ABSTRACT
Talk about human rights, or just rights, used here both in the generic sense of fundamental “subjective” rights and their specifically international embodiment, is shot through with references to value, valuation, and values. In the most colloquial sense, the “value of rights” tends to be associated with the Western liberal canon within which rights are essentially taken to articulate a set of values in the form of individual entitlements vis-a-vis public authority. The “right” critique consists of two distinct if, by some accounts, interdependent positions that take issue with what they see as the inherent egalitarianism of the logic of rights. Rights-in-practice are, however, not static but highly dynamic, involving diverse elements – people, institutions, legal frameworks – which, over time, generate effects that generate further effects and so on. In the end, the reality of human rights is simply more complex and less determined than the critics are prepared to admit.
