and appreciate that other societies may have equally valid alternative conceptions of human rights." Irene Oh, director of the peace studies programme at Georgetown University, has argued that Muslim reservations towards some provisions of the UDHR, and the broader debate about the document's secular and Western bias, could be resolved through mutual dialogue grounded in comparative descriptive ethics. "The Right to Refuse to Kill" Groups such as Amnesty International and War Resisters International have advocated for "The Right to Refuse to Kill" to be added to the Universal Declaration, as has Seán MacBride, a former Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations and Nobel Peace Prize laureate. War Resisters International has stated that the right to conscientious objection to military service is primarily derived from Article 18 of the UDHR, which preserves the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion. Some steps have been taken within the UN to make the right more explicit, with the Human Rights Council repeatedly affirming that Article 18 enshrines "the right of everyone to have conscientious objection to military service as a legitimate exercise of the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion". American Anthropological Association The American Anthropological Association criticized the UDHR during its drafting process, warning that its definition of universal rights reflected a Western paradigm that was unfair to non-Western nations. They further argued that the West's history of colonialism and evangelism made them a problematic moral representative for the rest of the world. They proposed three notes for consideration with underlying themes of cultural relativism: The individual realizes his personality through his culture, hence respect for individual differences entails a respect for cultural differences. Respect for differences between cultures is validated by the scientific fact that no technique of qualitatively evaluating cultures has been discovered. Standards and values are relative to the culture from which they derive so that any attempt to formulate postulates that grow out of the beliefs or moral codes of one culture must to that extent detract from the applicability of any Declaration of Human Rights to mankind as a whole. Bangkok Declaration During the lead-up to the World Conference on Human Rights that was held in 1993, ministers from several Asian states adopted the Bangkok Declaration, which reaffirms their governments' commitment to the principles of the United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They stated their belief that human rights are