ABSTRACT
The issue of universality has been a persistent and, more often than not, a controversial issue throughout the history of human rights. To begin with traditional understandings of universality, the discourse of human rights has been asserted as universal in a number of respects. The universal 'human' resists any attempt to be permanently fixed or determined; it is not an all-inclusive concept pertaining to 'human beings', but a non-essence. While the concept of universality has demonstrated a number of flaws and limitations when thought within the traditional frame of universality-relativity, a place can still be found for human rights as universal in radical politics. The universality of human rights is characterised by a constant fixing and unfixing of what universal rights concepts are, what they can be used to do and say, and what they represent which takes place in the diverse politics of human rights.
