Are Human Rights Real?

Human rights are often described in the West as universal—principles that apply to all people everywhere, born of humanity’s shared understanding of right and wrong. Yet this noble vision falters when we examine how human rights are actually defined, enforced, and dismissed. In reality, human rights have always been shaped less by universal morality and more by power: the ability of dominant actors to declare their actions as acceptable and, in time, to impose those actions as precedent for others to follow.

This is especially clear in recent debates over Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. Human rights organizations have documented widespread civilian suffering and raised the charge of war crimes. Yet rather than confronting these accusations, Western leaders deflected them by pointing to their own history of civilian targeting. A U.S. general noted, almost casually, that America deliberately killed civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. Senator Lindsey Graham went further, suggesting that Israel should be granted the same tools America used to end World War II—namely, the atomic bomb. These statements are not denials; they are normalizations. They transform extraordinary violence into legitimate practice by invoking precedent.

This is the essence of how power manufactures norms. When violations are excused because “we did the same,” precedent itself becomes the law. At that point, the principle is no longer whether something is right or wrong, but whether the powerful have done it before. Human rights, once imagined as a universal shield for the vulnerable, risk becoming a license for the powerful, absolving future acts of violence through the logic of past domination.

The danger is not only in the bloodshed itself, but in the slow erosion of human rights as a moral standard. If norms are reduced to the history of what the powerful permit themselves, then the very idea of universality collapses. Human rights are no longer the defense of the weak against the strong, but the defense of the strong against accountability.

This is the greatest threat to human rights today—not merely their violation, but their reconstitution as instruments of power. The digital age has revealed this process more starkly than ever, exposing the double standards and the manufactured consensus. The challenge now is to reclaim human rights as genuinely universal, grounded not in precedent set by might, but in principles of dignity and equality that cannot be bent to the will of dominance. Anything less is not universality, but empire cloaked in the language of justice.

[adapted from The Manufacturing of Human Rights Norms in the Age of Acceptance of Dominance]