Introduction: Global Human Rights Law and the Boundaries of Statehood

Abstract

Whatever the true historical origins and philosophical foundations of human rights—questions to which the contributors to this collection of essays give different answers—their protection has taken a distinctive form in the modern state legal order and, by extension, in the state-centered conception of international law. Arguing from a historical perspective, Samuel Moyn contends that, from American and French Declarations of the “Rights of Man” to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the main purpose of human rights was to organize and legitimize the social compact between the state and its citizens.1 If, in the course of the eighteenth century revolutions, the “rights of man” were proclaimed as universal principles to which positive law was supposed to conform, these rights “only appeared through the state, and there was no forum above it, or at times even in it, in which to indict the state’s transgression.”2 Human rights retained their state-centered focus with their appearance on the international stage after World War II, now in the form of international declarations and covenants established by and for independent states endowed with sovereign equality and national collective self-determination.3 The global expansion of human rights in this period thus reaffirmed, rather than undermined, the central role of the state in their creation, interpretation, and enforcement. As Marti Koskenniemi says, “[b]y establishing and consenting to human rights limitations on their own