Rights and Circumstance: The Universality of International Human Rights Law.

Human Rights is situated uniquely within the vast field of International Law. Where International Law in general has an ancient history, International Human Rights Law is comparatively very recent, based upon customs rather than explicit legal agreements, and comprises complex definitions of human morality. While most international law was borne out of exchanges of promises between two states or more, as befitting the interests of the involved parties, enforceable International Human Rights Law came about as a matter of a particular circumstance in which the existing law was realized to be insufficient to address all of its parties of interest: every human being. The result of this realization was the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations' General Assembly in 1948. But, if the Universal Declaration is truly universal, why have particular regional intergovernmental organizations - such as the Council of Europe, the Organization of African Unity (now African Union), and the League of Arab States - produced human rights legal instruments of their own after ratifying the Universal Declaration? Do these regional instruments present different conceptions of human rights, or do they bolster the universality of the existing system? This study investigates these questions through the use of recently-developed textual analysis software and manual comparative content analysis techniques. Ultimately, the research finds that International Human Rights Law is undeniably Western/American in origin. But, intriguingly, it also shows that this body of international law is becoming universal, and is indeed moving the whole of international politics forward. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]