“When Persia/was engaged in some war…/When invaders were burning down the City/And the women there were screaming/Two chess players went on playing their endless game of chess.” 

The chess players described in this poem by Fernando Pessoa were indifferent to surrounding events, concerned only about their game. They portray how we may risk spending our life: absorbed in something like a chess game, apathetic to the serious things happening all around us. This indifference has fuelled a backlash against human rights, which has emerged worldwide, particularly after the events of 11 September 2001. The tireless work of all those who take part in the protection of human rights has thus become even more cumbersome.

The human rights project has ancient roots. It starts with natural law philosophers, such as John Locke, stating how human beings have inalienable rights by nature, and continues with the American and French Declarations, transposing these rights into positive law. The Declarations proposed a new model for society, with the state as a means to enjoy all rights that all human beings possess by nature, being free and equal. 

At this point, however, the rights proclaimed under natural law lost something. Immerged in the domain of positive law, they fragmented: the Declarations claimed the rights of citizens vis-à-vis the state, not of the individuals per se; plus, these existed if recognised by this or that state, not universally.

It was only 100 years later, in the aftermath of the atrocities of the Second World War and the atrocities committed by Nazis who stripped the German Jews of their citizenship, that human rights were universality proclaimed. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights – adopted on 10 December 1948 by the UN General Assembly – is the first important step in this direction, despite not being formally legally binding by States. 

Today binding international norms exist, enriching the scope of the rights contained in the Universal Declaration. Other international norms guarantee rights not specifically envisioned by the Declaration. Recognising new rights has been parallel to technical/scientific progress, which has brought about new threats to individual liberty that required protection. Hence, there are now also third and fourth generation rights, such as the right to an unpolluted environment. Hypothetically, expanding the human rights’ catalogue is a never-ending process, dictated by changes in society, with new rights constantly emerging like matryoshka dolls.

This process cannot be limited, for rights naturally emerge every time the individual needs protection from oppression or integration in society. It is also vain to rank some rights as more fundamental than others, since rights are or are not. 

Everywhere a human right is violated, new violations may always occur. The answer is not the chess players’ indifference, but the bet. Those betting on human rights hope to win, but they know, as Sisyphus did, that they cannot rest, having to push a rock to the top of a mountain every day only to have it roll down again. Betting on human rights, one only needs – as Norberto Bobbio said, evoking Immanuel Kant – “fair concepts, great experience and goodwill”.

Keywords: Paola Gaeta, international law