Is the Age of Human Rights Over?

Abstract

70 years after the UDHR -- and the launch of the human rights movement -- there are signs that the Age of Human Rights is over. This piece interrogates the deficits and normative gaps of the human rights text, and concludes that the golden age of human rights is over. Human rights no longer have the power to provoke deep-seated moral and legal outrage. The consequence is that untold human catastrophes barely register global action, let alone condemnation. While human rights have been a phenomenal success -- perhaps more than any other moral language of our time -- they have lost the ability to coalesce action. Unfortunately, no new discourses have emerged to take the place of human rights. What is needed is a new moral language to fill the vacuum left by human rights.

Keywords: morality, human rights age, cultural biases, normative deficits, intellectual fatigue, post-mortem, moral vacuum, UDHR, distopia, torture, Global South