Human rights, liberal democracies and challenges of national security

Abstract

Since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)1 was adopted in 1948, people have increasingly defined their relationships with the state in the language of human rights. It is through the UDHR and the range of treaties adopted in its shadow, for example the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights,2 that people have navigated injustice on both large and small scales. These rights have subsequently been further specified and developed in regional human rights documents, such as the European Convention on Human Rights,3 and serve as the basis for the drafting and interpretation of constitutional rights provisions or bills of rights across a diverse variety of states. It is therefore accurate to understand human rights as a highly legalized field with no shortage of hard law to which people across the world can point to as a source for articulating how a state is interacting with its people, for better or worse. Yet human rights practice and discourse is not the sole realm of lawyers; it is a field to which politicians, academics, activists and the public also contribute in a myriad of ways.4 In fact, since the idea for the UDHR was