Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Note
- 1 Human Rights and Statelessness Today
- 2 Human Rights in History
- 3 Agamben and the Rise of ‘Bare Life’
- 4 Language, the Human and Bare Life: from Ungroundedness to Inoperativity
- 5 Nihilism or Politics? An Interrogation of Agamben
- 6 Politics, Power and Violence in Agamben
- 7 Agamben, the Image and the Human
- 8 Living Human Rights
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - Human Rights in History
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Note
- 1 Human Rights and Statelessness Today
- 2 Human Rights in History
- 3 Agamben and the Rise of ‘Bare Life’
- 4 Language, the Human and Bare Life: from Ungroundedness to Inoperativity
- 5 Nihilism or Politics? An Interrogation of Agamben
- 6 Politics, Power and Violence in Agamben
- 7 Agamben, the Image and the Human
- 8 Living Human Rights
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
An examination of ‘human rights in history will enable a better understanding of the context in which modern notions of rights arose and thus outline the terms of what we see as the central question facing human rights today: how might it be possible to defend the rights of those who have lost the ‘right to have rights’?
Generally, what passes for the history of modern human rights focuses on the period after the Second World War – on the aftermath of the Nuremberg Trials and on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) confirmed by the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in December 1948. Thirty human rights were specified and expressed as a set of abstract moral claims or aspirations. However, while these rights supposedly enshrined the sanctity of individuals, at the same time, they depended upon the goodwill of nation-states to uphold them, thus consigning human rights to a crippling contradiction and an uncertain future.
It is true that, in light of the brutality of the Nazi regime, the Nuremberg Tribunal did constitute a step forwards in the defence of human rights from a legal point of view. As David Chandler explains:
Where the tribunal broke new legal ground was in using natural law to overrule positivist law, to argue that the laws in force at the time in Germany were no defence against the retrospective crime of ‘waging an aggressive war’. This was justified on the grounds that certain acts were held to be such heinous crimes that they were banned by universal principles of humanity. Human rights frameworks were used to undermine positivist law, to cast the winners of the War as moral, not merely military, victors. (2009: 118 [emphasis in original])
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Agamben and the Politics of Human RightsStatelessness, Images, Violence, pp. 23 - 48Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2013