On 10 December 1948, the UN General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).

The vote on Paris’ Trocadéro hill that evening marked the birth of international human rights – a legal and moral framework that continues to be, up until this day, a central element of the world’s political architecture.

It is a date worth celebrating, not least because human rights are considerably more powerful today than they were in 1948. However, honouring human rights demands more than just sparklers and clinking glasses.

Celebrating human rights in a time like ours requires, for one, to stop for a moment and think what they stand for in the context of the twenty-first century.

Most of the time we take human rights for granted. They monopolise, at least in the West, the possibilities of politically correct argument.

Yet, human rights are not the revealed truth. They are above all a political choice; a choice made in Paris 73 years ago, yes, but also every time anyone anywhere asserts human rights for whatever reason – from a diplomat in Geneva or a judge in Arusha to an activist in Honduras or a student in Kabul.

Human rights are a legacy of the twentieth century. They embody a great deal of the ideological foundations of that period: individual autonomy, equality and equity, and democracy.

But to what extent do these values provide the answers that the world needs today?

Seeing the pervasiveness of inequalities both in the Global North and South, the deepening of the so called ‘cultural wars’ in places like the United States, or the obstinacy of systemic corruption in countries like my own, Mexico, can we really pretend to still see in the septuagenarian feuille de route of human rights as a path forward?

Moreover, can we expect to solve monumental global issues like climate change or gender discrimination with a formula that foregrounds individual freedom?

Human rights are a good political choice to address the problems of today because they rest on a notion of moral worth that has true universal resonance: equal human dignity.

Genuinely non-violent and secular, the discursive cores of human rights – individual autonomy, equality and equity, and democracy – speak beyond cultural specificity. They are plastic enough to accommodate contrasting worldviews, and incomplete enough to be complemented by local knowledge.

Anyone ready to accept that we are all equal in nature and thus that we all deserve equal respect, can take a hold of human rights.

Sure, many simply do not believe this. But their arguments – if any whatsoever – die out as soon as they reach beyond their respective pockets of privilege.

73 years later, human rights are still confronting us with the same question faced by diplomats on that 10 December 1948 evening: are we ready to commit to a global political project that is consequential with the idea of equal human dignity? Is the question – and the project – pertinent still?

Yes, I would say. More than ever.

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