Human Rights: Beyond Tragedies and Atrocities

The tragic and the atrocious have come to define our understanding of human rights and especially the system that has been designed to promote human rights and exact accountability. The result is itself a tragedy because it distorts the institutional responses, consumes most of the available institutional and other resources, distracts attention away from issues that should be seen to be at least as troubling and urgent, and leaves in its wake an impoverished notion of human rights. It is not by accident that we have gone down this path, and it will only be through an honest diagnosis and a determination to do things very differently in the future that the international human rights regime will start to provide answers to the most pressing problems of our time and be capable of mobilizing the political base that is an indispensable element of a successful regime.