(Perspectives for an intercultural and liberating project on human rights)

Abstract

On the bases of Norberto Bobbio´s proposal (1991), this article will evaluate the universalist commitments that underlie the traditional foundations of human rights, considering their monocultural, postcolonial and Eurocentric character. From there, the need for an intercultural reformulation of them will be maintained based on the theory of intercultural translation and the diatopic hermeneutics of Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2010). Some difficulties of this project will be highlighted and, the importance of complementing this programmatic hermeneutics with the contributions of Enrique Dussel’s Philosophy of Liberation (1973a, 1973b, 1998, 2001) will be affirmed. On this basis, the guidelines will be proposed to think about an analytical foundation of human rights that seeks to guarantee the production and reproduction of life in community, understanding this, not from a universalist, abstract and transcultural conception, but as the situated product of tensions and claims to universality typical of every culture. In this way, we will seek to promote situated appropriations of human rights that make it possible to account not only for the relations of oppression between cultures but also within them. Finally, based on the above, it will be concluded that this analectical and intercultural reformulation of the foundations of human rights is fruitful for legal systems to be open to processes of recognition and expansion of rights.