Abstract
Human rights have been called the lingua franca of our times which define the limits of what is conceivable and utterable. The hegemonic status of human rights discourse helps insulate its conceptual loopholes and blind spots from critical scrutiny. Against the backdrop of the punitive turn taken by criminal justice systems in a number of countries since the decade of 1970s, this article attempts to lay bare intellectual affinities between modern retributivism and the discourse of human rights and how they contribute to legitimizing morally untenable and sociologically ill-informed responses to crime. It is argued that a number of otherwise insightful scholarly works on new punitiveness have failed to notice the paradoxical nature of human rights discourse which combines appeals to human dignity with a commitment to retributive justice.
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