Are Human Rights Universal ?

10148 Words41 Pages
LAW IN A WORLD OF MULTIPLE LEGAL ORDERS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS UNIVERSAL? Right after the dramatic events of the Second World War, the international community became aware that Humanity was threatened from the inside. Therefore, this was to be a real turning point in the history of the legal world, since it appeared necessary to build up a Human Rights global regime, enabling each human being to be immunized against fundamental rights’ violation. The first step of this universal political project was to define the framework of such a regime by drawing up basic principles: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – adopted by the UN General Assembly on the 10th of December 1948 – consists of a list of the fundamental rights and reaffirms in its preamble the inalienable and universal respect of fundamental human rights. Theoretically, these rights are considered to be the rights that one has simply because one is human. Within a few years, new human rights instruments were created, at the national, regional and international levels, giving progressively birth to a real international Human Rights system, globally granted and respected by the whole international community. However, the statute of International Human Rights Law remains very ambivalent: since it is mainly based upon soft law and relies - for its major part - on domestic implementation, it is not as binding as a typical legal order. In fact, International Human Rights Law is merely working on customary international law, derived from the uniform conduct of states and their consent to act as if it was legally binding. Consequently, this brings us to one of the major issue concerning the universality of Human Rights: even though the universality of Human Rights is virtually recognized by the international community, this does not mean that Human Rights have a universal effectiveness. Indeed, the obvious
Open Document