The Limits of Human Rights

The continuous expansion of human rights can often appear to be both positive and limitless. The limitation of classical State sovereignty, the transformation of the fundamental idea of State will, the emergence of an international community, the carrying out of humanitarian interventions, the idea of a 'responsibility to protect', the concepts of peremptory norms and obligations erga omnes, and a renewed concern for the unity of the international legal order would all not have the same prominent place in legal discussion if not for the centrality of human rights to the international order.

Yet the ubiquitous presence of human right has provoked critical voices. Concerns are uttered about the role of 'droits-de-l'hommistes' and humanitarians, the continued presence of a 'civilizing mission', and the assumption of the 'trans-civilizational' universality of human rights. Fassbender and Traisbach assemble a team of experts to examine the issue from multiple disciplinary perspectives, and to analyse the limits of our current discourse of human rights. Declaring that the validity of a human right should not be taken as self-evident but instead should be contested, defended, and reformulated, this volume disputes the notion that the internationalisation of human rights proves that the world is moving from bilateralism to community interests, stating that contentious processes of supervision, evaluation, and substitution are far more common than genuine cooperation.