International human rights law norms and ‘human-rightist’ imperatives are increasingly ‘mainstreamed’ into general international law. The writer makes two modest assertions: that the success of this trend (i) makes it now possible to speak of general international law ‘sources’ of human rights obligations; and (ii) undermines claims of the ‘specialness’ of the human rights legal framework, which are a source of perplexity for the general international lawyer increasingly used to taking human rights law (as lex generalis) into account when interpreting and applying general international law.
