What is Left of Our Common Human Project? Reckoning with Human Rights’ Failures at 75

By Andrea Biswas-Tortajada, IRPS PhD Candidate

With every war, every conflict, every atrocity that goes on with impunity, many of us working in and studying human rights feel an urgent, yet almost futile, drive to talk about legality and dignity. We try to re-learn how to transform human rights into a long-lasting tool for emancipation. We ponder the present use and future promise of the infrastructure built around ‘human rights’ 75 years ago. We tally the wins and failures of this notion that has delivered some process but can do little to prevent human suffering. We cling to the radical simplicity contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) preamble that recognises “the inherent dignity” and “equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family.” We commemorate complex legacies. 

The current state of global freedoms and liberties and the perceived failures of human rights have prompted many questions and intense frustration directed, amongst others, at the UN and its human rights architecture. The High Commissioner Volker Türk was asked on Thursday, 7 December 2023, whether he thought Human Rights have failed. “No,” he categorically said. “They have not failed.” Well, something has failed monumentally at protecting the world’s most vulnerable from states, foreign powers, corporations, and other groups within society. The Universal Declaration said never again. Yet, despite claims of universality, what most racialised bodies have heard since 1948 is never again in Europe, never for white people, never again for the powerful. 

Complex legacies

To optimists, the UDHR marks a starting point of an international normative system that includes a wide array of protections for refugees, Indigenous peoples, and people with disabilities to fight the scourge of torture and fulfil the human right to water and sanitation, etc. Although the Declaration is not legally binding, the protection of the rights and freedoms enshrined in it has been incorporated into many national legal frameworks. It constitutes the basis for developing many other legally binding human rights treaties. This is why the UDHR is widely considered a milestone under international human rights law and the first document to claim universal moral appeal. Yet, to many, it is almost incomprehensible to celebrate the UDHR’s anniversary. 

It seems more fitting to commemorate that the Declaration marked the beginning of a struggle framed within the confinements of the multilateral system and the global order as we know it, operate within, resist against, and suffer micro and macro aggressions because of it. The long-standing criticism against the global human rights project, which accuses it of being deeply corrupted and inadequate, rings as loud as ever. The edging of Human Rights with capitalised initials in the post-WWII project is also a reminder of the way the Global South was sliced up by the war’s “winners” as the Member States of the United Nations created the world’s toughest job: to promote and protect the rights of everybody. It is an impossible task when the biggest violators are also the world’s largest powers. 

Current events compel us to look at the future of Human Rights with concern, especially with the appalling deadlock in the international Human Rights system that has left it discredited and unable to respond effectively to current and past crises. For one, we have not stopped threading too far away from witnessing, ignoring, denying, or justifying genocide. Moreover, very few political, social, or cultural figures stand ready to champion Human Rights or can do so authoritatively. Fewer still are the public figures who can provide ethical leadership as respect for established norms continues to evaporate in the same places where the Declaration emerged and that have extensively used Human Rights language to exclude, discriminate, loot, and exploit. In this ever-complex and interconnected world, the Declaration seems a quaint artifact rendered toothless against modern systemic injustices and conflict. Its heir institutions struggle for credibility beyond being a stage for political performances.

In news feeds and hashtags, the UDHR vision fractures but persists in bits and bytes.

So, is there hope for Human Rights when the most vulnerable across our globe bear the violent brunt of the hypocrisy of this moral posturing? The stream of posts on Palestine, DRC’s cobalt supply chains in Kolwezi, the Tigray region in Ethiopia, Yemen, trans athletes, First Nations, climate activists, and feminist collectives beg to differ with Türk’s assessment of the failings of Human Rights. They also show that oppression does not happen by accident and that abuse does not deserve privacy. 

In the comments section, an area of activism and engagement almost exclusively reserved for the bravest – vitriol and hatred aside – people pose pertinent questions about the sheer existence of Human Rights. Individuals around the world shoot questions into the void, and the engaged commentator wonders what good can the global order bring when its principles are ignored so easily, without consequence, in total impunity. People ask now, as they did in 1948, what are Human Rights for? Can they prevent death and suffering? How do we protect ourselves and our communities from abuses of power? How can we use political power and its structures to end discrimination, exclusion, and exploitation? Who speaks to the human in Human Rights? And if not for Human Rights, is there anything that unifies all peoples?

Easy answers to these questions do not seem to exist. And yet, those who believe in a world beyond mere survival cling to hope. With small and big acts of defiance and resistance, grassroots movements fight to preserve and expand hard-won freedoms. Activists and defenders challenge power at home, school, and social gatherings. They bear witness to mobilisations and acts of solidarity on the streets, legislatures, political fora, the marketplace, etc. They document their actions and their arbitrary and violent suppression for the world to see, follow, and replicate live. Local moral outrage turns into movements of global consequence. In every corner of the word, community advocates organise to resist exploitation. They are hopeful and are hope itself. 

Every day, behind blue lights, the 1773 words of the Universal Declaration are broken down into short reels, performed into the small soundbites and character-limited messages we exchange. Online, hashtags crystallise dissent and the promise of a better future, with tweets and posts clutching at eroded civil liberties across borders. Each bit and byte that questions, resists, denounces, and speaks truth to power holds an ember of optimism by showing the transformation of Human Rights into a common vernacular to contest injustice everywhere: HUMAN RIGHTS, human rights, and HUMAN RIGHTS. 

This was the promise and challenge that Eleanor Roosevelt announced at the time of the declaration: human rights need to gain meaning in small places where every individual seeks equal justice, opportunity, and dignity without discrimination. It is in those ungoverned cracks that the present and future of our common human project live.