The main purpose of the article was to study the key elements of the civilizational and cultural aspect of philosophical and legal research on the observance of human rights. The subject of the research was specifically the philosophy of human rights observance. Methodologically it is descriptive research developed in the domains of legal philosophy and logic. The scientific novelty lies in the fact that in modern legal discourse several approaches to the modern cross-cultural substantiation of the idea of human rights have been identified. Among them deserve attention the theories of human rights, based on the self-limitation of negative manifestations of a person, the ontology of spheres of human existence, the idea of human identity and the possibility of intercultural legal discourse. All allowed to conclude that, the further development of a theory of human rights acceptable to the majority of countries, in the opinion of the authors, is connected precisely with the otological concepts of human rights, among which the intercultural legal approach can be of great importance, in heuristic and hermeneutic terms.