Criticism of human rights as a Western construct predates postcolonial autocracy.

Evidence

The Saudi Arabian delegate, Jamil Baroody, criticised Chang’s ecumenical position, arguing that the UDHR was ‘based largely on Western patterns of culture, which were frequently at variance with the patterns of culture of Eastern states’. Today, the argument that human rights are a ‘Western construct with limited applicability’ to the non-Western world (as a highly influential article put it), is often depicted as a product of the turn towards autocracy in postcolonial states. In the 1940s, however, Baroody and others already suspected that the new human rights language could become a means for coercive interventions into non-Western societies. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 102

In the 1940s, however, Baroody and others already suspected that the new human rights language could become a means for coercive interventions into non-Western societies. With far less faith than Chang that human rights could be detached from ethnocentrism and civilisational hierarchies, Baroody anticipated more recent criticisms of the ‘dominant influence of Western liberal thought and philosophies’ on the key human rights texts. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 102

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: dismantling the common move that dismisses civilizational-relativist critiques as merely postcolonial authoritarian apologetics — they were raised at the founding moment by delegates who saw coercive intervention coming.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in human-rights discourse criticism and debates about how rights language enabled interventionism. — connects to: Human-rights legitimacy debates hinge on contested claims about their universal or colonial origins — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 128
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 102