Professor Hilary Charlesworth defends the ideal of universality in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. She accepts the need to 'balanc[e] the power of universal ideals with the inevitable specificity of their translation in particular local contexts', but goes on:
[C]laims that human rights do not acknowledge cultural difference are overplayed and are regularly used as a gambit for governments to avoid human rights scrutiny.
I don't think, as she appears to, that 'the war against terrorism is built on a division of the world into "good" and "evil" camps'; it's built on the assumption that intending terrorists do not have the good of their victims at heart, nor indeed the rights of their victims at the forefront of their concerns. But Charlesworth quite properly insists on the principle that 'human rights attach to every person', a principle that should not be lightly set aside.