ABSTRACT
Human rights have become a principal activity of international governmental and nongovernmental organizations and have led to an international law imposing human rights obligations on states. Human rights have figured prominently in relations between nations and have been grist for other transnational mills. Human rights were generally not the stuff of international politics or law until after World War II, but individual welfare was not wholly beyond the ken of the international system even before then. In idea, international law and human rights were linked even before the eighteenth-century heyday of rights theory, both having natural law antecedents and common progenitors in Grotius, Vattel, and Locke. One may plausibly question whether those developments, too, reflected an authentic, altruistic concern for human rights. Minority treaties were imposed on nations defeated in the war, on newly created states, and on a few others; they were not universal norms required of the big and the powerful as well.
