"We do not assume, as many human rights practitioners and scholars do, that more human rights necessarily lead to more emancipation."

This assumes that there is some manufactory somewhere, some process or institution that manufactures "human rights", and that can manufacture "more" human rights.

The authors don't say what this is, but of course what people always mean by this kind of talk is the State.

So the authors write a piece on human rights without defining, and assume that they are whatever the State says they are without defining the State or giving any reason.

The problem is that this assumes that human rights are whatever the most powerful and aggressive party in society says they are. This is just the creed that "might is right".

But this is of course the opposite of human rights, the opposite of a rule of just conduct, the opposite of ethics. The reason we need ethics in the first place, is to have some other principle on which social relations can be based, than just that the stronger dictate to the weaker whatever terms they want.

So without defining human rights or the State, all the authors have produced is confused babbling.

An exceptionally perceptive article, which describes perfectly the utter futility of trying to pin down the concept of human rights.

As with Art, "we don't know much about it, but we know what we like".

It impossible to give everybody the same freedoms. One person's concept of freedom of speech, to take a current example, is another person's idea of treachery. It should follow therefore - although it invariably does not - that any attempt to define such a slippery idea can only be an attempt to impose a particular set of values on others.

Atrocities perpetrated by one group of people on another group of people remain entirely unaffected by the existence of human rights charters. Whether these are acts of genocide between two African tribes, or the treatment of refugees in Manus Island, the perspective remains the same.

The entire concept of "human rights" is a furphy. People will do what people will do. One African tribe wipes out another African tribe, we call it genocide and get very upset. Refugees are raped on Manus Island, we call it disgraceful and get very upset. Invoking "human rights" in lieu of simply calling it criminal behaviour is flat-out pointless, irrelevant, and disrespectful.

How does one distinguish between armed civilians and legitimate terrorist targets.

Answer the terrorist is the one holding the kalashnikov and the severed human head.

Seververing human heads as occurred in Gaza is a violation of so called human rights as well!
Rhrosty.