Four Human Rights Myths Summary

In “Four Human Rights Myths” Susan Marks discusses several conceptions (or misconceptions according to her) about human rights. She begins her paper with a case study of the 2011 London riots and how distinctively different is their coverage by the British prime minister and two scholars.
Back in the day David Cameron blamed the human rights movement for perverting people’s morale and trumping the security of the public order. Shami Chakrabarti, a human rights activist, argued that the state suppresses human rights who are in the core of the civil society. Another scholar, Naomi Klein, argued that the real issue is that human rights and other moral concepts are wrongly distanced from politics, while in reality they are closely intervened.
After the initial remarks, the author presents the four myths by setting out the works of several scholars. Marks identifies the first myth as “The Myth of Presumptive Universality”. She presents Joseph Raz’s views that we have human rights not because we are human, but because those rights simply exist. Raz also claims that the rights that we have adopted are biased and do not respect the cultural diversity of the world. The scholar claims that if rights were truly universal then we should’ve had a higher

authority to enforce them.
Follows the “Myth of Deep Roots” which is supposed to debunk the notion that human rights have a deep historical base.

Moyn sees human rights as a concept that emerged in the 1940 after the UDHR and developed, as we know it today in the mid-70s with the worldwide implementation of human rights into the political agenda. In his book, “The Last Utopia”, Moyn argues that the movement for human rights succeeded because it managed to de-politicize itself. He calls it “last utopia” because it “evokes a vision of ‘another, better world’” and it displaced other utopian regimes (communism). However, Moyn claims that in recent times human rights have become a mediator in political disputes and have lost their non-political

nature.
Naomi Klein shares Moyn’s views about the origin and development of human rights, but claims that the movement is closely intervened with politics. According to Klein human rights and neo-liberal capitalists complement each other in that they see something wrong with the status quo, but fail to take into account the reasons behind said status.
Wendy Brown debunks the third myth – “The Myth of No Politics”. She argues that human rights are tools that takeaway power from the government and place it in the hands of the citizens. She also argues that people shouldn’t analyse the causes for human rights abuses but the effect. According to Brown this is an oversimplification of the issue.
The author leaves the last myth, “The Myth of the Dangerous Dark”, to her own perception. She discusses how human rights abuses might seemingly happen in the dark, but in fact are organised in plain sight making it hard for people to see the truth.