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What do we really talk about when we talk about human rights? | OpenGlobalRights

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The greatest value of international human rights law has been as a language for people, communities, and social movements to use to demand respect for their human rights.

When scholars and practitioners of human rights gather to diagnose the health of human rights, as a group of us did at the conference that sparked this series, we tend to plunge straight into our critiques, using the terms "human rights," "human rights movement," and "human rights project" as if we agree on what they mean. But because we do not start with a common, explicit understanding of those terms, we can end up missing the point. This essay raises questions that progressive critiques of human rights provoke. Critics of the right have long attacked human rights as being unrealistic and un

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