This chapter describes the long process of awareness and creation of the International Convention for the Elimination of Enforced Disappearance, the role of non-governmental organisations and the national and international cooperation organisations in that process.

It analyses the role of Condor Operation launched as a multilateral agreement between the national security dictatorships of the Southern Cone and the reaction of civil society and the relatives of the victims who began to seek a way to achieve the recognition of enforced disappearance as an autonomous offence and then the adoption of an International Convention for its punishment.

In this chapter, the testimonies about this process are analysed as well as series of concomitant actions gained momentum, as a result of which, the United Nations (UN) convened a Drafting Group for what ended up being the long-awaited International Convention. Finally, there is a brief analysis of the current state of those NGOs which fought hard for such Convention.

Finally, this chapter consists of research about a historic stage of a generation which is giving way to new people with their new rights, their new fights, and their new utopias.

This chapter considers the role courts play in protecting fundamental rights. It addresses three questions. What role do domestic courts play in the protection of rights in different constitutional settings? In examining key elements of constitutional design, the chapter show how there are significant variations in how courts protect rights across the world. Secondly, what role should courts play in the adjudication of rights? Here it is argued that courts in their ordinary work, applying legislation and the common law, do and must protect rights. With regard to the more contested question whether courts should protect rights under a constitutional bill of rights, the chapter argues that the case for such a role for courts is at its strongest in certain circumstances but that it cannot be claimed that in all circumstances courts should be conferred with this power. Finally, the chapter considers the current debates in the United Kingdom concerning a possible repeal of the Human Rights Act, and withdrawal from the European Convention of Human Rights, and expresses dismay at the prospect of the repeal of the Human Rights Act, given how elegantly that Act combines protection for rights by UK courts with the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty.

Human rights are commonly invoked by States and individuals alike. Most recently there has been a spate of cases with a State accusing another of acts of genocide. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Genocide Convention) is the first human rights treaty which the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted in 1948. As an example, it gave South Africa the basis for accusing Israel of acts of genocide for their activities against Palestinians living in Gaza even though it had no immediate and direct interest in the situation. Since the Genocide Convention a host of other treaties have been adopted and ratified by States and the United Nations machinery for administering them is now complex and sophisticated, despite the traditional enforcement mechanisms that domestic lawyers are accustomed to having behind them.

Each process to resolving intrastate conflicts requires different strategies and objectives. Yet, as conflicts continue to increase, researchers have asked if peacekeeping is truly possible. Furthermore, is peace from these approaches stable and durable? The role of third parties in ending intrastate wars or post-conflict instability is central to these processes, where organizations and states play a critical role in ushering in peace during and following civil wars. Over the last three decades a strong trend in third-party attempts to resolve intrastate conflict has emerged. Here, mediation and peacekeeping have played a pivotal role in addressing crises within various countries since the end of the Cold War. From mediation to peacekeeping, this chapter expands upon the different forms and interventions that prevent and resolve conflict, all of which incorporate various sociopolitical and international legal principles in the process. It highlights the benefits and consequences of each intervention, what institutions utilize these principles, and how international humanitarian law has changed since World War II.

We almost cannot think today about mass atrocities without Holocaust references. Holocaust analogies frame and enflame our ethical debates. Holocaust words dominate our humanitarian lexicon. Yet the deep linkage between the Holocaust and global justice is accompanied by a marked crisis of confidence in international law. Many question whether global legal institutions can ever prevent and properly punish atrocity crimes. The more we invoke the Holocaust, it seems, the less certain we become about the legal world built in its name. This chapter traces this development, from the first discussions of what would come to be called “genocide” in the 1930s, through private litigation geared toward restorative justice. Each legal mode of dealing with the Holocaust has served as a model for how to approach other atrocities, and each has been unavoidably politicized, despite law’s promise to depoliticize the response to political crimes.

This chapter addresses the status of recognition of the human right to resist in general or customary international law, and the problem of clarifying this absent express provision in material sources. It first considers theories of recognition in customary international law pre-dating the United Nations Charter, followed by theories of implied recognition under the Charter as a general principle of international law, including the generally accepted albeit narrow implied recognition of the right in UN General Assembly Resolution 2625. It then examines the possibility of a broader implied recognition of the right in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Applying the analytical template from Chapter 4, it identifies the elements and content of the theorized right in these sources. Finally, it reviews the third material source, the implied recognition of a customary right-duty to resist internationally criminal acts in the Nuremberg Principles. The chapter concludes by reviewing the corroborative sources potentially indicative of customary recognition, including: the customary laws of insurgency and belligerency, recognition, and responsibility; the regulation of ‘resistance movements’ and ‘national liberation movements’ by international humanitarian law; the political offence exception in extradition law; and the persistent non-equation of the ‘right to resist’ with ‘terrorism’ in international instruments.

The atrocities of World War II make the world realise how vulnerable national constitutional arrangements are. To effectively protect civil rights and liberties, to avoid gross injustices (genocide, discrimination, etc.), and to ensure peace, international cooperation on a global scale is needed. With new international institutions and mechanisms (the United Nations, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Human rights treaties, the UN Security Council) the united nations of the world centre on the protection, freedom and welfare of individual human beings regardless where they are or in whatever system they might live. Constitutions everywhere in the world begin express the universal principles of individual autonomy, inalienable human rights, freedoms and the right to self-determination. The implementation of the latter principle heralds in the era of decolonialization. Autocratic systems (classic dictatorships) are pressured under the new universal principles by the international community to set their people free. The new generation of liberation constitutions centre on universal values, with a special focus on self-determination. In the various (new) communist systems that come up this boils down to the right of the workers to determine a socialist (non-capitalist) future with fair labour ship and property relations.

The year 2015 witnessed celebrations around the world of an event that took place 800 years earlier in a meadow west of the city of London near what is now Heathrow Airport. Then, the main participants were King John on the one side, and leading barons and prelates on the other. They had gathered to sign up formally to a document (which came to be known as Magna Carta) with the aim of forestalling violent rebellion against the monarchy. Eight centuries later, four provisions of the 1297 re-issue of Magna Carta still decorate the United Kingdom’s statute book even though the document was not a ‘statute’ (or, for that matter, a ‘law’) in the modern sense and the surviving provisions are of no practical significance.

We do not need alternatives: we need an alternative thinking of alternatives. The dominance of Eurocentric epistemological, cultural, and political models prevents the immense diversity of social experience from becoming visible, identified, recognised, and valued. As a result, this massive waste of social experience has become one of the main characteristics of our time. In focusing on knowledges born from struggle, the epistemologies of the South enable us to retrieve a wide variety of social struggles and social innovations of an anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist, and anti-patriarchal nature that have been rendered absent or irrelevant by the dominant epistemologies and theories and the sociology of absences they generate. My purpose in this chapter is to indicate a number of paths towards an insurgent and cosmopolitan declaration, based on the experiences of social movements in recent decades. I propose to conceive of the Eurocentric universal declaration of human rights as a ruin and, by building on the diverse notions of dignity and life existing in the world, convert this ruin into a ruin-seed, that is, into a sociology of emergences. This involves starting a new conversation for humankind to promote the emergence of insurgent, cosmopolitan declarations based on experiences of liberation that have always existed and continue to exist around the world.

International human rights law (‘IHRL’) provides minimum standards which states must observe in their treatment of individuals under their jurisdiction. In this respect, it differs from many other areas of international law which focus on regulating international relations between states. The human rights recognised in international instruments are considered to be fundamental rights which all human beings are entitled to enjoy, regardless of their personal circumstances or the state in which they reside.

The chapter discusses human rights in history. It addresses the question of whether insights into rights are historically relative. Are beliefs about the legitimacy of rights the mortal children of time? To approach an answer to this question, the chapter outlines the proper methods to study the history of rights. It shows that it is not sufficient to focus on explicit conceptions of rights. Rights can form the implicit content of social struggles and may be expressed by the means of art. Conceptions of history underlying human rights histories are discussed. The development of the human rights idea since the American and French revolutions is reconstructed. The chapter recalls the genesis of the post-1945 system of protection of human rights in the context of major geopolitical developments, including the Cold War und decolonization. It addresses, moreover, the thesis that human rights originated in the Global North. It tries to do justice to the many contributions of the Global South to the development of human rights and to dispel the fog of amnesia hiding the policies of mayor powers of the Global North violating human rights, including but not limited to colonial wars.

British writer H. G. Wells was a major advocate for a universal declaration of human rights of the kind later passed in 1948. Wells paid much attention to the importance of knowledge for his era, more than found its way into the actual declaration. At this stage, an enhanced set of epistemic rights that strengthen existing human rights – as part of a fourth generation of human rights – is needed to protect epistemic actorhood in those four roles introduced in Chapter 5. Epistemic rights are already exceedingly important because of the epistemic intrusiveness of digital lifeworlds in Life 2.0, and they should also include a suitably defined right to be forgotten (that is, a right to have certain information removed from easy accessibility through internet searches). If Life 3.0 does emerge, we might also need a right altogether different from what is currently acknowledged as human rights, the right to exercise human intelligence to begin with. The required argument for the validity of the right to the exercise of human intelligence can draw on the secular meaning-of-life literature. I paint with a broad brush when it comes to the detailed content of proposed rights, offering them manifesto-style.

This chapter traces the history of the world's anti-death penalty movement, noting how countries moved away from punishments such as breaking on the wheel and burning at the stake and how capital punishment has been abolished or curtailed in various countries and American states. After taking note of early successes of the abolitionist movement, the chapter discusses abolitionist efforts over time, including in the Progressive Era and in the post-World War II period (e.g., in Europe and the Americas). In particular, the chapter discusses American states (i.e., Michigan, Wisconsin and Rhode Island) that abolished capital punishment before the American Civil War, and describes how West Germany outlawed capital punishment in its constitution in 1949. The chapter discusses how international human rights law has evolved in the post-World War II period, with capital punishment coming under increased scrutiny and protocols to international and regional human rights conventions (e.g., the Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Protocols 6 & 13 to the European Convention on Human Rights) abolishing or restricting the death penalty's use.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is often considered to be a part of the “natural law” tradition. This might mean that, whoever drafted the text, they were inspired by the natural law that resides in all of us. Such a claim is not falsifiable using historical methods, and will not be addressed here. It might mean, though, that thinkers and politicians who were demonstrably part of the natural law tradition played a large role in the drafting of the UDHR. This position, which will be contested in this essay, has been defended by numerous historians, most notably Mary Ann Glendon. The evidence shows that the natural law tradition, as it existed between the 1890s and the 1950s, was somewhere between skeptical and antagonistic towards human rights claims. The evidence also shows that natural law thinkers who were in the orbit of the UDHR, most notably Jacques Maritain, were not as influential as Glendon and others have claimed. As a historical matter, therefore, the UDHR is not in any substantive way a part of the natural law tradition. At most, natural law was one among a number of competing traditions that all played a role.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was proclaimed as a ‘common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations’ and rests on the claim that persons are ‘endowed with reason and conscience’. The drafters were thus aligned with the claims of the natural law tradition that there are timeless principles of morality – true for all people in all places – and that these principles serve as a guide for lawmakers and a standard to evaluate positive law. Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain argued that the drafters did not need to agree on the philosophical or metaphysical foundations of morality in order to agree on formulations of practical principles in the language of universal rights. This key insight helped to overcome obstacles to the UDHR and to guide key drafters including Charles Malik. Maritain’s account of natural law in The Rights of Man and Natural Law highlights the notion of jus gentium: commonly agreed principles that are intermediate between the first principles of natural law and positive law. The UDHR can be understood as a successful attempt to formulate jus gentium principles in the aftermath of a war that had seen them disregarded and violated.

This chapter examines Maritain’s notion of practical consensus amongst diverse views and backgrounds. For the Universal Declaration, this was built around a specific text setting forth rights dishonoured during war. Post-war conditions provided a stimulus for agreement amongst States. The chapter considers the prospects for consensus when moving beyond the mere enumeration of human rights, to their application in contemporary times, confronted with diverse philosophical views about their foundations. Reflecting on Maritain’s economic thought, I argue that those prospects are hampered given economic instrumentalisation and injustice from global capitalist structures. Moreover, efforts to reach political consensus on a regular basis are confronted with power in politics, which tempts some actors to go for broke, gain full control, and avoid compromise. Maritain realised that progress in protecting human rights would be replete with backward steps and new starts. Nevertheless, his hope was that the practically-embodied consensus embodied in the Universal Declaration would develop through progress in a common ethical life, despite divergence in theoretical explanations of that life.

This chapter explores connections among one ‘virtue of acknowledged dependence’, humility, as elaborated by Augustine; the right or just according to nature; and human rights. The opening section argues that in defending virtuous humility, Augustine defends a new account of natural right, supporting this thesis with a reading of The City of God, books I-V. After this analysis, our focus shifts a central framer of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Lebanese philosopher-diplomat Charles Habib Malik. Drawing on the archive of Malik’s papers and on his publications and lectures, we offer a select history of Malik’s study of Augustine’s work and his distinctively Augustinian perspective on themes such as humility, natural right and natural law, and human rights. We turn next to the text of the Universal Declaration, considering its Augustinian affinities as well as key divergences from Augustine’s views. The final sections of the chapter argue that Augustinian notions of humility and pride are central to Malik’s appraisal of the Declaration and the contemporary human rights project more generally, in their substance as well as their modes of expression.

This introductory chapter identifies the key questions, themes and debates addressed within the Handbook on Natural Law and Human Rights, and provides a conceptual overview of and integrated perspective on its contents. In particular, it argues that there is a perennial relationship between human rights and the phenomenon of natural law, which is revealed when we consider how human rights claims can justify the moral demands made on other agents and on the political community. Without prior moral duties – a natural law – human rights claims are impugned by the ‘individualist fallacy’, whereby the potential value of the right to the claimant is presumed sufficient to impose overriding duties, without due consideration being paid to the constitutive social commitments necessary to make that value a matter of common concern and action. The failure to come to grips with this problem, we argue, has led to certain blindspots in contemporary human rights theory and practice. This chapter draws to a close by identifying the key benefits we see accruing from a natural law theory of human rights.