Human rights and their protective efficacy in the spotlight: the right to barbarism or the rights of the oppressed?

Abstract

This article proposes a bibliographical review and makes critical considerations about the historic, theoretical basis and protective effectiveness of human rights. We contrast the normative advance with the concrete vulnerability and denial of rights of wide segments. The text begins with a brief presentation of the foundations of human rights, and contextualizes its consolidation in the twentieth century. In the sequence, are exposed considerations of different authors about their arbitrary implementation and widespread inefficacy. Finally, starting from the referential of sociology and political philosophy We report the fragility of its validity to the very dichotomous logic of modernity that, if on the one hand it is based on a new logic of power based on principles like equality and freedom on the other Maintains the previous inequalities and oppressions, as of gender, class and ethnicity. It is concluded that normative advances continue to be weakened by the practical negation of rights, which can be understood from the very ambiguity of modernity, whose egalitarian ideas are contradicted by the continuity of different forms of domination, discrimination and hierarchies.