Human Rights as a Selective Language; Part Three, Can the System be Made More Consistent

By: Naveed Ahmed

If the attention is built into how human rights language actually functions in the world, the natural next question is whether anything can be done about it, or whether this is simply an unavoidable feature of a system that depends on political will to operate. This final parts looks at what reform has actually been tried, what has worked in limited ways, and what the honest limits of reform seem to be. 

Historically, the only approach that has been tried is institutional independence, the idea that if human rights monitoring is removed from the direct control of powerful states and placed instead under independent courts, commissions, and documentation bodies, the selectivity problem should shrink. This logic produces international institutions like International Criminal Court, various UN special rapporteurs, and independent human rights organizations that operate separately from any single government. The evidence on how well this has worked is genuinely mixed. Independent documentation has improved significantly. Organizations today produce far more detailed, far more consistent records of violations across many different countries than existed decades ago, and this record keeping matters even when it does not lead to immediate consequences, because it builds a historical account that cannot be as easily denied or erased later. 

This documentation is not the same as enforcement, and this is where independence runs into its hardest limit. The International Criminal Court can issue an arrest warrant, but it has no police force of its own to carry it out. It depends entirely on the cooperation of national governments, and that cooperation reliably disappears when the person facing charges belongs to, or is protected by, a powerful state. This creates a strange situation where the court has successfully prosecuted leaders of weaker nations with limited ability to resist its authority, while remaining functionally unable to touch nationals of the world’s most powerful states, not because the evidence against them is weaker, but because no mechanism exists to force compliance from a state powerful enough to simply refuse. 

A second approach to reform focuses on changing incentive structures rather than institutional independence. This includes efforts like conditioning trade agreements or foreign aid on human rights performance, the idea being that if economic relationships are tied directly to the rights behavior, countries have a material incentive to improve even without court forcing them to. This approach has produced some real results in some specific cases, particularly with smaller economies heavily dependent on aid or trade access from powerful partners. But it has an obvious structural weakness. The same selectivity that affects media coverage affects this kind of economic pressure too. Powerful countries rarely apply these conditions consistently to their own closest allies, for the same reason examined in the first two parts of this series, proximity and strategic interest shape which violation gets treated as deal breakers and which get quickly overlooked. 

There is a third and less institutional form of reform worth taking seriously, which operates at the level of public awareness rather than formal mechanisms. The philosopher and activist tradition going back to figures like Eleanor Roosevelt, who chaired the committee that drafted the original Universal Declaration of Human Rights, argued that the declaration’s real power was never meant to come primarily from courts of treaties, but from what Roosevelt called the force of enlightened public opinion. Her argument was that once a moral standard exists clearly and publicly, even without perfect enforcement, it becomes harder for any government to violate it without facing some reputational cost, and that cost grows as more citizens around the world become aware of the standard and willing to hold their own governments accountable to it, not just other countries’ governments. 

This third path is slower and less satisfying than any other court verdict, but it may be the most realistic one available, because it does not depend on fixing the structural power imbalances between nations that drive selective enforcement in the first place. It depends instead on a gradual, imperfect but real expansion of who gets included in public moral concern, a process that has genuinely occurred over the past several decades even if it remains far from complete or consistent. Issues and populations that receive almost no international attention a generation ago, now receive meaningfully more, not because institutions changed dramatically, but because sustained advocacy, journalism, and public pressure slowly expand the circle of who counts as worth caring about. 

The honest conclusion to draw from this three part look at human rights language is neither the cynical view that the whole system is fake, nor the naive view that it simply needs better institutions to become perfectly fair. The more accurate view is that human rights, as both an idea and a practical system, exists in permanent tension between a universal principle and an unequal world that applies that principle unevenly. That tension is unlikely to disappear completely, because it is rooted in real differences in power between nations that no single reform can easily erase. What can change, gradually and incompletely, is the size of the gap between the principle and its application, and that gap narrows only through the same combination of pressure that has narrowed it before, independent documentation that cannot be erased, economic and diplomatic incentives applied as consistently as possible, and a public willing to notice when the same word is being used to mean two different things depending on who is speaking and who is being spoken about. 

Human rights, as both an idea and a practical system, exists in permanent tension between a universal principle and an unequal world that applies that principle unevenly.”

(The opinions  expressed in this article belong only to the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Convention).