ABSTRACT
When reading about human rights, it is not very common to hear of dictatorships as being their promoters. Law scholar Samuel Moyn writes that human rights historians tend to adopt the genre of hagiography when approaching their subject: those they consider to have advanced the cause of human rights are ‘generally treated with uncritical wonderment’ (6). But sometimes, governments and revolutionaries who have promoted the cause of human rights stood very far from today’s understanding of these rights and how they come about. In part, this has to do with the fact that today’s concept of human rights is linked to the changes in world politics and international law that have taken place since the 1970s (Moyn 7), but it also has to do with the fact that the term ‘human rights’ means many different things. The crucial difference lies in the understanding of their universality, and their relationship to the state. Not only democratic states, but authoritarian states have also included and include human rights as part of their legislation.
