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28 Sydney L. Rev. 665 (2006)
Human Rights in the 21st Century: Take a Walk on the Dark Side

handle is hein.journals/sydney28 and id is 659 raw text is: Human Rights in the 21st Century. Take a Walk on the Dark Side RATNA KAPUR* Abstract This article unpacks three normative claims on which the human rights project is based and exposes the dark side of the project. The author examines the larger context within which human rights has taken shape, and critiques the claim that human rights is part of modernity's narrative of progress: interrogates the assumption that human rights are universal, challenging its dehistoricised, neutral, and inclusive claims; and unpacks the atomised, insular liberal subject on which the human rights project is based and its correlating assumptions about the 'Other' who needs to be cabined or contained lest she destabilises or undermines this subject. The author makes some tentative proposals as to howv we can engage with human rights once its dark side is exposed. We have witnessed an extraordinary, proliferation of human rights law in the course of the 20th Century and the beginning of this millennium. Contrary to popular belief, business is booming at the United Nations, with its entourage of resolutions, declarations and conventions that now deal with a broad range of abuses across the globe including racial discrimination, women's rights to equality, the rights of children, and the rights of indigenous groups - all aided and abetted by non- governmental organisations, including faith-based groups, women's groups and other social justice initiatives. There is a sense that the international community is dealing with these 'problems' seriously and handling them with great speed and efficacy. Yet, the outward sense of progress, of something being done, of a social justice project being pursued in the name of human rights, is emerging as a somewhat disingenuous and illusory endeavour. The record of human rights since their proclamation in the I8th Century has been less than stellar. Indeed, the legal interventions that have been pursued in the name of human rights are perhaps the most explicit examples we have to date of how the assumptions that more law equals more equality and freedom, and that human rights is an optimistic and hopeful pursuit, are quite mistaken. In fact, the proliferation of laws in the name of human rights serves at times to remind us how our good intentions, passions and progressive 'swords may have turned into boomerangs.' The human rights tDirector of the Centre for I eminist tLegal Research New Dehli. Currently visiting professor at the Geneva School tor International Relations and Diplomacy. This article is based on the 2005 Julius Stone Lecture. I Janet Halley & Wendy Brown (eds), Left Legafism.Left Critique (2002) at 4.

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