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Now More Than Ever

I can trace three generations of human rights in my own family. I am the daughter and granddaughter of refugees. I would not have been born had my father not escaped persecution in war-torn France and settled in the US - and his father had not first fled Poland after being beaten and jailed for labor organizing. I came of age in America with the rights revolution. One of my first memories is attending a civil rights march with my mother; during my studies I volunteered in a Vietnamese refugee camp in Hong Kong; and my first job was working in a women's clinic where we wore buttons reading: "Health care is a right, not a privilege." My formal study of human rights began with my PhD dissertation, when I traveled to Argentina to chart the fall of a dictatorship, the rise of transitional justice, and the emergence of a new kind of movement: Mothers of the Disappeared. After returning to the US as the Berlin Wall fell, I became a mother myself and began a quarter-century of human rights research that carried me from Quito to Delhi, from Johannesburg to The Hague. A generation later, my daughters have come of age riding the next wave of rights: one plots new paths for economic empowerment in Latin America, while her sister advocates for the LGBTQ community. What comes next? The fate of the next generation will depend on the future of all of the rights to protection, freedom, and dignity that have shaped my own life, and newer rights frameworks for my children and grandchildren - above all, environmental justice.

Human rights have fallen on hard times - yet they are needed now more than ever. Despite historic advances in human rights law and mobilization, unprecedented numbers suffer war crimes, forced displacement, ethnic persecution, gender violence, and backlash against rights defenders. These hard times in practice are matched by harsh criticism in theory. Nationalists and realists claim human rights are too much, development critics and legal skeptics say human rights are not enough, while post-modern, post-colonial, and critical-school feminists argue that rights are the wrong kind of politics for liberation. Human rights are poised on the knife's edge between hope and despair, beloved and beleaguered, inspiring and ignored.

But far from the "end times" of human rights declaimed by some (Hopgood 2013), it is time for a reboot that closes historic gaps and confronts emerging challenges. After several generations of measured success and unexpected shortfalls, the future of human rights lies in fostering the dynamic strength of human rights as political practice. People all over the world - from Amazonian villages to Iranian prisons - use human rights to gain recognition, campaign for justice, and save lives. With all of its limitations, human rights have proved a sustainable basis for solidarity in the face of violence and oppression. In this book, I will argue that the future of human rights must expand this practice to meet persisting threats to human dignity and craft new ways to speak rights to power. But, first, let us begin by setting the stage and defining the debate.

The Rise of Rights

What are rights? Human rights are a set of principles, values, and institutions seeking to assure the life, dignity, freedom, and equality of all people. Rights include both freedom from oppression and duties by authorities to provide and protect basic elements of survival, identity, and social life. They obligate governments but, when states cannot or will not protect their citizens, also other power-holders such as employers - and the international community at large.

These rights began as simple humanitarian perquisites often rooted in religious traditions, such as resistance to slavery, and developed further with the rise of citizenship and the ethos of the French Revolution as limitations on sovereign power: liberty, equality, and solidarity. Human rights gained additional scope and traction through Enlightenment-era social contract theorists of freedom and democracy, Marxian ideals of justice and solidarity, and Kantian notions of reciprocity and a cosmopolitan world order. The horrors of the twentieth century, peaking in the trauma of the European Holocaust, forged a new level of commitment to universalism and the "right to have rights" and generated the first intervention frame of genocide. While post-World War II decolonization and incorporation of the global South increased attention to the socioeconomic rights and self-determination principles planted in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, they were then somewhat sidelined by Cold War US hegemony and political rights preoccupations. From that time on, successive waves of struggle against dictatorships, exclusions, and oppressions have produced a growing body of treaties and institutions to contest patterns of abuse - such as forced disappearance - and protect vulnerable populations such as indigenous peoples. By the 1990s, over two-thirds of the world's states affirmed at the Vienna Conference that, in principle, human rights are "universal, interdependent, and indivisible" (Lauren 2013; Jensen 2003; Iriye et al. 2012).

An international architecture for claiming rights developed in waves along with modern projects of global governance, from the Geneva Conventions to the international war crimes tribunals and associated International Criminal Court (ICC). The normative centerpiece of the Universal Declaration and the twin International Covenants on Civil and Political Rights and on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights are flanked by a post-war suite of phenomenon-based treaties, such as the Convention Against Torture, and population-protecting mechanisms, such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. Parallel undertakings exist at the regional level, most strongly in Europe and the Americas. In some cases, regional norms exceed the global standard, notably in the inter-American treaties on gender violence, disability, and forced disappearance. An ensemble of United Nations monitoring mechanisms parallel the covenants in treaty committees - and UN processes go on to greater levels of reporting and potential responsibility via the Human Rights Council, the Universal Periodic Review, and Special Rapporteur visits. These standards gain traction through a combination of global legal institutions and jurisprudence, incorporation in national charters and legislation, diplomacy, sanctions, and aid policies. In tandem with these interstate channels, global civil society engages in standard-setting, advocacy, and sometimes implementation, especially for issues such as refugees.

Hard Times

Three generations past the birth of the international rights regime, freedom, equality, and aspirations for human dignity are vastly expanded yet deeply contested. Almost half of the world's countries are democracies, and up to two-thirds of the global population enjoys at least partial theoretical protection from arbitrary abuse of state power. The dismantling of legalized oppressions of colonialism, apartheid, caste, and gender inequity has liberated majorities on every continent. Intertwined with civic freedoms, recognition and respect for all forms of difference and dissidence - from sexual minorities to indigenous peoples - has greatly improved in many countries and is strongly supported by international norms and institutions. Global treaties, lawsuits, and campaigns on war crimes, contemporary slavery, health rights, and corporate responsibility have resulted in some consequential interventions - from limitations on land mines to access to essential medicines - that have saved or improved tens of millions of lives (Landman 2005). Moreover, despite cultural differences and political controversies, global public opinion is broadly supportive of the principles and proponents of human rights (Ron et al. 2015). Emerging research shows both that rights conditions are improving overall through cascades of rising standards and networked institutions and that some of the skepticism, ironically, results from rising expectations and improving measurement (Sikkink 2017).

And yet the glass is half empty. Sixty-five million people are forcibly displaced by civil wars and failing states - the highest level recorded in human history - and face a panoply of threats to survival, freedom, and physical integrity. Rising xenophobia has resulted in the illicit detention and deportation of migrants by democratic governments - and often hate crimes by their citizens - from Europe to Australia to America. War crimes in Syria have resulted in nearly half a million massacred, tens of thousands of political prisoners, cities of civilians systematically destroyed, genocidal attacks on minorities, and enslavement of women and girls - with no significant international response. One out of three women in the world has suffered gender-based violence, including femicide, battering, and sexual assault, at the hands of government agents such as police, criminals, along with private individuals such as traffickers - and, above all, their own families. Democracy has deteriorated significantly in many of the emerging Latin American, South Asian, and African nations where citizens had gained power from military or single-party rule in the past generation. Rising powers in Russia and China remain authoritarian, combining...