What role do Human Rights play in International politics today?

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What role do Human Rights play in International politics today?

"It was once the case that rights were almost always associated with domestic legal and political systems, in the last half century a complex network of international law and practice has grown up around the idea that individuals posses rights simply by virtue of being human".1

This concept of individual rights developed out of the 'natural rights' theories and were thought to be God-given, an assumption also taken by classical Liberalism. "In the seventeenth century, John Locke, [a theorist of the social contract] identified natural rights as the right to 'life, liberty and property', a century later Thomas Jefferson defined them as the right to 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness'".2 The protection of individual rights has often been taken from political theory and made into laws and public policy in societies.

However the decline of religious belief in the twentieth century has lead to the idea of natural rights theories being reborn in the form of what is now known as 'human rights',3 rights in-which people are entitled to by virtue of being human. In-turn this means that rights are universal and should belong to all humans despite their nation/ race etc.

This essay attempts to discuss the role of human rights in international politics today by looking at the extent in-which human rights legislation, organisations and all round commitment to protect individual rights has grown in the last half century. "Today, governments and international institutions claim human rights as one of the essential pillars of the international system, and they are claimed in the same breath as peace, democracy and the rule of law".4 In-turn this has made the concept of human rights very broad and although this development of putting the value of human dignity above the search for economic gain has generally been seen as a positive one there has been some speculation as to the motives behind them.

Therefore, this essay will also discuss some of the criticisms of human rights and its implications on the international system as well as domestic law, focusing on several debates which include the promotion of 'universal' rights and the high profile debate of human rights verses Asian values. The concept of a world society and its implications on the traditional notion of sovereignty and accountability. As well as considering question of who benefits and the more sceptical side of the human rights debate in-which critics claim can be used as an excuse by the West to justify intervention.

Traditionally international practice has lacked even the language with which to condemn the horrors and the atrocities of the Second World War. However "the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights marked the beginning of the modern human rights regime"5 "and set a common set of principles against which the human rights practices of individual member states could be measured".6 It's aim was to establish a system which transcended national boundaries7 "and not only included "classical 'negative' rights, like the right to 'freedom of thought, conscience and religion', but also 'positive' rights such as the 'right to work' and the 'right to education".8

However if the post-1945 human rights regime had been taken seriously, it would have created a universal system where all states involved would have been obliged to conform to quite a rigid template that would have dictated most aspects of their political, social, and economic structures.9 As we know this has not happen and although "conventional defenders of human rights argue that this would be a Good Thing"10 others have challenge the idea of universalism or cosmopolitan norms altogether.
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"It was probably inevitable that Western Europe and North America would set the agenda for the post-Cold war world...[and] with the collapse of communism there was no other large-scale ideological vision left in the political marketplace."11 However this dominance of Western ideology in the international system did lead to resentment, especially amongst the leaders of South-East Asia in the 1990's.

This resentment was reflected in the Bangkok Declaration, 1993, which stated that "western notions of human rights were seen as excessively individualistic, as opposed to the stress on the family of Asian societies, and insufficiently supportive ...

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