A/HRC/16/37 community, rights and duties should be inextricably linked. According to Mr. Prabhu, Ghandi’s point shows that the universality of human rights might be conceived in many different ways. He therefore stressed that, in order to avoid imposing a particular ethnocentric standard on the rest of the world, there was a need to engage in intercultural dialogue. Through such a dialogue, different ideas could correct and enhance each other. 26. Mr. Prabhu advocated a model that attempted neither to transcend cultural differences nor to solve them by making one culture superior to others, but rather to take the other cultures seriously and attempt an open-minded, meaning-and-truth-seeking dialogue. A tripartite distinction between norms, legal mechanisms and justification could provide the framework within which cross-cultural dialogue proceeded. It allowed for the recognition and acceptance of the fact that there were many human rights cultures around the world, even if not necessarily using those terms; for instance, he pointed out the classical Indian moral notion of dharma, which had been invoked in discussions on human rights. Dharma did not start with the individual: human reality was not incarnated in the individual only but in the social whole, and the social whole in turn was an expression of a cosmic order whose integrity dharma tried to protect. From such a perspective, many of the assumptions underlying Western human rights discourse could be disputed. In addition to a critique of individualism, the tradition of dharma would also criticize the idea of rights being separated from responsibilities and the idea of rights applying to humans alone, leaving aside nature and the community. 27. Mr. Prabhu suggested that each tradition might have something to contribute to the development of a global human rights culture. The further evolution of human rights discourse needed to go beyond the limits of what he saw as its original Western-oriented formulation, and should consider different interlocutors, such as civil society organizations, and non–State spaces. 28. Patrice Meyer–Bisch, coordinator of the Interdisciplinary Institute for Ethics and Human Rights at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, pointed out that the consideration of “traditional values” in the context of human rights raised two main questions: (a) was diversity of values compatible with universality?; and (b) was taking traditions into account compatible with personal freedoms? 29. According to Mr. Meyer–Bisch, it was not possible to consider human rights independently of their cultural context. This did not mean to introduce relativism, but to find in cultural diversity the array of necessary resources to reach a more concrete and demanding universality. Universality was the common challenge: it revealed the human condition by constantly working on our common contradictions. Universality was therefore not opposed to diversity, but channelled it and built its coherence. 30. Freedoms needed cultural resources to be exercises. The analysis of the traditional transmission of values in the light of human rights – especially cultural rights that particularly secured the rights and freedoms to have access to cultural resources, as vehicles to convey identities, values and meanings – placed on each human being duties of observation, interpretation and solidarity. He argued for the need (a) to inform freedoms with all the sources of reason; (b) to regard traditions as cultural heritages, as an object of cultural rights in the indivisible and interdependent human rights’ system; (c) to highlight the importance of the responsibilities needed in order to protect the fragile value of traditions; and (d) to reconcile tradition and innovation, and to regard them jointly as common responsibilities and obligations. 31. Informing freedoms with all the resources of reason required ensuring access to cultural resources for all, especially for the most deprived, and acknowledging that traditions had a variety of interpretations. A living tradition was a space of constant interpretation and transmission. Both long-lived experience (tradition) and rational debate 8