Introduction

The issue addressed in this volume is whether international law, and in my case human rights law, is “parochial,” a term I take to mean “restricted to a small area; narrow; limited; provincial.” What I want to do in this chapter is address the topic from a reverse perspective by examining what is often left out of everyday discourse about international human rights: the idea of international human obligations. In doing so, I hope to offer some observations about the contextual nature of human rights and their potential for universalization.

Obligations are not a popular topic in debate about international human rights for the simple reason that most discussions of human rights necessarily address the question of vindicating rights. In this, it is easier to see those rights as relatively absolute, at least in an initial phase, than it is to try to understand them conditionally as part of broader legal culture. Much of the debate about international human rights today proceeds on the assumption that the rights involved are “inherent,” “inalienable,” and so forth and that therefore to infer they have other things that come with them, such as obligations, is to question this orthodoxy, which naturally raises suspicion.