Assignment in Comparative Human Rights Law

Session 4
Human Rights and Uses of History by Samuel Moyn
Epilogue Summary
Submitted by
Joselito C. Manuel
The Future of Human Rights
Moyn, like any other historian, believes that the path to the future is knowing the past.
When it comes to human rights in the future, he deems it necessary to know what
other utopias tried to evolve, why it failed, and how it will shape the last Utopia that is human
rights. A utopia refers to an imagined or idealized community or society characterized by
perfection, harmony, and an ideal state of living. Human right according to Moyn is the last
Utopia. According to some scholars Moyn mentioned, for Utopias to succeed, it must be
realized in its pure form and not diluted with the realities and attempts to institutionalize it.
Moyn doesn’t agree with this. Human Rights as a Utopia according to him, at least answered
the need to begin from the way things are now.
With the reality of the present.
However, he thinks that the danger there is if human rights as a Utopia conform too
much to reality that it becomes neutered or ineffectual or losses its efficacy.
How far back a history? Moyn insists that human rights as a byword internationally was
crystallized in our moral consciousness only in the recent 70s. While the byword was a
product post WW2, it was ingrained only in the 70s. The aftermath of decolonization, of the
holocaust, and of the Cold War, human rights is at the fringe and sidelines during the time of
Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. Then came the Ginsburgs, the Kellers, and the Carters
of the world, along with Amnesty International in the 1970s hoisting the flag of human rights
waking the international community to this utopia called human rights. While Moyn admits
that there was indeed a ‘rights of man’ movement before human rights, and it is in the form
of nationalism. However, this isn’t what human rights as it is today. It is not revolutionary
and not confined within the nation state. So to Moyn, thinking that human rights is God-
given and naturally occurring, as with those who subscribe to natural law, or even a later
idea that it is a baby of the holocaust post WW2 such as the UDHR is a mistake. It is only
after failing on other endeavors towards Utopia that people came to human rights. In his
words, out of despair and disappointments. Thus the look only into recent history not the far
flung past. He said that this also means that “the burden falls on the present not to turn to the
past for reassurance, but to decide for itself what to believe and in what way to change the
world. History at its best liberates, but does not construct. Yet perhaps it offers a lesson all
the same about what sort of idealism people should, or at least can, seek”.
For contemporary human rights, there is only one side. Partisan politics may be
acceptable within the nation state but not in the international arena where morality is that
basis. It does not intervene in power politics. It is a set of Global Moral Principles. So,
according to Moyn, a better compromise between Utopia and Realism had to be realized. It
cannot be too idealistic but it cannot conform to reality too much as to lose its utopianism to
coin a word.
So what is the future of human rights according to the Gospel of Moyn?
Transformation in steps. Not instant radicalization. Human rights must acknowledge
that it is mobilizational. It is a norm to be enforced by tribunals. However, it must transcend
judges. While judges may enforce human rights but it is only within their jurisdictional
realm. In domestic settings. The human rights movement must mobilize to strengthen this
grassroots enforcement to become more powerful to reach beyond borders. Human rights
must seek to move away from the frame of individualistic norms. This has to happen at a
global not individual scale.