ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with what may be the most prominent common challenges to human rights (they are also quite ‘all-out’): the relativist challenge and the political pawns challenge. The former states that human rights lack universal validity, while the latter says that they are merely pawns in political power games. These influential common challenges need to be discussed, also because they are linked to currently prominent debates about the end/future of human rights. The chapter argues that the relativist and political pawns challenges, in the versions of them that matter most, can be answered: relativism about human rights is implausible at a general level; and where the political pawns challenge asserts, as it usually does, that more than (what I call) ‘local’ repairs to human rights are needed, it is ultimately unconvincing. Thus, as far as these challenges are concerned, there is in the end no reason to fear for the future of human rights.
