The Universal Struggle: Human Rights in a Fractured World

Human rights face an existential crisis in 2025. Despite 77 years since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaimed that “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights,” only 20% of the world’s population lives in countries rated as “Free,” while authoritarian practices have surged across 150 nations.¹ This paradox—the simultaneous expansion of human rights norms alongside their systematic violation—defines our contemporary moment. Understanding how we arrived here requires examining human rights through multiple lenses: their historical evolution, philosophical foundations, cultural interpretations, and political realities. While acknowledging legitimate critiques and persistent failures, this essay argues that human rights remain humanity’s best framework for protecting dignity and justice in an interconnected yet fractured world.

From Ancient Precedents to Universal Declaration

The concept of inherent human dignity predates modern human rights discourse by millennia. The Code of Hammurabi (1754 BCE) promised to “make justice reign in the Kingdom and promote the good of the people,” establishing principles of legal protection and restrictions on arbitrary power.² The Persian Cyrus Cylinder (539 BCE) proclaimed religious freedom and abolished slavery for captive peoples, while Buddhist emperor Ashoka’s edicts (268-232 BCE) emphasized kindness, prohibited religious discrimination, and condemned mistreatment of prisoners.³ These diverse traditions—from Hindu concepts of dharma to Confucian ethics of benevolence to Islamic principles of human dignity—demonstrate that concern for human welfare transcends Western origins.

The path from these ancient precedents to modern human rights passed through crucial waypoints. The Magna Carta (1215) established that even kings were subject to law, introducing habeas corpus and due process principles that later influenced democratic constitutions.⁴ The Enlightenment brought John Locke’s natural rights theory, arguing humans possess inalienable rights to “life, liberty, and property” independent of government.⁵ Revolutionary documents—from the American Declaration of Independence to the French Declaration of the Rights of Man—proclaimed these principles as universal truths, though their application remained tragically limited by exclusions based on race, gender, and class.

The Holocaust’s industrialized genocide catalyzed the modern human rights system. Eleanor Roosevelt, chairing the UN commission that drafted the Universal Declaration, worked with representatives from diverse philosophical and religious backgrounds—René Cassin of France, Charles Malik of Lebanon, Peng Chung Chang of China—to create a document reflecting humanity’s pluralism.⁶ When the UN General Assembly adopted the UDHR on December 10, 1948, with no votes against and only eight abstentions, Egyptian delegate Omar Lutfi’s insistence on “universality” ensured the declaration would apply to all peoples, including those under colonial rule.⁷

Philosophical Foundations and Tensions

Human rights draw from multiple philosophical traditions, each contributing essential insights while generating productive tensions. Natural law theory, systematized by Thomas Aquinas and secularized by Hugo Grotius, grounds rights in human nature discoverable through reason.⁸ Grotius’s revolutionary claim that natural law would remain valid “even if we should concede…that there is no God” established a foundation for rights independent of religious belief.⁹

Social contract theorists offered alternative justifications. While Hobbes emphasized security through absolute sovereignty, Locke made government legitimacy conditional on protecting pre-existing natural rights, establishing the principle that “there can be no subjection to power without consent.”¹⁰ Rousseau’s emphasis on the “general will” pointed toward more collective conceptions, while Rawls’s “original position” thought experiment grounded rights in principles of fairness rational individuals would choose behind a “veil of ignorance.”¹¹

Immanuel Kant provided perhaps the most influential foundation through his concept of human dignity rooted in rational autonomy. His categorical imperative—”Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or the person of any other, never simply as a means but always at the same time as an end”—establishes dignity as inherent, inalienable, equal, and absolute.¹² Contemporary philosophers like Martha Nussbaum have developed capabilities approaches focusing on what people are able to do and be, while Jürgen Habermas grounds rights in the pragmatic presuppositions of democratic discourse.¹³

These philosophical foundations face significant challenges. Marx critiqued liberal rights as legitimating capitalist exploitation while presenting formal equality that masks substantive inequality.¹⁴ Feminist philosophers argue that rights discourse reflects masculine assumptions about autonomy while neglecting relationships and care central to human flourishing.¹⁵ Postcolonial theorists contend that human rights often serve as vehicles for Western cultural imperialism. Yet these critiques have enriched rather than destroyed human rights discourse, pushing toward more inclusive and contextual understandings.

Religious Perspectives and Cultural Dimensions

Religious traditions have profoundly shaped human rights discourse, providing both support and resistance. Catholic social teaching grounds human dignity in the imago Dei—humans created in God’s image—while liberation theology’s “preferential option for the poor” expanded rights beyond individual freedoms to include structural justice.¹⁶ Islamic perspectives draw on Quranic principles of human dignity and justice, though debates persist about reconciling Sharia with international standards.¹⁷ Buddhist engaged Buddhism emphasizes compassion and interdependence, while Hindu reformers have challenged caste-based discrimination through human rights frameworks.¹⁸

The universalism versus cultural relativism debate reached its apex at the 1993 Vienna World Conference, which declared “all human rights are universal, indivisible and interdependent” while acknowledging “national and regional particularities.”¹⁹ The “Asian values” discourse, championed by leaders like Lee Kuan Yew, argued that Asian emphasis on order and community differs fundamentally from Western individualism.²⁰ Yet Amartya Sen demonstrated that Asia contains diverse traditions of tolerance and freedom, while authoritarian interpretations of “Asian values” often serve elite interests rather than authentic cultural expression.²¹

African perspectives offer Ubuntu philosophy—”I am because we are”—emphasizing relational personhood and communal harmony.²² The African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights uniquely recognizes collective rights alongside individual ones, while indigenous worldviews globally emphasize connections between human rights, environmental protection, and cultural survival.²³ These diverse approaches suggest that human rights can be universal in aspiration while particular in implementation, adapting to local contexts without abandoning core principles.

Political Realities and Institutional Challenges

The political dimensions of human rights reveal persistent tensions between principle and power. The Responsibility to Protect doctrine attempts to reconcile sovereignty with protection obligations, establishing that states have primary responsibility to protect their populations from mass atrocities, with international intervention as a last resort.²⁴ Yet R2P’s application—from NATO exceeding its Libya mandate to paralysis over Syria and Myanmar—demonstrates how geopolitical interests often override humanitarian imperatives.²⁵

The UN Human Rights Council, despite innovations like Universal Periodic Review examining all states equally, suffers from membership of serious violators and selective focus driven by political alliances.²⁶ Regional systems show varying effectiveness: the European Court of Human Rights has developed extensive binding jurisprudence, while Asia and the Middle East lack comparable mechanisms.²⁷ The International Criminal Court faces unprecedented attacks, including US sanctions that UN experts condemn as “an attack on global rule of law.”²⁸

China’s rise has introduced alternative human rights discourse prioritizing development over political freedoms, appealing to states seeking to avoid Western conditionality.²⁹ This “development first” paradigm, combined with systematic efforts to reshape international institutions, represents what Human Rights Watch calls “the most intense attack on the global system for enforcing human rights since that system began.”³⁰ North-South divisions persist, with developing nations criticizing selective enforcement that scrutinizes the Global South while ignoring powerful states’ violations.

Contemporary Violations and Emerging Challenges

The current human rights landscape reveals both persistent violations and new challenges. Freedom House documents the 19th consecutive year of global freedom decline, with authoritarian practices spreading across 150 countries.³¹ Civil and political rights face systematic assault: journalists murdered in Mexico, protesters disappeared in Kenya, democracy subverted in Guatemala.³² Press freedom has declined for 14 consecutive years, with 56 countries arresting internet users for political expression.³³

Economic and social rights fare no better. Gender pay gaps persist at 20% globally, while 333 million people face acute food insecurity—more than double pre-COVID levels.³⁴ The refugee crisis has reached unprecedented scale with 123.2 million forcibly displaced people, while receiving countries increasingly adopt pushback policies and punitive detention.³⁵ Minority rights violations continue from Rohingya statelessness to Tibetan cultural erasure to systematic racism in justice systems worldwide.³⁶

Women face staggering violence levels—one killed every 10 minutes by partners or family members—while 40% live in countries with restrictive abortion laws.³⁷ LGBTQ+ people face criminalization in 60 countries, with death penalties in seven nations, though recent progress includes decriminalization in Namibia and marriage equality advances in Estonia.³⁸ Digital rights confront mass surveillance programs in 49 countries and internet shutdowns during elections in 25 nations.³⁹ Climate change creates new violations through displacement and environmental destruction, with vulnerable populations bearing disproportionate impacts.⁴⁰

Mechanisms for Protection and Progress

Despite these challenges, multiple mechanisms demonstrate effectiveness in protecting and advancing human rights. International and regional courts provide authoritative interpretations and remedies, though enforcement depends on state cooperation.⁴¹ Treaty bodies’ individual complaint procedures achieve 95-100% state response rates, generating policy changes and jurisprudence development.⁴² National human rights institutions compliant with Paris Principles show statistically significant positive effects on education, health, and housing access while correlating with lower torture rates.⁴³

Civil society remains indispensable, from Amnesty International’s advocacy campaigns to grassroots movements achieving local change. Strategic litigation has advanced gender-sensitive jurisprudence, while coalitions like the International Campaign to Ban Landmines demonstrate civil society’s treaty-making power.⁴⁴ Human rights education, when implemented through participatory whole-school approaches with adequate teacher training, positively impacts knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors.⁴⁵

Corporate accountability mechanisms increasingly require human rights due diligence, with mandatory laws emerging in Europe.⁴⁶ Technological innovations enable documentation through mobile apps and satellite imagery, though they also pose surveillance risks. Transitional justice mechanisms combining truth-seeking, prosecutions, reparations, and institutional reform offer paths forward for societies emerging from massive violations.⁴⁷

Defending Human Rights While Acknowledging Failures

Human rights have undeniably failed to prevent atrocities from Rwanda to Syria to Xinjiang. Implementation remains inconsistent, enforcement mechanisms weak, and political will often absent. Cultural imperialism critiques highlight how rights discourse can mask power relations, while the persistence of global inequality questions whether civil and political rights mean much without economic justice.

Yet these failures don’t negate human rights’ value—they demonstrate the need for constant vigilance and improvement. Human rights provide a language for articulating injustice that resonates across cultures, evidenced by their adoption by liberation movements worldwide. They offer standards for evaluating government conduct and tools for seeking accountability, however imperfect. Most fundamentally, they embody humanity’s aspiration that every person possesses inherent dignity deserving of respect and protection.

The path forward requires acknowledging both human rights’ universality and cultural particularity, strengthening enforcement while respecting sovereignty, and addressing root causes of violations including inequality and environmental destruction. It demands protecting civil society space, supporting human rights defenders, and ensuring marginalized voices shape human rights interpretation and implementation.

Conclusion

Human rights in 2025 face profound challenges from authoritarian resurgence, technological disruption, climate crisis, and ideological competition. Yet their core insight—that human dignity requires protection through law and institutions—remains more vital than ever in our interconnected world. The struggle for human rights has never been easy or complete, progressing through setbacks and victories, shaped by diverse traditions and ongoing dialogue.

Rather than abandoning human rights due to their imperfect realization, we must recommit to their promise while addressing legitimate critiques. This means developing truly universal approaches through inclusive dialogue, strengthening protection mechanisms while adapting to new challenges, and maintaining hope that humanity can transcend divisions to protect our common dignity. The alternative—accepting that might makes right and dignity depends on power—offers no vision for human flourishing in our shared future. Human rights, for all their flaws, remain our best hope for building a world where every person can live with freedom, justice, and dignity.

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Notes

1. Freedom House, Freedom in the World 2025: The Uphill Battle to Safeguard Rights (Washington, DC: Freedom House, 2025), 1-3; Amnesty International, The State of the World’s Human Rights: April 2025, POL 10/8515/2025 (London: Amnesty International, 2025), 12-15.
2. “How the Code of Hammurabi Influenced Modern Legal Systems,” History.com, 2023.
3. Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project, “Human Rights Timeline: From Antiquity to the Magna Carta,” George Washington University, 2024.
4. History of Human Rights (London: Amnesty International Publications, 2020), 23-25.
5. John Dunn, Locke: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 45-48.
6. Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York: Random House, 2001), 73-95.
7. Johannes Morsink, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Origins, Drafting, and Intent (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 28-35.
8. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (Cincinnati: Benziger Brothers, 1947), II-I, Q. 94.
9. Hugo Grotius, De Jure Belli ac Pacis [The Rights of War and Peace], trans. Francis W. Kelsey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925), Prolegomena, section 11.
10. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 330.
11. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 11-22.
12. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 38.
13. Martha Nussbaum, Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 78-80; Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 107-110.
14. Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), 26-46.
15. Serene J. Khader, Decolonizing Universalism: A Transnational Feminist Ethic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 1-25.
16. Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Catholic Church (Vatican: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004), nos. 144-148; Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1973), 265-272.
17. Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, Islam and Human Rights: Selected Essays, ed. Mashood A. Baderin (London: Ashgate, 2010), 1-15.
18. Christopher Queen and Sallie King, eds., Engaged Buddhism: Buddhist Liberation Movements in Asia (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), 1-44.
19. Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action, United Nations General Assembly, A/CONF.157/23, 12 July 1993, para. 5.
20. Fareed Zakaria, “A Conversation with Lee Kuan Yew,” Foreign Affairs 73, no. 2 (March/April 1994): 109-126.
21. Amartya Sen, “Human Rights and Asian Values,” Sixteenth Morgenthau Memorial Lecture on Ethics and Foreign Policy (New York: Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs, 1997), 1-28.
22. Thaddeus Metz, “Ubuntu as a moral theory and human rights in South Africa,” African Human Rights Law Journal 11, no. 2 (2011): 532-559.
23. African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, Organization of African Unity, CAB/LEG/67/3 rev. 5 (1981); UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, UN General Assembly, A/RES/61/295, 13 September 2007.
24. The Responsibility to Protect: Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 2001), xi-xiii.
25. Alex J. Bellamy, The Responsibility to Protect: A Defense (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 115-140.
26. Hilary Charlesworth and Emma Larking, eds., Human Rights and the Universal Periodic Review: Rituals and Ritualism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 1-17.
27. Alexandra Huneeus and Mikael Rask Madsen, “Between universalism and regional law and politics: A comparative history of the American, European, and African human rights systems,” International Journal of Constitutional Law 16, no. 1 (2018): 136-160.
28. “United States: UN experts condemn sanctions against the ICC,” Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Press Release, 7 February 2025.
29. Katrin Kinzelbach, “The EU’s Human Rights Dialogue with China: Quiet Diplomacy and its Limits” (London: Routledge, 2015), 45-67.
30. Kenneth Roth, “China’s Global Threat to Human Rights,” in World Report 2020 (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2020), 1-10.
31. Freedom House, Freedom in the World 2025, 4-8.
32. Amnesty International, State of the World’s Human Rights, 45-67.
33. Freedom House, Freedom on the Net 2024: The Struggle for Trust Online (Washington, DC: Freedom House, 2024), 12-15.
34. World Bank, Women, Business and the Law 2024 (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024), 2-5.
35. UNHCR, Global Trends Report 2024 (Geneva: UNHCR, 2024), 2-4.
36. Amnesty International, State of the World’s Human Rights, 89-112.
37. UN Women, Women’s Rights in Review 30 Years After Beijing (New York: UN Women, 2025), 23-25; WHO, Violence Against Women Fact Sheet (Geneva: WHO, 2023).
38. ILGA World, Laws on Us: Global Report on LGBTI Human Rights (Geneva: ILGA, 2024), 45-48.
39. Freedom House, Freedom on the Net 2024, 23-27.
40. UNHCR, Global Trends Report 2024, 45-50.
41. Council on Foreign Relations, “The Role of the ICC,” CFR Backgrounder, 2025.
42. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, “Individual Communications procedures,” OHCHR Documentation, 2024.
43. Sonia Cardenas and Andrew Flibbert, “National Human Rights Institutions & State Compliance,” Human Rights Review 29 (2018): 1-29.
44. Richard Price, “Reversing the Gun Sights: Transnational Civil Society Targets Land Mines,” International Organization 52, no. 3 (1998): 613-644.
45. Felisa Tibbitts, “Transformative Learning and Human Rights Education: Taking a Closer Look,” Intercultural Education 26, no. 2 (2015): 107-113.
46. John Ruggie, Just Business: Multinational Corporations and Human Rights (New York: Norton, 2013), 89-122.
47. Pablo de Greiff, ed., The Handbook of Reparations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 1-18.

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