Tag: human rights

  • Human Rights Explained: What Scholars Say About Origins, Debates and What Works

    Human Rights Explained: What Scholars Say About Origins, Debates and What Works

    Human rights are invoked in courtrooms, classrooms, newsrooms and protest marches, yet the phrase means different things to different people. This guide draws on work by historians, philosophers, lawyers and political scientists to explain what human rights are, where the idea came from, what scholars argue about, and what the evidence says about what works. Our tagline is “Rights don’t stop at borders. Neither does the record.” This article follows the same rule: it keeps to the record and names its sources.

    A note on method. Every book, article and institutional page cited here links to a publisher, journal, university or United Nations page that we checked. Where scholars disagree, we say who holds which view instead of declaring a winner. This is an explainer, not a verdict on any government, party or movement.

    The short version

    • Human rights are claims people hold simply because they are human. Modern international law gave them written form, starting with the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
    • Scholars disagree about when the modern idea began, whether it is truly universal, how to weigh political freedoms against economic needs, and how much law changes behavior.
    • Treaties alone are a weak guarantee. Domestic pressure, long-term struggle and clear facts show up repeatedly in the research.

    What human rights are and where they came from

    A working definition

    In plain terms, human rights are basic entitlements that belong to every person regardless of nationality, religion, sex, race or status, and that governments are expected to respect and protect. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on human rights is a good starting point for the debates about what grounds those claims. Since 1948, states have written many of them into treaties they can be held to.

    Older roots: natural rights

    In the seventeenth century, John Locke argued that people hold rights to life, liberty and property before any government exists, and that a government is legitimate only when it protects them; see the Stanford entry on Locke’s political philosophy. Thomas Paine pushed natural-rights language in a more democratic direction, as the entry on Paine explains. Revolutionary-era declarations in America and France drew on this vocabulary, though in practice the protections were unequal and many people were excluded.

    1948: the Universal Declaration

    The modern system begins in the aftermath of the Second World War. The UN General Assembly proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Paris on 10 December 1948 as a common standard of achievement for all peoples. According to the UN’s history of the Declaration, eight states abstained and none voted against. Eleanor Roosevelt chaired the drafting committee, which also included René Cassin of France, Charles Malik of Lebanon, Peng Chung Chang of China and John Humphrey of Canada.

    The Declaration is not itself a treaty. Its principles became binding law through the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), both adopted in 1966 and in force by 1976.

    Vienna 1993: universal and indivisible

    In June 1993 a World Conference on Human Rights adopted the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action. It restated that all human rights are universal, indivisible, interdependent and interrelated, and said states must promote and protect all of them whatever their political, economic or cultural systems, while taking national and regional particularities into account. Much of the debate below is an argument about that sentence.

    When did the “human rights movement” begin?

    Scholars do not agree. Louis Henkin treated the post-war international system as a new legal and moral order in The Age of Rights (Columbia University Press, 1990), as a Michigan Law Review review describes it. Historian Samuel Moyn argues in The Last Utopia (Harvard University Press, 2010) that human rights began to make sense to broad communities as a cause of justice only in the decade after 1968. One claim is about law; the other is about a mass political movement. Both can be true.

    The big debates

    Universal or culturally relative?

    Political scientist Jack Donnelly offers a middle position in Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice (Cornell University Press, 3rd ed., 2013) and in “The Relative Universality of Human Rights” (Human Rights Quarterly, 2007): rights are universal as broad principles, but how they are interpreted and carried out can legitimately vary.

    Legal scholar Makau Mutua is a leading critic. In Human Rights: A Political and Cultural Critique (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002) he argues that the human rights corpus, though well meaning, is a Eurocentric construct, and that a truly multicultural approach drawing on Asian, African, Pacific and American traditions is the way to make it universal. Hurst Hannum takes another route in Rescuing Human Rights: A Radically Moderate Approach (Cambridge University Press, 2019), arguing that human rights should be understood mainly as binding international law and that the term should not be stretched to cover every social goal.

    Rights versus power

    Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) is a classic warning that rights need a political community to protect them. Writing about stateless people, she described a “right to have rights,” roughly the right to belong to a political community at all. A commentary from the Hannah Arendt Center describes how philosopher Seyla Benhabib embraces that phrase while resisting Arendt’s limits on its scope. The Stanford Encyclopedia’s overview of Arendt is a helpful guide for newcomers.

    Michael Ignatieff, the founding director of Harvard’s Carr Center, argues in Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry (Princeton University Press, 2001) that international norms are best defended on pragmatic grounds and should have limits on their scope, according to a Foreign Affairs capsule review. Stephen Hopgood goes further in The Endtimes of Human Rights (Cornell University Press, 2013), arguing that the global, institutional version of human rights is declining and that local, grassroots action may prove more durable. Kenneth Roth, a longtime leader of Human Rights Watch, answered in a 2014 essay in the New York Review of Books, summarizing Hopgood as preferring conscience-driven protest over professional investigation and public pressure.

    Civil and political versus economic and social rights

    The two 1966 covenants split rights into civil and political (ICCPR) and economic, social and cultural (ICESCR). Vienna called them equally important, but many advocacy groups have concentrated on the first set. Roth explained one reason in a 2004 Human Rights Quarterly article: organizations like Human Rights Watch are strongest when investigating and exposing misconduct, which works best where the violation, the violator and the remedy are clear. Samuel Moyn’s Not Enough (Harvard University Press, 2018) argues that the rise of human rights coincided with growing inequality and that the movement neglected broader social and economic justice.

    Other scholars offer a different lens. Amartya Sen’s Development as Freedom (Knopf, 1999) defines development as expanding the real freedoms people have reason to value, not just raising national income; the Stanford page on the capability approach summarizes it. Martha Nussbaum’s Creating Capabilities (Harvard University Press, 2011) asks what each person is actually able to do and to be. Upendra Baxi’s The Future of Human Rights (Oxford University Press, 2002) warns that rights language can be bent to serve powerful economic interests, which one scholarly assessment describes as a “trade-related, market-friendly” paradigm.

    Voices from Africa, Iran and the Middle East, and the USA

    Africa: peoples’ rights, duties and ubuntu

    The African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, often called the Banjul Charter, was adopted in Nairobi on 27 June 1981 and entered into force on 21 October 1986. It speaks of the rights of peoples as well as individuals, including self-determination (Article 20). Its preamble stresses the right to development and says civil and political rights cannot be separated from economic, social and cultural rights. It also sets out duties that individuals owe.

    That emphasis on duties drew scholarly attention. In “The Banjul Charter and the African Cultural Fingerprint” (Virginia Journal of International Law, 1995), Mutua evaluates the Charter’s language of duties and argues that pre-colonial African ideas of rights and duties can help build a rights regime with local legitimacy. His 2002 book organizes its critique around three metaphors: the savage, the victim and the savior (see its table of contents).

    A related conversation centers on ubuntu, often summed up as personhood through relationships with others. Philosopher Thaddeus Metz argues in “Ubuntu as a moral theory and human rights in South Africa” (African Human Rights Law Journal, 2011) that ubuntu can ground a public morality in which human dignity is tied to the capacity for community, and serious rights violations degrade that capacity.

    Mahmood Mamdani, a Columbia University scholar, raised a sharper challenge. In Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror (Pantheon, 2009) he criticized the Western “Save Darfur” campaign, and the Carnegie Endowment’s review notes he extended the argument to advocacy groups generally. You need not accept his conclusions to take his question seriously: who gets to define a crisis, and who is left out of the story?

    Iran and the wider Middle East: law, faith and reform

    Iran is a party to both covenants: it ratified the ICCPR and ICESCR on 24 June 1975, according to the University of Minnesota’s ratification table. For historical context, Ervand Abrahamian’s A History of Modern Iran (Cambridge University Press, 2008) covers oil, foreign intervention, the Pahlavi era, the 1979 revolution and the Islamic Republic, and his Tortured Confessions: Prisons and Public Recantations in Modern Iran (University of California Press, 1999) examines prisons and public recantations.

    Shirin Ebadi’s career shows how rights work happens inside a legal system. The Nobel Prize biography says she was one of Iran’s first female judges, was dismissed after the 1979 revolution, then opened a legal practice defending people persecuted by the authorities. She was imprisoned in 2000 after criticizing the country’s clerical rule, took up the struggle for fundamental rights, especially of women and children, and won the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize. She tells her story in Iran Awakening (Random House, 2006, with Azadeh Moaveni).

    Scholars of Islam and human rights disagree with one another. Ann Elizabeth Mayer’s Islam and Human Rights: Tradition and Politics (Westview Press; 5th ed., 2013) challenges the stereotype of a monolithic Islam incompatible with human rights and argues that governments and movements have selectively used Islamic tradition for political ends. Sudanese legal scholar Abdullahi An-Na’im argues from within the tradition: Toward an Islamic Reformation (Syracuse University Press, 1990) calls for reinterpreting historical formulations of Shari’a so Islamic public law can fit modern human rights, and Islam and the Secular State (Harvard University Press, 2008) argues that state coercion in enforcing Shari’a betrays the Qur’an’s insistence on voluntary belief. Mahnaz Afkhami’s edited volume Faith and Freedom: Women’s Human Rights in the Muslim World (Syracuse University Press, 1995) brought scholars and activists together, including An-Na’im and Mayer, to treat Muslim women’s rights as human rights.

    As a matter of public record, the UN Human Rights Council created an independent international fact-finding mission on Iran in November 2022 to investigate alleged violations linked to the protests that began on 16 September 2022. The Council renewed its mandate in January 2026 for two more years, according to the mission’s UN page, where its reports are open to read.

    The United States: Eleanor Roosevelt, civil rights and ratification gaps

    The United States helped build the modern system, and Eleanor Roosevelt chaired the committee that drafted the Declaration. Its own relationship with international human rights law has been more complicated, and scholars highlight three threads.

    First, civil rights and human rights were once more closely linked. Historian Carol Anderson’s Eyes Off the Prize (Cambridge University Press, 2003; publisher page) describes how the NAACP took a human rights agenda, covering education, health care, housing and employment as well as legal equality, to the United Nations. She argues that the Cold War and anti-communism let powerful opponents cast those rights as Soviet-inspired, and that the NAACP retreated to a narrower civil rights agenda that was easier to defend politically.

    Second, treaty ratification. The United States ratified the ICCPR on 8 June 1992, subject to Senate reservations, understandings and declarations (see the resolution of ratification). The UN treaty body database shows it has not ratified the ICESCR, the women’s rights convention (CEDAW) or the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Roth argued in “The Charade of US Ratification of International Human Rights Treaties” (Chicago Journal of International Law, 2000) that the conditions attached to U.S. ratification meant treaties would not improve rights at home. Henkin had earlier contrasted American constitutional rights with international human rights and urged wider recognition of economic and social rights.

    Third, human rights language is now applied to domestic questions. After a 2017 visit, Philip Alston, then the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, said in a statement that about 40 million people in the United States live in poverty, and he criticized proposed tax and welfare changes. You may agree or disagree; the example shows UN experts applying the same standards to wealthy countries as to others.

    What the evidence says works

    Do treaties, courts and campaigns improve lives? Researchers disagree in instructive ways. Oona Hathaway’s “Do Human Rights Treaties Make a Difference?” (Yale Law Journal, 2002) analyzed 166 countries over nearly forty years in five areas of human rights law. She found that countries that had ratified treaties generally had better practices than those that had not, but that noncompliance appeared common and that, after controlling for other factors, ratification was sometimes associated with worse practices than expected. Her explanation: because enforcement is weak, governments may gain credit for ratifying without bearing much cost. She stresses this does not mean treaties have no positive influence.

    Beth Simmons reached a more optimistic conclusion in Mobilizing for Human Rights (Cambridge University Press, 2009). Using statistics and case studies, she argues that ratification leads to better rights practices on average, because treaties give domestic groups tools to demand change.

    Kathryn Sikkink, who holds a chair in human rights policy at Harvard Kennedy School, argues in Evidence for Hope (Princeton University Press, 2017) that change comes slowly and through struggle, but that over the long term human rights movements have been very effective. She also says activists and scholars judge efficacy differently because they use different yardsticks, and she points to long-run declines in genocide and violence against civilians. Her earlier The Justice Cascade (W. W. Norton, 2011) examines the trend toward holding political leaders criminally accountable.

    No single study settles the question. Taken together, a few patterns stand out:

    • Law helps most when someone can use it. Simmons’s domestic-mobilization argument and Hopgood’s emphasis on local action point to this from different directions.
    • Ratification alone can be public relations. Hathaway’s finding on weak enforcement and Roth’s critique of conditional U.S. ratification express versions of this worry.
    • Clear facts and clear remedies strengthen advocacy, in Roth’s account, and progress is slow and uneven, in Sikkink’s.

    That is why records matter. A documented, sourced account of what happened is the raw material for courts, journalists, researchers and families seeking answers, whatever one’s view of the larger debates.

    Why it matters in Boston and how to act

    Greater Boston is home to many human rights programs. We list them as public resources; we are not affiliated with them, and listing them is not an endorsement of any position.

    Human rights questions are not distant. They show up in how families stay connected across borders, how workers are treated, how courts and agencies handle people’s cases, and how journalists and researchers keep accurate records. The scholars above give us tools for all of it: separate law from politics, ask who is missing from the story, and check claims against evidence.

    Ways to take part

    • Read the primary documents. The Universal Declaration takes about ten minutes.
    • Use our Take Action page for current ways to get involved.
    • Check claims before sharing them: look for a primary source, a date and a named author.
    • Want to volunteer? Email contact@bostonhumanrights.org with a few lines about your interests and skills.

    Further reading

    Sources

    All links were checked on 1 October 2026. Books above are cited with their publisher pages; the sources below are primary documents, articles and reference works.

    Questions, corrections or sources we should add? Write to contact@bostonhumanrights.org.