ABSTRACT
Liu Nanlai is a professor at the Institute of Law and deputy director of the Center for Human Rights Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. He addresses the issue of the particularity and universality of human rights, and stresses the importance of cultural and historical factors in explaining differences between societies with respect to the understanding and implementation of human rights. The current political, economic, and social statuses of developing countries also determine their human rights claims and human rights policies, which again are greatly different from those pursued by developed countries. Developing countries, in comparison with Western states, invoke provisions in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and other international human rights instruments to prove that, like civil and political rights, economic, social, and cultural rights are an indivisible part of human rights that should be given equal attention. The human rights movement has advanced in a direction favorable to the realization of human rights ideals.
