[TLDR (too long didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are it behooves you. This HR Reader is about the push and shove in the de-facto adoption of HR highlighting some important misalignments between where we ought to be and where we actually are. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text]. Traducir/traduire los/les Readers; usar/utiliser deepl.com
—We are witnessing the erosion of the right to have rights. (Medico International)
–Turning points are usually only seen in the rear-view mirror, with the benefit of hindsight. It seems we are not in one such turning point right now …not yet. (Stuart Gilespie)
1. In conference rooms and on official social feeds, the language of human rights (HR) is frequent and rings familiar: dignity, equality, universality are all mentioned lightly. Outside those rooms, the world is harsher –war footage is now routine, hunger hangs in the background, we see prisons filling with critics and borders hardening and becoming moral walls. The catchphrase ‘human rights’ still travels the globe. The question is whether the world still treats it as a binding promise or as a decorative slogan. Human Rights are not ornaments for peaceful times! They are the minimum conditions that make ordinary life possible, i.e., being able to speak out without fear, to worship without fear, to be judged by law rather than by decrees.
Human rights are being pushed aside in the name of profit or power
2. If there is a single sentence that captures the mood of every year’s HR Day observance, it may be that rights are pushed aside, not by accident, but by design. We need a sober acknowledgement that normal commemoration of HR Day can (and does) sound hollow when civilian deaths climb, when prisoners of conscience multiply, when HR norms are treated as optional. A day of mourning would not replace HR Day. It would rather tell the truth about what is happening. Human Rights Day exists because the world once learned, in blood, what happens when rights are treated as privileges, and some lives are defined as less worthy than others.
3. The Universal Declaration of HR (UDHR) was not a negotiated treaty, but it became a covenant, a global blueprint respected by courts, by constitutions, by civic movements. It became part of the everyday vocabulary of dignity used by people resisting abuse. Its message is simple: rights are inherent; they do not emanate from rulers; they are not gifts; they are not conditional. Authoritarian geopolitics, in contrast, begins from the opposite assumption, namely that people are instruments; that labour can be exploited; that populations are to be managed; that opponents are to be crushed; that minorities can be scapegoated; that refugees can be traded like bargaining chips.
The way the current world politics works is that HR are what is neglected and/or ignored first
4. When Volker Türk, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, calls HR ‘a compass in turbulent times’, he is not being rhetorical. A compass does not end the storm; it stops you from steering straight into the rocks.
5. Now, war, is not only a battlefield problem. It is a HR failure, one that spreads. What begins as exceptional brutality in one theatre becomes precedent elsewhere. This is what makes the HR argument more than moral; it is also politically relevant. In a world of competing powers and brittle alliances, HR are not a distraction from security; they are part of the security system. They are the rules that keep the powerful from turning the weak into collateral.
6. As relates to human migrations, HR are indispensable because they stand between displacement and dignity*, between a person being treated as a person and not being processed as a number, as a problem.
*: Dignity is the inherent right of every human being to be valued and respected, not based on status or achievement, but simply for being human.
Without giving the voices of people a space, human rights become a paper tiger
7. After all this, ponder: The HR system depends on something so ordinary that we rarely name it: space —the space to speak, to organize, to investigate, to protest, to defend. The HR ecosystem is not just about the the UN system. It is about: independent judges; about credible journalists; about principled civil servants; about unions; about local public interest civil society organizations and social movements; about community leaders and HR defenders who document abuses when it is dangerous to do so. The targeting of HR defendants is not anecdotal. UN human-rights data reports that at least 625 human-rights defenders were killed or disappeared in 2024. The number of journalists and of media workers killed also rose, most of them in conflict zones. These are not only tragedies. They are signals. They tell you what kind of future is being built, namely one where truth is treated as sabotage.
8. Human rights are indispensable precisely because civic space is indispensable. Without civic space, society cannot correct itself peacefully. And when peaceful correction becomes impossible, violence becomes more likely. If HR are seen as selective –shouted at enemies, whispered to allies– then they become another geopolitical instrument of the powerful. That is precisely what authoritarians want: to turn rights into just another propaganda word. We should be more than careful.
9. Bottom line
- Mourning about all this without building proactive movements becomes paralysis –and using double standards is the acid that corrodes HR.
- We have to make HR durable again in an era of hard power. The most effective antidote to authoritarianism is not moral lecturing. Human rights are not credible if they function as a rhetorical weapon rather than a constraint on power.
- Human rights are indispensable today for a simple reason: the alternatives are already here. Where rights are treated as optional, law becomes a disguise, a prerogative of the powerful.
- If Human Rights Day is a vigil now, then let it be a vigil with purpose: today, not someday. (all adapted from R. Jaura)
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com
Postscript/Marginalia
–To be sure, the US has never been entirely consistent in its prioritization of HR, which more often than not took a back seat to other geopolitical concerns. Take the following: In August 2025, the Trump’s administration abruptly withdrew from the United Nations’ signature human rights process: the Universal Periodic Review (UPR). While this move did not make headlines in domestic media, it should have. The UPR offers an opportunity for all countries to take stock of their voluntary efforts to promote HR in a periodic report to the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in Geneva. The US had already pulled out of the UNHRC earlier this year. (Council on Foreign Relations) …and since this Reader was written, The Trump administration has pulled out from another 60+ organizations.