Lecture summary: Recent literature on human rights has proposed to go beyond the dualism of essentialist versus historicist conceptions of human rights. It is argued that ‘the history of human rights’ has to be expanded as ‘to include a moral history of the century after the Enlightenment’ (Hoffmann).
This lecture highlights as well the inquiry of continuities within the epistemological framework of human rights and natural rights. I am employing for this purpose historical understandings of natural rights and the role they played in the history of international law. The theologian-jurist Francisco de Vitoria and the jurist-theologian Hugo Grotius, the so-called fathers of the discipline of international law, and later other authors, such as John Locke, became famous for detaching natural subjective rights from their original roots in individual moral theology and relocating them in the context of encounters between peoples.
The fact that in doing so they contributed to a new form of natural law and arguably founded international law meant that their moral-epistemological endeavours bore significant fruit.
LCIL International Law Centre Podcast