There is little serious prospect that the human rights system will become obsolete. It is deeply embedded in international law, in the institutions of the multilateral system, and in constitutions and laws in most countries around the world. But for this system to be effective, there are important questions to address concerning what can be reasonably expected of it, and by what methods it can achieve positive change.
Embracing different methodologies
Widely divergent conceptions of human rights give rise to different prescriptions about how to use them effectively, and what renewal might look like. However, the possibility of using human rights in different ways should be considered a source of strength.
From one perspective, human rights comprise a system of laws built on international agreements and customs between states. Achieving human rights progress is therefore understood as a matter of developing international law and then pursuing accountability through international mechanisms and domestic courts. In this model, the ongoing challenge is to elaborate better norms and standards, ensure they are implemented in law, and strengthen mechanisms for recourse. Legal mechanisms are the backbone of the human rights system, and (in theory) provide a way to achieve positive change by resorting to established principles and rules. Without them, there would be a dependency on fleeting and unpredictable political windows of opportunity.
From another perspective, however, human rights constitute a moral narrative that sets out a sweeping vision of justice and peace. Human rights are meaningful in that they can represent people’s lived experiences of injustice and conflict, articulate a popular aspiration for change, and galvanize collective action to achieve this. One interviewee went as far as to argue that the legal paradigm of human rights is based on a false promise that states will protect people from each other, which simply does not happen in practice. Instead, in their view, progress depends entirely on solidarity among peoples to force political action. Human rights offer a ‘powerful idiom’ to generate solidarity. For proponents of this view, the legal complexity of human rights threatens to obscure their moral clarity and urgency.
However, these different roles for human rights are not antithetical, and they can exist in creative tension. The credibility of human rights norms, laws and institutions rests on public consent for human rights as an expression of values and ideals. Meanwhile, the practical usefulness of the human rights discourse consists to some considerable extent in the universal norms, laws and mechanisms to which it has recourse.
The credibility of human rights norms, laws and institutions rests on public consent for human rights as an expression of values and ideals.
Another way of framing the different roles of human rights could be that they provide both a positive vision and a means of restraint. As a way of expressing vision, both the moral idealism of human rights and the well-established and elaborated norms of the human rights system offer a vocabulary and a framework according to which aspirations for a more just world can be expressed with precision. But human rights mechanisms also provide a means of restraint for unjust and harmful conduct. The incorporation of human rights concepts in international and domestic law provides the potential for judicial redress in many jurisdictions.
Starting with solidarity and subsidiarity
Despite the malaise surrounding human rights in some quarters, there remains a strong sense among many throughout the human rights community that the framework and system that has evolved over the last 75 years makes an important contribution to people’s struggles against power and serves as a check on state behaviour. However, to preserve this essential quality, human rights must not be defined and controlled by those with power, but rather understood as a way for those who are least powerful to secure justice.
Many interviewees expressed disquiet with the ‘elite capture’ of human rights and the sense of distance that often exists between human rights institutions – including UN treaty bodies, international or domestic courts, national human rights bodies and others – and the supposed beneficiaries of their work. One interviewee reflected on how important human rights have been as an organizing concept for social movements, yet over time these rights have become attached to particular institutions and mechanisms where this moral urgency has been diluted. As another expressed it: ‘People are talking about rights in the slums; but the closer you get to power, the more this fades.’
Against this background, the renewal of human rights must be based first on solidarity with people who experience human rights harms, and then on the principle of subsidiarity – so that those affected are able to participate in and influence processes that address their situation.
Seeking complementarity with other global frameworks
The human rights system is unique in many respects, including its permanent status and the extent to which it is embedded within norms, laws and institutions of the multilateral system. However, it does not hold a monopoly position as an international framework for achieving a more just world.
The UN secretary-general’s 2021 report Our Common Agenda portrays human rights as one among several ‘blueprints for a better world’ alongside the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris Agreement on climate change, that rely mainly on voluntary action by states. This somewhat overlooks the grounding of human rights in international law, but there is now a sense in which the human rights framework is perceived to coexist among other global frameworks.
However, rather than interpreting this as the loss of a pre-eminent position for human rights, it could be seen to offer an opportunity to leverage the unique strengths of the human rights system to elucidate and complement other global frameworks. While not without its challenges, one important way of doing this would be to provide avenues of legal recourse in areas that otherwise rely on voluntary commitments and action by states by framing specific goals in human rights terms. To conceive of human rights tools as a way of achieving the aspirations set out in other global frameworks hedges against the shortcomings of such voluntarism. This in turn could be an important source of renewal for human rights.
Rethinking the anthropocentrism of rights
In years to come, it is possible that the idea of human rights may founder less because of the ‘rights’ and more because of the ‘human’. The anthropocentrism of human rights is becoming more difficult to justify as we become more aware of our complex interrelationship both with the natural world and with technology.
The climate and biodiversity crises are forcing an urgent reckoning with human destructiveness and the fragility of the ecosystems on which societies depend. The burgeoning ‘rights of nature’ movement has begun to widen the scope of rights beyond humans alone, acknowledging the interdependence of all life and natural resources on the planet.
Meanwhile, advances in technology are blurring the distinction between humans and machines by enabling computers to decode brain activity with growing sophistication. While there are many positive potential applications of such technology, there is an emerging focus within the human rights sector on how to meet this challenge to human autonomy. More broadly, if the very definition of a human becomes less self-evident in future, so too does the question of how we should attribute rights.
A rigid approach to human rights based on the special and unique status of humans may prove unsustainable in future. We may instead need to locate human rights within a wider paradigm of human flourishing in healthy balance with our natural and technological environment.
Developing an ambitious agenda on the grand global challenges
In the recent past, the human rights agenda has been focused to a large extent on human protection, including in the context of conflict and state abuses of power. This remains necessary and important. However, the legitimacy of the human rights system may now rest on its ability to tackle the biggest global challenges – some of which pose increasingly existential threats to the world as we know it.
The following section addresses three such challenges. They are all global in scope, and therefore require responses at a global level. As a universally accepted framework with strong tools and mechanisms, human rights should be considered as an asset in responding to each of these challenges.