Developments and challenges for a political idea of human rights

Abstract

[Excerpt] Much ink has been spilt and hairs split in the battle between orthodox and political conceptions of human rights. No doubt, much in the confrontational approaches has been clarifying. There is a wide array of collected volumes and articles that illuminate obscure angles, pros and cons.1 But since John Rawls made explicit a seminal conception of international human rights in his Oxford Amnesty Lecture in 1993 we have also had a fair share of straw-figures and shadow-boxing between misrepresented positions.