When the Human Rights Council at the United Nations unanimously passed a resolution calling on countries to build “a culture of peace” two years ago, the moment was notable in itself. Previous efforts to link peace and human rights have often met resistance, with disagreements over what peace entails and who bears responsibility for ensuring it.
But “The Resolution on Human Rights and a Culture of Peace,” adopted on April 4, 2024, was different.
The new resolution’s call for “a culture of peace” was a departure from previous resolutions that instead focused on “a right to peace,” a concept that has long drawn disagreement and typically passed only with significant dissenting votes. Without a single dissenting vote in 2024, the resolution was an unusual moment of consensus within the Human Rights Council.
The Council, based in Geneva, consists of 47 member states elected by a majority of the U.N. General Assembly through a direct and secret vote. Through an executive order in early 2025, President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the council, explaining that the council allows countries with poor human rights records to hold seats.
“Some of the UN’s agencies and bodies have drifted from this mission and instead act contrary to the interests of the United States while attacking our allies and propagating anti-Semitism,” the order states.
Last week, Brett Scharffs, professor of law and director of the International Center for Law and Religion Studies at Brigham Young University Law School, traveled to Geneva to discuss how the resolution passed two years ago has held up and how it might be strengthened today.
For the past decade, BYU’s center has been focused on the idea of human dignity in international policy. One of its major projects is the “Punta del Este Declaration on Human Dignity for Everyone Everywhere,” a document intended to establish a global framework for protecting human dignity. The effort has also included a proposal to create a United Nations “Human Dignity Day,” envisioned as a complement to Human Rights Day, observed annually on Dec. 10.
An important partner in this work has been Muhammadou Kah, Gambian ambassador to Geneva and an academic, who had invited Scharffs to Geneva.
In front of representatives from nearly half of the world’s countries, Scharffs spoke about the role human dignity plays in building a “culture of peace,” engaging with religious actors and confronting the main obstacle to peace: “people or interests who do not want peace.”
He also quoted President Russell M. Nelson, late president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who called on church members to be peacemakers in the world.
After his remarks at the U.N., The Deseret News caught up with Scharffs to discuss the obstacles and opportunities nations have to seek and build peace. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Deseret News: In your speech, you referred to the “cultures of peace” as opposed to the singular “a culture of peace” as it is used in the resolution. Why did you choose the plural form?
Brett Scharffs: I use the term “cultures of peace” deliberately, because I think there are likely going to be variations globally — what a culture of peace in an African country looks like is going to be a little different than what a culture of peace looks like in a country in the Gulf region or in Southeast Asia.
The United Nations really has a universalist vision of human rights. But also, if you look at the preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it talks about how there are going to be variations and how it’s going be implemented incrementally, with differences based upon the stages of development and the constitutional and historical differences of different places.
So I was deliberately using the plural “cultures of peace” just simply because I want to recognize that world culture is not one thing. And I think that “the cultures of peace” that will emerge will be different in different parts of the world.
The basic features of peace are universal, but the details of culture are going to vary from region to region and country to country.
DN: You mentioned in your remarks in Geneva that human dignity is largely absent from the resolution. Why do you think that is? Is it more difficult to implement the idea of human dignity than human rights, even though the human dignity underpins human rights?
BS: There are some human rights advocates who want to focus solely on human rights, so it may have been collateral damage of the drafting process. My view is that human dignity is so fundamental to human rights, that if we don’t include human dignity in our discussions of human rights, we’re going to lose a lot of people.
In a lot of places in the world here — I’m thinking of Muslim societies, places in the global south, including Africa, Asia, including parts of Latin America — human dignity resonates much more robustly than human rights does.
There are places in the world where human rights feel much more like a Western concept, whereas human dignity feels much more Indigenous, much more like a concept which comes out of the people’s own traditions.
For example, human rights is not a concept that we find even in the Hebrew Bible. But the idea of the dignity of a humankind we find in the creation of men and women in the image of God, for example.
We’ve been working on projects on Islamic conceptions of human dignity, African conceptions of human dignity, Indigenous concepts of human dignity.
What we find when we broaden the conversation and strive to listen to voices that are often neglected is that these voices have really interesting things to say about human dignity, and they’re often a little different than the Western ways of thinking about dignity.
Western conceptions of dignity are really dominated by the tradition that flows from Immanuel Kant, which is a very abstract and philosophical concept of dignity, which is really individualistic.
Whereas when you get conceptions of dignity that come out of other cultures, they’re often much more communitarian and they’re often much more rooted in lived life, in the soil of life.
They often also include the concern for the afterlife, the dignity and respect for the dead. Our project is not trying to find a single imperial definition of dignity. We’re trying to broaden the voices that we listen to and enrich our understanding of human dignity.
I think that human rights and human dignity are like hand in glove. I don’t think you can really separate one from the other.
DN: What are some examples of what prioritizing human dignity in international human rights looks like on the ground?
BS: You can choose any human rights issue and think about how human dignity bears upon that issue: it can be freedom of speech or immigration or how we treat prisoners. It’s not that human dignity works like an algorithm and it tells us the exact answer to the question before us. But if we focus on human dignity, we’re going to eventually get better answers to the question that we’re focusing upon.
What it does is it helps us stay focused on what really matters. So it becomes a focusing mechanism that helps us stay rooted. Human dignity is the single most important benchmark for helping us differentiate between uses of artificial intelligence that should be encouraged, and those that should be discouraged.
DN: How are religious voices important in peacemaking? What would meaningful engagement with these voices look like for international leaders?
BS: When you look at the resolution, it is all but silent with respect to engaging religion on peace-building. It does mention including minority religions and youth in other civil society contexts. So you could extrapolate from that engagement with religion, but it isn’t very direct.
Religious voices are essential to peacemaking. This was true with Desmond Tutu in South Africa in the end of apartheid, but is also true in a lot of much less dramatic situations where engaging with religion is a very important part of peacemaking.
I like the terminology of religious actors, because that gets you beyond the official leaders of religious communities. It gets you to women and younger people. But even that terminology is missing from the resolution.
The reality is that if you’re serious about peacemaking, you need to engage in a purposeful and intentional way with religious voices.
And I don’t just mean partnering with religion, because there’s going to be times when there are ways of partnering (with religion) that are appropriate and ways of partnering that are inappropriate.
Religion needs to remain autonomous from the state in order for religion to operate most effectively. So it has to be done in ways that are thought-through and that take religion seriously.
DN: In your speech, you said that one major obstacle when it comes to peacemaking is “people or interests who do not want peace.” What did you mean?
BS: I’m talking about ... people who may want to die the martyr’s death rather than have peace.
What we need are leaders who want peace. It’s a really obvious and painful reality, which is that the biggest obstacle to peace is powerful leaders and powerful interests that don’t want peace.
What are these interests? President Harry Truman called the military industrial complex as he was leaving office in the 1950s — which are powerful companies that make money building armaments. We have economic interests that are interested in war rather than peace.
Leaders often want to address grievances, territory. Often, they want national honor or the glory of an earlier age restored. Sometimes they want their own survival, whether political or just life itself.
But when you’re dealing with that type of leader, you have to understand what you’re facing and try to address that in a realistic way.
When we talk about peace, it’s easy to be a little too abstract and a little bit too idealistic. And when we’re dealing realpolitik, we have to realize that the abstract idealism sometimes has to be tempered (with) the harsh reality of what powerful leaders and powerful interests are trying to achieve. And that’s hard for those of us who are idealists and those of us who really have a heart for being peaceable and living peaceably with others.
We have to sort of try to understand our adversaries and figure out whether they have a form of rationality based on an assessment of interests. And if they do, then try to change the calculation of their interests. If they have moral values, then try to understand and find someone who can appeal to their moral values, whatever they are.
We probably ought to begin with the presumption that our opponents have a form of rationality that we can try to understand and appeal to, and they also have a moral sense that we can try to understand and appeal to.