International Human Rights: Stories and Consequences of Universality

This article presents a genealogical analysis of the origins and nature of the universality of contemporary human rights within the broader evolution of international law. Challenging the classical progressivist narrative, the author differentiates between various iterations of what is conventionally referred to today as human rights or their historical precursors — natural rights, the rights of the citizen, rights of man, rights of national minorities, and, ultimately, human rights as formulated in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The latter represents the first historical instance in which an international legal articulation of human rights is framed as a universal, timeless, and global model. Nonetheless, these human rights emerged as the second attempt — following the failed efforts of the Interbellum period — to internationalize the discourse of rights, particularly within the mechanisms established for the protection of national minorities and stateless persons. Before the late 19th and early 20th centuries, subjective rights as such — whether rights of the citizen or rights of citizenship — were primarily confined to domestic political struggles, functioning as both an instrument and a precondition for access to recognition-seeking collectives within the State. To this day, international law and its practice has yet to produce actually universal human rights, leaving universality as an aspiration rather than an empirical reality — one built upon the abstract notions of Human Nature and Human Dignity. Yet even these universally aspirational rights have ultimately become captive to the very universality they proclaim. Engaging with the paradigm of critical legal theories, drawing on the genealogy method (a critique of grand narratives), and taking inspiration from Hannah Arendt’s theory of totality, the author seeks to demonstrate how an idea conceived as emancipatory, once constrained by its positivist articulation in international law, inevitably evolves into the kind of hierarchical, totalizing, and ideological construct that postmodernist critique has long identified. In doing so, human rights steadily diverge from the ideals of ius naturale, risking to become — if they have not already — yet another iteration of the historically recurrent, logically simplistic, and politically convenient ideologies that humanity has outlived before. The author’s solution is the instrumentalization of the universality of human rights for the purpose of selected human rights issues.