What makes the human rights field so interesting is the constant battle between the general concepts and understandings, and their actual application in the lives of specific people on the ground. It is not difficult to set out certain general themes. We can state confidently that for decades now universal human rights and the international instruments which have been designed to promote and protect them, have been a source of hope for many in the world who have been denied freedom, equality and the basic means of survival. They have also provided a discourse and a set of tools for those seeking to end oppression. Ultimately, they show us a way to achieve global peace and solidarity.

Equally, the somewhat bolder ones among us can declare comfortably that as a general rule universal human rights are also a contested site, in terms of their articulation, interpretation and implementation. Universal human rights are not simply something handed down to us by the gods or nature; they are the creation of human agency, imagination, creativity, humanity and above all struggle. The universal human rights – civil, political, social, economic, cultural, environmental, developmental, individual and collective – which we know today, have had a long history in their making; one of protest, revolt, revolution and suffering. As the famous Irish poet, Seamus Heaney, so eloquently wrote:

An associate of my late colleague and comrade Professor Kader Asmal, who was Dean of Trinity College Law School, head of the Irish Anti-Apartheid movement and a great exponent of universal human rights, Heaney could have been thinking about the struggle against apartheid. He knew in his bones that it was in those moments of upheaval that the greatest advances had occurred in the development of human rights around the world. The campaigns for workers and female suffrage, the campaigns by labour unions for workers social and economic rights, the struggles for self-determination against colonialism and neo-colonialism, the campaigns to abolish slavery in all its forms, the civil rights movements, the campaign to end homosexual oppression, all have contributed to the development of recognisable and accepted concepts of universal human rights.