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Keane, David; McDermott, Yvonne --- "Introduction" [2012] ELECD 784; in Keane, David; McDermott, Yvonne (eds), "The Challenge of Human Rights" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2012)

Book Title: The Challenge of Human Rights

Editor(s): Keane, David; McDermott, Yvonne

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9780857939005

Section Title: Introduction

Author(s): Keane, David; McDermott, Yvonne

Number of pages: 8

Extract:

Introduction
David Keane and Yvonne McDermott

When the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 proclaimed the
universality of human rights, this was as much a projection of its future
path as a statement of its then status. Human rights has since become as
fundamental to political or legal action as mathematics is to physics; a
common language to be applied to various problems or situations that
arise. There has been a resulting exponential growth of human rights, to
the point where it is inextricable from questions of democracy, state legiti-
macy and state co-operation. This complexity of human rights has seen
a fracturing of its origins, motives and influences, and it struggles to be
contained within the broad rubric of the UN international legal order or
its regional counterparts. The edges of all of the individual rights-specific
legal instruments are bursting with new interpretations or applications, as
meaning is expanded to draw in wider issues or unforeseen consequences.
The discipline has seeped into `such exotic and highly specialized'1 areas
of knowledge as international refugee law, minority rights, indigenous
rights, children's rights, the international law of armed conflict and indi-
vidual criminal responsibility, which all have their roots in the protection
of the individual. The danger is that an ever-increasing corpus of rights will
devalue the existing standards, hard-fought and hard-won, while adding
meaningless layers and confusing advocates who seek simple expressions
of state responsibilities. In this regard, the expanding range of actors, ...