Human Rights and Religion: Perspectives and Retrospectives

Human rights discourse has be viewed and debated from different perspectives. There exist different viewpoints to understand human rights concept. Westerns people viewed human rights which emancipates individuals from state, Africans and Asians observed human rights as a means to which emancipates them from socio-cultural suppression. But views are connected with a common concept called negative freedom. Means it human rights ensure individualism as well as liberalism. But when it comes to the issues of religion and its implications with human rights there is hardly any debates we can find in the human rights literature. Therefore, the present paper focuses on the relationship between human rights and religion and explores several theses and counter theses. One school of thought argues that absolute practice of human rights can be ensured through the exclusion of religion. Contrarily, another school of thought believes that both are mutually inclusive. In this regard the present paper analyses the core debates of both schools of thoughts in the western literature context and argues that the nature of the relationship between human rights and religion remains dialectical.