ABSTRACT
This multi-layered audience refl ects the different questions which the UDHR drafters posed when compared to their Enlightenment forebears. They were not only asking how human beings can escape state tyranny and gain control over their own lives, but how a sense of mutual moral responsibility can be inculcated in all human beings everywhere. This was now understood to be indispensable to prevent fl agrant breaches of human rights that were not just conducted by remote states but by tangible human beings, whether under orders or otherwise, and which can take place in multiple locations wherever there are gross imbalances of power. As Simpson has observed: ‘Those who had experienced occupation knew, though this could not always be said . . . that under German occupation . . . those who ill-treated the population were, not infrequently, their own fellow citizens.’ 130 This complex reality contributed to what the Sudanese human rights scholar Abdullahi A. An-Na’im has called ‘the particular conception of freedom and social justice that was articulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ 131 and it is quite a stretch from the ‘natural rights’ perspective of the Enlightenment.
