermines the attempts to dismantle the basic principle of the universality of human rights. It does this through the concept of cultural relativity, the idea that rights are culturally specific. What this idea essentially states is that rights emerge due to the social, cultural and political environment. What this implies is that due to the environment, rights in different places in the world are then inherently different because they came about in different conditions. The reason that this is so important is because it would follow the idea that there is no universality to the concept of human rights, but also that there cannot be, because different cultures have different concepts of morality and therefore human rights.
Economic, social, civil and political rights are interdependent; one cannot truly exist without the other, therefore the argument that civil and political rights must be sacrificed in order to ensure economic development is an argument that dismantles itself. A citizen that does not have his or her civil and political rights has no power or voice to defend their economic rights.
