Human Rights, Global Justice, and the Limits of Law

Although international human rights law is becoming more developed, it has inherent and internal limits. It is made by state actors, and respect for human rights in practice depends on how states are structured and on the political projects of officials who act ‘in the name of the state’. In this chapter I discuss the citizen/human paradox on which international law depends: humans have rights as such, but citizens with rights must give themselves the law. From a sociological perspective, I will argue that human rights are necessarily political, and that the entanglement of the ‘international’ and the ‘national’ is unavoidable for the progressive construction of human rights.