ABSTRACT
In their contemporary manifestation, human rights are a set of individual and collective rights that have been formally promoted and protected through international and domestic law since the UN Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Arguments, theories, and protections of such rights, however, have been in existence for much longer (see e.g. Claude 1976; Foweraker and Landman 1997:1-45; Freeman 2002b:14-54; Ishay 2004; Woodiwiss 2005), but since the UN Declaration, the evolution of their express legal protection has grown rapidly. Today, there are numerous international treaties on human rights promulgated since the UN Declaration to which an increasingly large number of nation states are a party (see below), while the language of human rights increasingly pervades our moral, legal, and political vocabulary to such an extant that many have claimed we now live in an ‘age of rights’ (see Bobbio 1996). Indeed, the development of a human rights doctrine has changed the ways in which nation states act towards each other at the international and regional levels, and the ways in which governments, individuals and groups interact at the domestic level. These new types of action and interaction cover a broad range of areas, including political rights, civil rights, social, economic, and cultural rights, as well as questions of poverty and the distribution of socio-economic resources. Politically and legally, both the sovereignty and pursuit of power-based national interest has become increasingly checked by the application of international, regional, and national human rights norms and practices (Landman 2005b). This chapter provides an overview of the current categories of human rights that make up the field and maps the breadth and depth of the international and regional systems for their protection by looking at the degree to which nation states in the world formally participate in these systems through ratification of human rights treaties. The chapter concludes by considering whether the world has reached the limits of specifying new human rights in need of protection and whether key actors with prime responsibility for their promotion and protection (see Chapter 2) should now concentrate their energies on the full implementation and enforcement of human rights.
