international human rights regime, with all the questions that raises about what
responsibilities are being acquired. With the continued prominence of human
“rights talk”, the terms of this dilemma became more and more ambiguous.^53 While
it is not possible to offer any kind of definitive resolution to the question here, I will
set out the considerations on either side of this dilemma, before looking at the
issues in a more applied way in the context of military humanitarian intervention.
For many humanitarians, it has become important to preserve a strong
conceptual distinction between humanitarianism and human rights, along the lines
of humanitarian action being about an apolitical, neutral, impartial provision of
relief, and human rights being a politico-legal contract between individuals and
their states or, at a stretch, various articulations of that nebulous entity, “the
international community”.
To be clear from the outset, there are four clear limits to maintaining an
impermeable practical or conceptual distinction between human rights and
humanitarianism, all of which have already been discussed in this thesis. The first is
simply the sheer power of human rights as a contemporary vocabulary to articulate
the unacceptable, along the lines explored in Chapter 2. Though “human wrongs”
may, as Ken Booth suggest, be even more powerful agreed framings, rights have
worked themselves into the very fabric of the language in which humanitarian
concern is expressed.^54 Yet they retain much of the contingency of humanitarian
concern as set out in earlier chapters. As Lynn Hunt puts it:
Human rights are difficult to pin down because their definition, indeed their
very existence, depends on emotions as much as on reason. The claim of
self-evidence relies ultimately on an emotional appeal; it is convincing if it
strikes a chord within each person. Moreover, we are most certain that a
human right is at issue when we feel horrified by its violation.^5553
The phrase comes from Mary Ann Glendon, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political
Discourse 54 (New York: Free Press, 1991).
Ken Booth, "Human Wrongs and International Relations", International Affairs 71, no. 1
(1995). 55
Hunt, Inventing Human Rights , 26.