History of Human Rights Law
Authors: Amorosa Paolo , Schröter Karla 
Published: October 2023

The history of human rights has become a burgeoning field of research in recent decades. While its approaches have been plural and diverging, the primary focus of this literature has been on human rights as a philosophical idea or a global political movement. In such literature, the content of key international legal documents such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or the Covenants of 1966 functions more as a background for the description of wider sociopolitical developments than as a direct focus of legal-historical analysis. This entry, instead, highlights and surveys the historical literature on the body of fundamental rights in international conventions and declarations emerging since 1948 as a primarily legal phenomenon. The purpose of taking stock of the history of human rights law as a specialized regime of international law is twofold. First, it complements and supports current revisionist historiographical trends while also signaling their potential limits. Second, it highlights the beneficial role that a further focus on legal historical methods can have in better understanding the complexity and multifaceted nature of post-1948 developments. Indeed, the latest research has focused on the specificities of human rights as a 20th-century phenomenon, rather than seeking close intellectual continuities with a distant past, be it an ancient Greco-Roman inspiration, an early modern natural rights tradition, or an Enlightenment revolutionary conception. Obviously, one such key specificity is the concrete formulation of individual guarantees in terms of positive law beyond the state, as this literature duly notes. A closer focus on the drafting of these key human rights instruments and the struggles over wording and interpretation in considering their implementation opens further perspectives to understand their momentousness and the stakes their conception and operation has raised and keeps raising. In a connected way, this renewed focus on international human rights as a body of legal documents highlights the role legal history can play in making sense of the immense field of the history of human rights and within the diverse array of approaches that converge within it. Highlighting the sociopolitical backgrounds of views that governments and NGOs have brought to bear on the drafting and implementation of international human rights conventions brings to the fore the contentious nature of the post-1945 concept of human rights. Giving concreteness to the idea of human rights as a site of negotiation and contestation, in international courts and diplomatic conferences as much as in street protests and mass demonstrations, opens space to hold together the variety of angles human rights history can be read from. Decolonization and the 1960s, the rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s, the various waves of feminism and the mainstreaming of LBTGQ+, the fight against apartheid and demands for racial justice, geopolitical considerations during and after the Cold War, conservative approaches to religious freedom, and many more developments are all perspectives that belong under the wide umbrella of the post-1945 history of human rights and hold valuable explanatory power within it. In this perspective, the effort to pinpoint a “real,” single origin of modern human rights loses most of its meaning. In light of these objectives, this bibliography focuses on texts that see post-1945 developments in their own specificity and not primarily as an essential expression of centuries-old ideas of justice. Among texts with that approach, it further focuses on works that bring together close attention to international human rights documents and the wider sociopolitical conditions that informed the debates on their drafting and implementation. In other words, this entry surveys the space in the literature on international human rights where legal textuality and global history meet. By identifying research that occupies said legal-historical space, this bibliography seeks to pursue an agenda that is descriptive and programmatic at the same time. On one hand, the article aims to create a single reference point to the state of the art of multidisciplinary approaches to the history of human rights law; on the other, it signals that, especially in areas of relatively recent and fast-moving developments, such as the African regional system or Indigenous rights, much work remains to be done.