How have law and international institutions sought to promote human rights globally? To what extent is there a global consensus on the theory and practice of human rights?

The first 200 words of this essay...

Fiona Fairbairn

Mansfield College

Hartmut Mayer

How have law and international institutions sought to promote human rights globally? To what extent is there a global consensus on the theory and practice of human rights?

Human Rights is a notion that human beings have rights because they are human beings, not because they are citizens of some particular state. In the contemporary world, there has been the dramatic upsurge in the question of human rights and their place in the state system. In world society today, most states acknowledge that issues connected with the fundamental rights of human beings are a legitimate part of foreign policy.

The process leading to the new standing of the concept of human rights was formally heralded by the establishment in 1946 of the United Nation Commission on Human Rights and in December 1948, the General Assembly passed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Two Covenants were designed to give substance to this: the first was on economic, social and cultural rights; and the second on civil and political rights. The first was passed in 1966 (though not operative until ten years later) but the second Covenant has had a much