Moral responsibility and speaking to the 'dark side of human rights'

Abstract

Globally, issues such as xenophobia, rising nationalism and populism, linked to the international migrant crisis, are stretching the past influence and the present reinterpretation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) to its limits. Locally, the #MustFall 1 protests at higher education institutions rightly question the existence and validity of human rights, especially as it pertains to the right to education, socio-economic rights and the moral responsibility of higher education institutions to its students within human rights policy frameworks. The growing critique of human rights is crucial not only to the understanding of the conceptual, legal, moral, historic and contextual complexities of human rights but also the rethinking of the anthropological, ethical, ontological and epistemological premise of human rights. Human rights literacies, we argue, while including knowledge about human rights, question the social and moral consequences of the (non)realisation of human rights as well as the anthropological, ethical, ontological and epistemological premise of human rights. Critique and dissensus are inherent to human rights literacies and impact on how we speak and act to in(ex)clusions, marginalisation, intolerance, disrespect, misrecognition and discrimination.

Editorial: On critique, dissensus and human rights literacies

“…One might then question why most human rights discourses are positioned in an uncritical, descriptive and rational realm and are unable to question or address human rights violations. This is answered, through various lenses and in different lived and research contexts, by the authors in this special edition (Du Preez, Simmonds and Chetty 2017;Simmonds and Du Preez 2017;Becker 2017a;Roux 2017;Keet, Nel and Sattarzadeh 2017;De Wet 2017). It seems that human rights have lost their dissident and rebellious spirit (Kapur 2006).…”