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.

This chapter provides an original inquiry into the use of General Assembly resolutions within domestic legal systems. The scholarly literature is silent on this, being entirely focused on the use of resolutions by international courts and tribunals. As a result, this chapter supplements the current academic debate by revealing a neglected aspect of the legal significance of resolutions. It evaluates the degree of legal significance that states attach to resolutions at the implementation stage by analysing the process of incorporation of resolutions into domestic law. It shows that the source of the legal significance of resolutions can be ultimately traced back to the will of individual states to rely on resolutions depending on context and circumstances. As a result, generalizations about the legal significance of resolutions within domestic legal systems appear to be neither convincing nor useful.

The Arab claim is that the Palestinian refugees were illegally expelled by Israel or fled from fear of illegal Israeli actions. The Israeli position is that the refugees fled because they were caught in an armed conflict caused by the aggression of Arab armed attempts to prevent the creation of a Jewish state. As to a “right of return,” the Arab position is that such a right exists in international law, and although many refugees may not wish to return, they have the right to do so. The Israel legal position under international law as being that neither under the general international conventions, nor under the major UN resolutions, nor under the relevant agreements between the parties, do the Palestinian refugees have a right to return to Israel. There does not appear to be any legal precedent or the claim that descendants of refugees also have a right of return. In accordance with international law, the refugees are entitled to be compensated for property they left in Israel. The Jews who fled Arab States are also entitled to such compensation; Israel’s position is that such mutual claims will have to be negotiated in a multilateral forum.

In order to understand the key questions and issues surrounding BHR, a basic understanding of human rights more generally is necessary. Since BHR is an interdisciplinary field, it is important to gain an understanding both of the legal and non-legal dimensions of human rights. This chapter first provides a brief introduction to the philosophy of human rights and some of the key discussions that derive from this. Among them are the disputes between universalism and relativism and between foundationalist and non-foundationalist accounts of human rights. The chapter then takes a look at the main human rights bodies that institutionalize human rights in the international and regional context, paying particular attention to the United Nations’ human rights system. Finally, the chapter provides a brief introduction to international human rights law, outlining some of its key principles and instruments.

This chapter revisits the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and some thinkers who addressed social rights in its time, arguing that it is best understood historically as a charter for social citizenship. There is little evidence that the UDHR was intended – let alone noticed – as a call for supranational protection or a lodestar for non-governmental pressure. Rather, the UDHR was a template for a new kind of state, thus both national and governmental in its implications. This unprecedented new kind of state, birthed by the Second World War and ultimately consecrated around the world, afforded social protections and perhaps even egalitarian distribution. The restoration of the UDHR to its time poses new questions about how it was that human rights could indeed become at a later date so strongly associated with the supranational and non-governmental even as any commitment to distributive equality evaporated. Put in terms of a formula, the UDHR is an artefact of a pre-neo-liberal age that found itself celebrated in a neo-liberal one – but only once it was reinvented first.

Social rights have yet to be accorded their proper place either in the history of the international human rights regime or in current practice. The concept of ‘generations’ of rights is as problematic as it is unhelpful in this regard. In the future, more historical work needs to be done on the relationships among conceptions of social rights, poverty alleviation and distributive justice, as well as on the relevance of national-level precedents and on the role of religion. The implications of extreme inequalities should also be a crucial element of future work, but the debate needs to be based on a deeper, more accurate and more integrated understanding of past approaches, as well as on clear definitions of the key terms and reference points. And more attention needs to be given to the crucial role played by a diverse array of civil society actors in this field. This final chapter lays out a research agenda that bridges the past, present and future of social rights.