An overview of political approaches to human rights

Human rights discourse is in danger of being overwhelmed by its own success not so much in terms of its material outcomes as in the ubiquity of its usage. Human rights have become not only the principal medium in which moral concerns are brought to bear on politics and economics, and indeed on almost every sphere of public human activity, but also the principal ingredient of the burgeoning field of human rights law. Its rhetoric is pervasive while being ill defined and variably applied in almost all dialogues which seek to prescribe moral weight and urgency or demand legal resolutions of certain wrongs.