In my experience, the increasingly legalistic approach to human rights has overshadowed a moral approach, which for me is what resonated early on. In the 1970s, when I had the good fortune to be a part of Amnesty International before it was a very wide network, questions of right and wrong formed the dominant discourse. I was not a lawyer. It was not a question of whether something violated Article X of this covenant or that covenant. It was that torture is wrong.
Starvation is wrong.
It was a language of morality, and it captured people's imagination and made the human rights movement grow. Once human rights started to become a specialist language that only certain people who had been to school could access and only the experts could interpret correctly, it lost the ability to mobilize the vast majority of people. Another equally formidable obstacle to achieving broad-based support is the operational structure of the human rights movement. Born in a colonial and neocolonial world, the human rights movement has not kept pace with the rapidly and dramatically changing political environment. While opposing colonial structures and relationships substantively, operationally the movement initially both mirrored and made use of them.