No Human Rights without Retribution: Plights and Promises of Redress as if Nothing Happened

So much has been written on human rights that there must be really very good reasons to add anything more to an already enormously extensive literature. Might all these efforts not have been better spent on realization and protection of human rights in more direct fashions? So many scholarly and humane words and warnings, however suave or even persuasive, seem powerless against so much irrational cruelty in the world. It seems apparent that if human rights are really or even overridingly important, such rights ought to redirect human effort from the books to action on behalf of human rights.