What future for human rights?

Earlier this week I was part of a panel discussing the future of human rights at the Sir Joseph Hotung Memorial Event at Chatham House. This was no small topic to address in an hour, and thankfully is also the focus of a much bigger project on which I am working.

As so often, the context was hardly encouraging. It is rarely difficult to find evidence of a world unfriendly to human rights, and indeed there has been much to choose from: war in Ukraine (not to mention Ethiopia), the killing of veteran journalist Shireen Abu Akleh by Israeli forces, the Taliban turning the screw on women's rights in Afghanistan , the US Supreme Court threatening to overturn Roe v Wade , the UK government's plans to scrap the Human Rights Act .

But amid all of this, I had been struck by how the developing situation in Sri Lanka seemed to illustrate something so essential about human rights. This week we watched an alarming escalation after weeks of mostly peaceful protests against a government accustomed to its own impregnability. The Rajapaksas have cultivated both chauvinistic Sinhala Buddhist nationalism and a reputation for efficiency as the basis of their power, while evading any consequences for overseeing the killing of tens of thousands of Tamil civilians at the end of the civil war in 2009 - a grotesque failure which the international human rights system has been unable to resolve. The Rajapaksas had a stint out of power; now they are back and in control. But with deep scarcity and growing economic desperation, pressure against them has been growing as protesters have dug in. The Rajapaksas were in no mood to listen. Pro-government mobs attacked the protest site, provoking counter-violence, and before long the country was in lockdown with a shoot-on-sight order in place and fears of a larger military crackdown. It is a case study in the profound interconnectedness of economic and civic rights and what happens when a ruling class never expects to be held to account.

This was the sobering context for our discussion about the future of human rights. What difference can human rights make? Must we accept defeat in the face of politics and power? In what ways can it be the effective system-framework-regime-movement that we want?

These are big and perennial questions, and the answers are as murky as always. But I offered three challenges that the human rights system needs to confront if it is to have an impactful future.

Firstly, it must find ways to overcome the damaging polarisation between competing paradigms of rights. The human rights system has come to accept this as a natural condition, and no amount of talking about "indivisibility" seems to change that. In the field of diplomacy, the polarisation is worsening again in the context of US-China rivalry. The US is doubling down on its democracy agenda (of which human rights is a subset), while China is trying to position itself as a leader of Global South countries , including by laying claim the old African-led concept of a "right to development ". Both democracy and development make a legitimate pairing with human rights, but both lead to deeply reductionist view when taken alone. What would address the crisis in Sri Lanka from a human rights perspective, more democracy or more development? If human rights has a core, perhaps it is in the space where these two paradigms meet - a space which is too often empty.

Secondly, the global relevance of human rights needs to be established afresh. At the global level, the UN Secretary-General's vision, Our Common Agenda , shoe-horns human rights into a Sustainable Development Goals framework. And at the national level, many countries have leaders and populist movements which define themselves in opposition to human rights norms, or seek to contextualise the inconvenient parts away. The UK government's plans to introduce a so-call British Bill of Rights fall foul of standards demanded by the West at the 1993 Vienna World Conference on Human Rights, where US Secretary of State Warren Christopher decried cultural relativism as "the last refuge of repression ". The future of human rights depends to some extent on whether it is possible to reclaim and re-centre a universal vision of human rights.

Thirdly, the human rights system would be well-served by an ambitious and holistic vision for taking on the biggest existential challenges we face. To be clear, this should not replace the ongoing business of norm-setting and strengthening compliance. But there are grand global challenges in the world to which rights-based answers are needed. It is time to be more propositional about that, bringing big ideas to the big questions of what kind of world we want to live in, what kind of future we envisage for humankind and our environment. I would like to see the human rights movement coalesce around a strategic agenda focusing on inequality, climate, and technology, all underpinned by a commitment to strengthen civic engagement.

As the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights approaches, there is much to celebrate in terms of progress, and the extent to which human rights norms are embedded in the international system. But if the human rights system is to avoid a fate of gradual obsolescence, its smears appearing here and there in other frameworks, it is time to look to the future with big ideas.