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, loc. 102