The right to forego rights

Many declarations of human rights go too far and are too wordy.  In trying to cover all the bases, presumably for all time, the architects of these declarations have left us with documents that are indigestible for the average person.  Yet the demand from "politically correct" human rights activists, generally of a Western cultural persuasion, is for such declarations to become more, not less, comprehensive.  They are also lobbying vigorously for a much greater commitment from influential states and the international community to globally enforce these human rights standards.  In so doing, they are seeking to impose a particular and highly specified culture on the global community.  The international human rights movement is a significant contributor to the globalisation of culture^[1]. 

In principle there should be an irreducible set of human rights guaranteed to each human being by the full force of the international community.  But, in the interests of global cultural diversity^[2], this minimum set of human rights needs to be exactly that - the absolute minimum^[3].

What no widely promulgated declaration of human rights recognises explicitly, is that every human being has the inalienable right to forego rights, and to choose to be part of a group or a society that restricts, even severely, their freedom to act.

Expressed from a different perspective, this is the right each of us able-minded adults has to harm ourselves.  

The freedom to choose well costs the risk of choosing badly. 

The growing tension between the Islamic and Asian worlds and the "Western" worlds is in part due to the attempts by the West to overreach and impose its culture of freedom in the name of supposedly inalienable human rights.  There are Muslim customs that to contemporary western eyes are barbarically anti-woman.  But it is entirely conceivable, and they are well within their rights in doing so, that millions of Muslim women might freely choose to live under the Shari`a, the law of Islam. 

The minimum human rights that should be globally inalienable, and that should be enforced by whatever measures the international community is able to muster are:

• The right to forego rights

• The right to communicate^[4]

• The right to privacy and data integrity^[5]
  and

• The right to migrate^[6]

The right to die^[7] is a special case of the right to forego rights.