The Rights Dialogue
R. Venkataramani
THE FUTURE OF HUMAN RIGHTS by Upendra Baxi Oxford University Press, 2006, 339 pp., 595
June 2006, volume 30, No 6

With the publication of the book under review, Professor Baxi has joined the club of class of that thinkers and writers who generate a set of commentators. A good deal of postmodernist writing is free from narrow doctrinaire or ideological impositions. The search for a global language towards articulating freedom struggles of a variety of rightless sections of the community is itself a product of impoverished democracies and disguised dictatorships. The struggle for the autonomy of the human person besides other requisitions to the community is also a demand for the creation of necessary conditions for the recognition, acknowledgment and promotion of that fundamental value. While this struggle seems to be eternal, the extent of community preoccupation with the contours of the struggle do vary and have always varied. Culture and religion, economics and social adventures, have all played their apparently divided roles. Baxi grappled with these in his book Inhuman Wrongs and Human Rights when he writes thus: – “The moral monotheism of rights — talk is clearly disconcerting to received habits of thought and traditions of social action.

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