We saw in earlier chapters that the United Nations Charter in its Articles 55 and 56 required states to cooperate on human rights matters, and the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights was the first intergovernmental statement in world history to approve a set of basic principles on universal human rights. We also saw that since the 1940s, almost all states – not just western ones – have regularly reaffirmed the existence of universal human rights without negative discrimination based on nationality, ethnicity, gender, race, creed, or color. As noted, this reaffirmation occurred most saliently at the 1993 UN conference on human rights at Vienna. We also saw in chapter 5 that regional developments have supplemented this global trend, most notably in Europe and the Western Hemisphere. The international or transnational law of human rights is now a well-developed corpus of law, far more concentrated and specified than other fields such as international environmental law.

We also noted in chapter 1 that the twentieth century, however, was not only a time of increasing professions of international morality and human rights, but also the bloodiest century in human history. At the start of the twenty-first century, a fundamental challenge is how to reduce the enormous gap between the liberal legal framework on human rights that most states have formally endorsed, and the realist principles that they often follow in their foreign policies.