But he also defended the right to free expression as a "universal value".
On Tuesday, Mr. Obama laid out a lengthy defense of the right of free speech as a universal value.
There are probably far fewer people in Russia now than 15 years ago who believe in democracy as a universal value.
It is time when those committed to human rights need to recommit themselves to the defense of human dignity — as a universal value — wherever it is oppressed or violated, and do so without apology.
But in diplomacy, messages matter, and a speech Rice gave in Egypt early in Bush's second term provides the sharpest contrast with Tillerson's remarks, especially because she upholds liberty as a universal value.
At the same time, liberals who do embrace equality as a universal value are often dismissive of central feminist concerns like oppression by familial, religious or cultural norms: they see the family and other communal associations as belonging to a private sphere of individual choice in which the political principles governing the public realm do not apply.
In a nation riven with partisan divisions, improving farm animals' often-miserable lives has emerged as a universal value.
Human-centered development must be recognized as a universal value and the entire UN system -- including the specialized agencies -- should synchronize and coordinate their activities for advancing this cause.
As far as I can tell, that is a universal value, and that is true in the Bay Area.
Einaudi's remarks hit on all the points that would become so familiar early in the next century in George W. Bush's "Freedom Agenda": the idea that democracy, as defined by Washington, was a universal value; that "history" represented a movement toward the fulfillment of that value; and that any nation or person who stood in the path of such fulfillment would be swept away.
That would signal a shift in official policy; up to now, the state media has condemned the notion that human rights are a universal value, dismissing it as a Western belief that is unsuited to China.
