Double standards. The Political Charachter of International Human Rights

International human rights law is a complex field. At first glance, it would seem that human rights aremore concerned about the relationship of the state with the individual than with inter-state relations. To get really deep into a human right it seems that knowledge of the constitutional law of a specific legal system is the best way to understand what that human right truly means. But in this approach the responsibility for protecting a human right is often limited to the territorial state. The risk is then that violations of human rights are primarily seen as a list of terrible things carried out in distant lands by and against ‘others’. Now a different approach is more dominant. Human rights are seen as universal, based on the notion of shared humanity and shared responsibility. Striving for human rights is a quest for human dignity. The big impetus for the human rights revolution was the Holocaust, the killing of six million Jews during the Second World War. When the Nazi regime made war on a particular group of people, citizenship gave no protection. Human rights were acknowledged in international law with the creation of the United Nations in 1945, although the concept of human rights at that time was not new. If we see human rights as a concern with ‘others’, human rights have deep roots in religion and philosophy.The Book of Genesis speaks of the value and sacredness of God’s children and the responsibility that human beings have towards each other, illustrated in the cry of Cain: ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ Christ spoke of the need to take care of the poor, the sick and the hungry and have compassion with strangers. Human rights were developed in connection with natural law theory and were formulated as claims of the citizens against the ‘divine right’ of kings in the absolutist state in the seventeenth and eighteenth century (humanists, reformists, John Locke, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in 1789). The Declaration of Independence (1776) of the United states of America states: ‘We hold these truths