The “Human” in Human Rights – hybrid seminar

Designed in the aftermath of the Second World War and grounded in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, these instruments sought to create an indivisible, interdependent and interrelated protective framework for human rights. Through rights ranging from political participation and freedom of expression to education, health, and cultural life, the Covenants articulate a comprehensive framework for safeguarding the conditions under which individuals can fullfill human lives.

The Covenants were drafted with a perception of the ’human’ embedded in them as a rights‑bearing individual subject assumed to uniquely possess human agency, and autonomy, situated within a state‑based order and capable of securing and enforcing those rights.

Currently, rapid technological developments, including artificial intelligence, automated decision-making, biotechnological and digital forms of identity, challenge conventional assumptions about what constitutes human personhood, agency, and vulnerabilities. Furthermore, digitalisation, new technologies and changed behavioural patterns with intended as well as unintended changes as to who is visible, recognized, and protected by human rights regimes, calls us to rethink the criteria by which human rights frameworks establish who (or what) counts as ’human’ and thus merits human rights protection.

In most contexts, already disadvantaged or marginalised people are especially vulnerable to having their human rights infringed upon or violated. Indigenous Peoples in the Global South are a good case in point, their experiences highlight tensions between individualised human rights and profoundly collective understandings of being human that currently are not easily accommodated under human rights law. At the same time, contemporary debates increasingly probe the outer boundaries of the human rights project itself, including rights of future persons, the protection of the environment and other non‑human entities such as animals.

Against this background, the anniversary of the Twin Covenants provides an opportunity to critically reassess how international human rights law defines, constructs, and limits the notion of the ‘human’ it seeks to protect.