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This article examines the Congo reform movement's use of atrocity photographs in their human rights campaign (c. 1904–13) against Belgian King Leopold, colonial ruler of the Congo Free State. This material analysis shows that human rights are conceived by spectators who, with the aid of the photographic apparatus, are compelled to judge that crimes against humanity are occurring to others. The article also tracks how this judgement has been haunted by the potent wish to undo the suffering witnessed.

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In this essay I chart a range of difficulties for the field of human rights education, a field that has traditionally been preoccupied with universal principles. These difficulties arise in conjunction with three critiques of the view of morality implicit in this version of human rights education: Levinas's ''interhuman'' realm of ethical responsibility, the vicissitudes and resistances to learning elucidated by psychoanalysis, and the complex nature of the faculty of judgment as described by Hannah Arendt. Although perhaps philosophically irreconcilable, these three critiques combine to suggest the potential for human rights education to become an education that attends to the ethical responsibility that occurs apart from the rational aims of knowledge. Rather than merely an instrumentalized, moralized method for ''securing'' the future, this latter approach provides an important location for what Arendt called ''thinking without a banister.''

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