Late modernity: Human rights under pressure?
| Author | Walter Kälin |
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474513500623 |
| Published date | 01 October 2013 |
| Date | 01 October 2013 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Punishment & Society
15(4) 397–411
!The Author(s) 2013
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DOI: 10.1177/1462474513500623
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Article
Late modernity: Human
rights under pressure?
Walter Ka
¨lin
University of Bern, Switzerland
Abstract
Human rights as a product of modernity are hugely successful in terms of number of
treaties and ratifications, activities of international human rights bodies, expansion into
new areas such as relations between private actors, and real progress achieved in areas
such as the abolition of the death penalty. At the same time, several contemporary
developments may, in the long term, erode the concept of human rights as developed
since the Age of Enlightenment and undermine support for it. Three challenges are in
the foreground: (1) the decline of state power, in particular the phenomenon of fragile
states and the negative impact of weak state institutions on human rights such as
the prohibition of torture; (2) the utilitarian challenge to the validity of core human
rights guarantees, particularly in the context of the war on terror; and (3) the loss of
empathy as a precondition for recognizing the rights of others even if they are our
enemies.
Keywords
human rights, late modernity, torture
1 The modern origins of human rights
Despite precursors from antiquity and the Middle Ages (Ka
¨lin and Ku
¨nzli, 2009:
22–23; Miller, 2009), human rights, understood as ‘the inalienable international
legal, moral, and political norms that protect the personal integrity, basic equality,
and political and social identity and participation of all people’ (Davis, 2008) are a
modern
1
project in a triple sense.
Philosophically, they are a product of the Age of Enlightenment with authors
such as John Locke (1632–1704), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) and
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) promoting the idea that individuals possess innate
Corresponding author:
Walter Ka
¨lin, University of Bern, Schanzeneckstrasse 1, Postbox 8573, CH-3001 Bern, Switzerland.
Email: walter.kaelin@oefre.unibe.ch
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