ABSTRACT
Reflecting on the consequences of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Zbigniew Brzezinski declared that ‘human rights have become the genuine historical inevitability of our times’. Looking forward, and in light of the remarkable yet still unfinished awakening of Arab societies after the spark lit in Tunisia in December 2010, it would seem that recent events are once again giving credence to the inevitable role that human rights and fundamental freedoms will play in the field of foreign affairs in the future. Normative positioning entails that the human rights component of a foreign policy is limited to the legal codification of emerging norms, contributing to the expansion of the normative foundation for human rights with the intent to seek universality for the norms. Conceptually, operative positioning can be of two types, mainly distinguishable by the generic or case-specific scope of the human rights agenda.
