Following Zambia’s election to the UN Human Rights Council, a journalist from Le Monde, one of France’s leading newspapers, called to ask me how that recognition squares with allegations of human rights violations made by critics of the Zambian government. As we spoke, I found myself returning to a belief I have held since college: the failure to take cultural relativism seriously lies behind many of the misunderstandings and misapplications of human rights standards.

I was introduced to the concept of cultural relativism in a philosophy class in the early 2000s: the idea that values, norms, and moral boundaries are not universal truths handed down from above. They are products of culture. What one society treats as sacred, another treats as ordinary. What one society forbids, another permits. To understand a people, you must first understand the logic of their culture rather than judge them through the assumptions of your own.

That idea changed how I see the world. It also explains something that human rights organisations and advocates refuse to admit: the modern human rights framework was not a universal truth handed down by a higher power. It was written by humans. It was written in a particular place, by particular people who belong to a particular culture. And as a result, the framework carries particular assumptions—assumptions that were then exported around the world as though they belonged to everyone. They do not.

Yes, the drafting committee included representatives from China, India, Lebanon, and Chile. But a document negotiated by a few dozen delegates in a conference room is still a document negotiated by a few dozen delegates in a conference room. The villages of Africa were not consulted. The assumptions that travelled with it were never put to a vote anywhere.

This is not a claim that anything goes. Cultural relativism is not a licence for a state to do as it likes. It is a rule about how an argument has to be made. Before you judge a culture, you have to enter it. You have to argue in its terms, against its own standards—not against a stranger’s. Judgment is still permitted, but it simply has to be earned.

So when the reports travel from Western capitals to China, to Africa, and to us, they are often mistaking boundaries for abuse. They are simply looking at cultures with limits—limits they do not recognise because they do not share them.

Picture a home where the parents are present and parenting is hands-on. In that home, there are rules. There is respect, there is order, there are lines a child does not cross. Now picture another home down the street where the parenting is completely hands-off—no boundaries, no rules, no discipline, no consequences—and everyone calls it freedom.

Over time, that second home gets praised as modern and open-minded, and it becomes the gold standard. Meanwhile, the first home, the one actually doing the hard work of raising responsible citizens, gets criticized for being too strict and gets reported to the authorities for child abuse.

But a home with no rules is not a free home—it is a neglected one. A society that enforces basic order is not the opposite of a rights-respecting society. It is the prerequisite for one. Order is what makes rights possible in the first place. China, for example, is a civilization built on respect, on duty, on obligation—concepts that have held it together for centuries. Those concepts are not obstacles to human rights. They are the soil those rights grow in.

African societies are rooted in community, in kinship, in the understanding that a person is a person through other people. But that societal foundation is not only communal; it is also hierarchical—respect for elders, respect for authority, respect for the office a person holds, even when you disagree with the person holding it. That is the part these human rights reports never translate.

Take one case—a 25-year-old in Zambia is arrested for insulting a 64-year-old man. Not just any man: an elder old enough to be his father, and the holder of the highest office in the land. In our culture, a young man publicly insulting an elder is already crossing a line. Insulting an elder who is also the head of state crosses two lines—and it is not a political statement. It is a moral transgression. Respect for elders, for authority, for those who hold high office, is not optional—it is an inheritance passed down for generations.

That inheritance was eventually written into law in 1965, when Section 69 of the Penal Code was enacted—a law meant to protect the same boundary the culture had always protected: that a society can permit political argument without permitting its elders, its authorities, and its head of state to be publicly degraded by its own children. The law did not make us respect our elders. It only put on paper what we already did.

President Hakainde Hichilema repealed it in 2022, and rightly so. The law was there to restrain what a person does, not to police what they think. When Section 69 started punishing argument instead of stopping the public degradation of the President, it had already walked away from its own purpose. The statute changed. The boundary did not. And the boundary was never the law’s to carry alone. It lives in the family, in the community, in the way a child is taught to speak to an elder before any statute is written. When a young man or woman crosses that boundary, the response is not punishment for its own sake. It is correction—the same correction any parent owes a child who has forgotten how to speak to his elders.

To label this a human rights violation is to dismiss the very cultural differences that cultural relativism asks us to take seriously. A nation is entitled to guard its inheritance against degradation, and it should not be told that doing so is a crime.

And here is what the people in the home down the street never admit, even as they write their reports about ours: they do not live in this house. They do not pay the price when this house falls apart as a result of societal degradation—the kind that follows whenever a people sets aside what held it together to satisfy someone else’s judgement. The outsiders arrive, they judge, and they leave. But we are the ones who live here, and we deal with the consequences.

This is not an argument for impunity. A nation that protects its boundaries is defending an order it took generations to make. And whatever its critics may claim, Zambia’s election to the Human Rights Council demonstrates that the international community does not view the country through the simplistic lens its detractors often promote. It affirms that a nation may govern itself according to its own culture, its own laws, and its own understanding of dignity, not someone else’s script.

That principle is the part the critics cannot accept. There is more than one way to build a good society. Ours was not built in Geneva. It was built here, by people who knew what held them together. The West is entitled to its own model, just as other societies are entitled to theirs. We are not asking anyone to adopt ours. We are simply asking them to stop mistaking difference for deficiency.