In May 2000, the Taliban, who rule most of Afghanistan, ordered a mother of seven to be stoned to death for adultery in front of an ecstatic stadium of men and children. The year before, the House of Lords—Britain’s highest court—had allowed two Pakistani women accused of adultery to claim refugee status in the United Kingdom, since they risked public flogging and death by stoning at home. Women today are denied the vote and the right to drive cars in several Arab states, and harsh versions of shari`a (Islamic law) punishment are spreading to Sudan, Nigeria, and Pakistan.

Still, the Taliban’s repression remains in a class by itself: denying women the right to leave home except when accompanied by a brother or husband and forbidding them all access to public education. Not only do the Taliban seek to spread their militant vision to other states, they also demand to be left alone to implement their own religious and cultural values at home without foreign interference. Leaders in Kabul insist that they not be judged by the norms of others—especially in the West.

Of course the Taliban are not the only ones to reject outside scrutiny. Florida’s government, after frying several prisoners in a faulty electric chair, has only reluctantly turned to other methods of execution to conform to the U.S. Constitution’s prohibition of “cruel and unusual punishment.” Yet when America’s Western allies tell it that the U.S. system of capital punishment is barbaric, local politicians and courts reply that it is their way and no one else’s business. Which is precisely what the Taliban say.

This is not to indulge in what Jeane Kirkpatrick, a former U.S. permanent representative to the U.N., has called the “sin of moral equivalence.” The United States is not Afghanistan. What the Islamic fundamentalist regime is doing there violates well-established global law. Article 7 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) echoes the U.S. Constitution in proclaiming that “no one shall be subject to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment,” which certainly covers stoning and flogging—but not execution by lethal injection or (functioning) electric chair. And the 1980 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) prohibits almost everything the Taliban have done to subordinate women.

The difference has been widely recognized. In October 1999, the U.N. Security Council duly censured the Taliban by a unanimous resolution. The General Assembly, too, has shown its disapproval by refusing to accept the credentials of the Taliban’s delegation. But Taliban leaders and other radical fundamentalists in Pakistan, Sudan, and elsewhere reply to such condemnation by arguing that their codes have reintroduced social cohesion, decency, and family values into societies corrupted by colonialism and globalization. They point scornfully to the degradation of Western women through pornography, prostitution, and other forms of exploitation, and argue that their wives and daughters have been liberated from public obligations to focus instead on home and family.

Although huge differences in degree do exist between repression in Afghanistan and executions in Florida, the point is that the arguments of Islamic extremists parallel those used by U.S. courts and politicians: namely, that states have a sovereign right to be let alone and not be judged by international human rights standards. The United States insists, for example, on the right to execute persons who committed crimes as minors. Never mind that this violates U.S. obligations under the ICCPR. It is the American way, representing American values and ethics.

Such assertions are made nowadays by many varieties of cultural exceptionalists. For most of the 55 years since the collapse of Hitler’s own extravagant form of cultural exceptionalism, this sort of claim tended to be suppressed, or at least muted. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the several ensuing legal treaties setting out civil, political, cultural, and economic rights as well as the rights of children, women, ethnic groups, and religions, were meant to create a global safety net of rights applicable to all persons, everywhere. Although these legal instruments allow some restrictions in time of national emergency, they brook no cultural exceptionalism.

But more and more, such universalist claims are being challenged. And so the argument must be joined: are human rights truly universal, or are they a product of the decadent West that has no relevance in other societies?

The postwar flourishing of human rights has featured two dynamic elements: globalization and individualization. Against both a backlash has emerged.

Globalization has been achieved by drafting basic codes of protection and, to the extent possible in a decentralized world, by monitoring and promoting compliance. Inevitably, this scrutiny has come into conflict with notions of state sovereignty. When the Commission of Experts overseeing compliance with the ICCPR found Jamaica to have violated the treaty through its administration of the death penalty, Jamaica responded by withdrawing from the ICCPR provision that allows individuals to make complaints to the commission. Jamaica’s defense in that case was typical: respect our culture, our unique problems. When it comes to the treatment of our own people, we want sovereignty, not globalism.

Sovereignty, however, is not what it used to be. Beginning in the mid-1950s, the global system began to take humanitarian crimes more seriously. The U.N. barely hesitated before telling even quite seriously sovereign states—Belgium, the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands, and the United States—to emancipate their colonies. And they did. By 1965, the Security Council was imposing mandatory sanctions on a white racist regime in Rhodesia and, in 1977, on South Africa—although they, too, had asked in vain to be let alone to pursue the cultural exceptionalism of apartheid.

By last fall, the secretary-general of the U.N., Kofi Annan, felt emboldened enough to tell the General Assembly that their core challenge was to forge unity behind the principle that massive and systematic violations of human rights—wherever they may take place—should not be allowed to stand. . . . If states bent on criminal behavior know that frontiers are not the absolute defense; if they know that the Security Council will take action to halt crimes against humanity, then they will not embark on such a course of action in expectation of sovereign immunity.

Annan called for a redefinition of national interests that will “induce states to find far greater unity in the pursuit of such basic [U.N.] Charter values as democracy, pluralism, human rights, and the rule of law.”

This bold call drew quite a hostile reaction from member states. Governments seeking to preserve their sovereignty, however, are not the only ones offended by this most recent call for the enforcement of global values. Some cultures perceive the global human rights canon as a threat to their very identity. The Taliban may brandish national sovereignty as a shield, but they also see themselves as militant guardians of a religion and culture that should be exempted from a “Western” system of human rights that is inimical to Islam as they practice it. Other governments, notably Singapore’s, have similarly advanced their claim of exceptionalism by referring to “Asian values” that are supposedly antithetical to universal or Western norms.

In taking a stand against global human rights, the Taliban have made common cause not with the tired nationalist defenders of state sovereignty, but with a powerful and growing subset of cultural........

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