The political conception of human rights: some objections

Abstract

In the current debate on human rights, the political conception is attractive in its ability to try to find solutions to the central questions and problems, which the orthodox conception has difficulties in solving, because of its own nature (the political formulation of human rights) it does not need a moral foundation that is independent of the recognition established by international law and practice. On the one hand, it is necessary to recognize that the current practice and the international doctrine consider human rights as tools addressed, mainly, to establish the limits of the legitimate sovereignty of the state, thus, recognizing the plausibility of the political conception. On the other hand, the article intends to show that this specific function, while important, should not exhaust all that human rights perform. Therefore, the political conception runs the serious risk of weakening the normative force of human rights and conflating two different agendas, that of human rights and that of global justice. To go through this argument, first of all, the article presents the contemporary genesis of the political conception of human rights based on the work of John Rawls. Secondly, it focuses on the reformulation given by Raz and Beitz’s approaches. Finally, in the third section, I criticize three main assumptions which ground the current paradigm of political conception of human rights.