Human Rights as a Contingent Foundation: The Case of Physicians for Human Rights

If one were to compare two human rights organizations, Physicians for Human Rights USA (PHR USA) and its Israeli counterpart, one would expect to find that their activities were similar. Surely the different geographical and political context within which each organization operates influences their work, but because both are doctors’ rights groups and because both use international human rights conventions as their point of reference, their mode and sphere of action should presumably be the same. Such a supposition would certainly be plausible, given that human rights organizations frequently describe their activities as impartial, independent, and even beyond politics.2 After all, ever since their appearance in the early 1960s, rights groups operating in Western countries have adopted a seemingly universalistic strategy, which is frequently portrayed as uninfluenced by national, economic, or regional ideologies.3 Amnesty International, for instance, explained its resolution not to condemn apartheid by asserting that the organization is neutral with respect to opposing political ideologies (Winston 2001: 33). Human rights nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) tend to promote their cause by appealing to a wide range of international human rights conventions and treaties, which over the years have been continuously developed and, if taken together, comprise an impressive “inventory of rights.” This inventory is used as the legal framework for evaluating the status of human rights within local settings and for demanding social change. Yet, despite the international reference point provided by UN conventions and other legal instruments, which is purportedly universal, in this essay I demonstrate not only that human rights organizations are deeply embedded in the ideological forces circulating in their society, but that human rights themselves are contaminated by ideology.4 To investigate how local ideological forces affect the activities of human rights organizations and help determine our conception of human rights, I compare PHR USA with its Israeli equivalent. I show that the ideological differences between the United States (which is intensely neoliberal and free-market oriented) and Israel (whose socialist tradition has yet to fade) influence the activities of each organization, prompting the two groups to privilege certain rights and to deemphasize others. By positioning local human rights activism vis-à-vis the international inventory of