This chapter completes the book’s examination of the impossible narrative position faced by refugee applicants by examining how specific genres enter the hearing room and further determine the ‘authentic’ refugee that states are willing to accept. Drawing on Joseph R Slaughter’s engagement with the genre of human rights discourse, it argues that like the protagonist of the classic Bildungsroman and human rights narratives, refugee applicants are expected to narrate a linear progression from a non-citizen ‘outsider’ towards full civic incorporation through the seeking of protection and the resolution of refugee status. In this generic mode, refugee applicants were expected to present evidence as omniscient narrators with sovereignty over self and others, and the ability to account not only for their own actions but also the decisions and interior worlds of others. Crucially, the ‘good’ refugee’s story moves steadily towards complete resolution that is the determination of refugee status and the realisation of a liberal personhood, marked by self-possession and autonomy, and readiness to become a refugee-citizen.

In the past decade, the international community has generally felt China’s proactive role in the international human rights discourse. China has made substantive contributions in the creation of international human rights law and continues to promote a global moral consensus view of human rights. Additionally, China regularly and positively interacts with international human rights mechanisms such as the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) and special procedures and treaty bodies. It practises the principles of respect, dialogue and cooperation rather than confrontation, while resisting politicization, selectivity and double standards. Since China emphasizes economic, social and cultural rights, there is an impression that it ignores civil and political rights or selectively safeguards human rights. This conclusion is difficult to support when we review the recent movements within Chinese policy and judicature when it comes to human rights. Considering its positive commitment to civil and political rights during the third UPR and in its fourth National Human Rights Action Plan, China is expected to make substantive progress in the comprehensive, balanced protection of all human rights.

The discursive view of human rights, emphasised throughout this book, suggests that human rights must be understood as an ongoing and ever-changing discourse about what it means to be human and about what should comprise the rights of common global citizenship. If this is the case, it is most important to examine the nature of that global dialogue. Who is responsible for maintaining that discourse, who contributes, who does not, and whose voices are the most powerful in defining what is to count as ‘human rights’? As discussed in Chapter 1, one of the consequences of globalisation has been localisation, and this has led to the identification of the global and the local as the sites of significant change and praxis. For this reason, the discussion in this chapter will be divided into a consideration of global and local dialogues around human rights.

There are two views one can take on the timeliness of the idea of human rights. One is that it is an idea whose time has come. This view sees human rights as being a necessary counter to economic globalisation and asserts that, in the globalised world, ideas of global citizenship based on ideals of human rights are important in the same way as ideas of national citizenship rights became important with the emergence of the nation state. It suggests that the apparently increasing interest in a human rights discourse is a source of hope for a future based on collective understandings of shared human values rather than individual greed and consumption. Human rights can be the basis for a future of humanity that until now has seemed an impossible dream. The other view of human rights is that it is an idea whose time has passed. This view sees human rights as a leftover remnant from the disappearing world of modernist certainty and Western imperialism. In the postmodern world of relativism, multiple voices, fragmented realities and the ‘death of the meta-narrative’, there is no room for, and no point in, a universal discourse such as human rights.

The issue of cultural relativism has been a major one for theorists of human rights. Arguments about cultural difference represent perhaps the strongest criticisms of the idea of human rights, and for many they are the most difficult to deal with (Brown 1999, 2020). This is especially true for social workers from Western traditions, who are generally aware of the role of the West in colonising other world-views and who wish to value cultural diversity. This results in Western social workers (among many others) feeling somewhat guilty about supporting something called ‘human rights’ and being particularly susceptible to the criticisms of human rights as a Western concept and therefore somehow not to be trusted. The aim of this chapter is to explore this difficult area, with a view to developing an approach to human rights that overcomes these dilemmas. Herein lies the key to dealing with cultural difference: the capacity to look critically at all cultural traditions is contextualised differently in different cultures, and to see that human rights violations and the struggle for human rights occur in all cultural contexts.

This chapter examines human rights policies and their relationship to conceptions of the national interest, focusing on the 2001 establishment and subsequent functioning of the National Human Rights Commission of Korea (NHRCK). The chapter argues that one reason why Korea created and consolidated the NHRCK was to realize its desired identity as a seonjinguk (advanced country). Over time, with changes in political administrations, the definition of a seonjinguk transformed alongside human rights discourses, with implications for the NHRCK’s functioning as a channel for rights-claiming. By tracing the rise and subsequent weakening of the NHRCK from 2001 to 2012, this chapter demonstrates that national interest considerations shape state decisions about whether to comply with or disregard global human rights norms embodied in national human rights institutions like the NHRCK. It also illustrates the interplay between international and domestic human rights discourses.