ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of how international human rights law and its affiliated system for the management of violations developed after 1945. Beginning with the United Nations Charter, we review the Declaration of Human Rights, the subsequent Covenants on Civil and Political Rights and Economic and Social Rights, and a host of other human rights treaties and United Nations bodies up to the present that have created the current global human rights system. Special attention will be paid to the roles of both power politics and non-governmental organization activism in shaping this system, in order to demonstrate that international human rights law and its enforcement system are not the same as most people’s sense of morality, but that activists driven by a sense of moral justice have been critical to extending human rights protections under international law in the face of stiff resistance from state governments. Based on this review, the chapter will argue that this creative tension between the law as states define it and the moral advocacy of non-governmental organizations have been essential in pushing the expansion of the limits of what states have been willing to accept over time. Using critical legal perspectives, we also look at some of the cultural influences and problems with the law, and briefly outline possible directions in which the system may develop in the future.
