It is a strange irony that the most visceral, bloody aspects of the human experience are often debated in the most sterile environments. I was struck by this dissonance recently while following the proceedings in The Gambia v. Myanmar case at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. Here we have a dry, procedural debate over legal definitions, yet the subject matter is the attempted annihilation of a people, the Rohingya.
This trial represents an important moment in the history of Human Rights. Philippe Sands, the lawyer arguing the case, is attempting something that has never been done: to hold a state explicitly responsible for the crime of genocide. But beyond the legal technicalities, this moment forces us to confront a tension I see constantly in both political theory and in the conversations with clients: the conflict between the political, the “Law of Nations” – the cold reality of borders, sovereignty, and rights, and what Hegel might call the “Law of the Heart”- our stubborn, internal conviction that every human life possesses an inherent dignity that no government can erase.
To understand where we are, however, we must look further back than the United Nations or the Enlightenment. We must look to the ancient distinction between body and soul, which can roughly be mapped into a distinction between “something” and “someone.”
The Sacred Roots: Imago Dei and the Person
The history of human rights is often told as a secular triumph: a movement away from religious mythologies toward autonomous reason, taking shape in universal human rights. But this is a misunderstanding of our own intellectual genealogy. Long before we had “human rights,” we had the theological concept of the Imago Dei, the Image of God.
In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the sanctity of the individual did not come from their utility to the state or their capacity for reason, but from their status as a “creature of God.” If every human being is created by the divine, then every human being carries an infinite value that transcends earthly power. To mistreat a human was not just a crime; it was a sacrilege. This theological foundation provided the first real check on power. It suggested that there is a part of the human being that the King cannot touch, because it belongs to God.
This leads us to the crucial philosophical distinction articulated by the German philosopher Robert Spaemann: the difference between “objects” and “persons.”
An object—a something—can be used, exchanged, or discarded. It has a price. A person—a someone—has dignity. They are an end in themselves. The history of atrocity is essentially the history of turning “someones” into “somethings.” When we enslave, we turn a person into a tool. When we commit genocide, we turn a people into waste to be removed. The entire project of human rights is the desperate legal attempt to enshrine this distinction: to prevent the state from ever treating a “someone” as a “something.”
The Schism between Individuals and Groups.
The Enlightenment didn’t invent these rights; it translated them. It took the “creature of God” and renamed it the “citizen of the world.” We moved from “Divine Right” to “Natural Rights.” But in severing the theological root, we created a vulnerability. If we are not sacred creatures, but merely biological entities, who grants us our rights? The State?
For centuries, the “Law of Nations” answered: Yes. Sovereignty was absolute. What a government did to its own human “objects” inside its own borders was its own business.
It took the industrial-scale slaughter of the 20th century to finally shatter that silence. The modern human rights movement emerged from the ashes of World War II, but it was fractured from birth by two competing visions of how to protect the person. This schism can be traced back to two men who studied law in the same Ukrainian city, Lviv: Raphael Lemkin and Hersch Lauterpacht.
Lemkin gave us the concept of genocide. He understood that humans are often targeted not for what they have done, but for who they are—their “kind”. He sought to protect the group, to criminalize the destruction of a tribe, a religion, or a people.
Lauterpacht, however, feared that focusing on the group would only entrench the very tribalism that caused conflict. He championed crimes against humanity. He argued that we must protect the individual human being, regardless of their ethnicity or religion. He wanted to strip away the labels and protect the naked “person” underneath.
From a philosophical point of view, I find Lauterpacht’s vision more intellectually elegant; it seeks to transcend the “us vs. them” binary. But from a social theory point of view, I know that Lemkin understood something darker about our nature. We identify with our tribes. We feel safety in numbers. It is no accident that “genocide” has become the “crime of crimes” in the public imagination. We seem to need a special word for the horror of being erased as a group.
Collision of Values: Universal Dignity vs. Cultural Harmony
But even as we established these legal definitions, a deeper philosophical battle began to brew—one that continues to threaten the universal application of rights today. It is the clash between the universal claim of “human dignity” and the particularist critique of cultural sovereignty.
When we speak of “human dignity” in the West, we are often referring to a rigorous philosophical architecture. Dignity is treated as a “threshold concept:” it is a special worth or status shared by all human beings. You do not possess more dignity because you are smarter, stronger, or wealthier; once you cross the threshold of being a person, you possess the full measure of dignity. This concept imposes practical requirements: we must never treat persons merely as a means to an end, nor humiliate or degrade them.
However, this universalist view has faced fierce resistance, most notably from the “Asian Values” movement of the 1990s, championed by leaders like Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew. This critique argues that the Western obsession with the individual is culturally myopic. Instead, it prioritizes the community and the family over the individual, and values social harmony over personal freedom.
From this perspective, the “Law of Nations,” the stability of the state and the harmony of the collective, is paramount. Respect for authority and hard work are seen as the engines of progress, not the adversarial demanding of rights. Proponents of this view do not necessarily reject all rights, but they seek to deemphasize the “fundamental freedoms” and democratic participation that Westerners hold sacred.
This is one of the deep modern dilemmas: We all desire a harmonious community, what the Asian Values proponents seek, but the danger lies in the cost. When we elevate “harmony” above the individual, we risk returning to a world where the person is merely a means to the state’s end. We risk sliding back into treating the “someone” as a “something” useful for the collective body.
The New Age of Impunity
We are now living in a moment where this friction has ignited into a full-blown crisis. We are witnessing a “new age of impunity:” The idea that people have the right to form groups and determine their own destiny yields to geopolitical calculations: Russia wants to eliminate the Ukraine, Trump wants to take over Greenland, China wants Taiwan. The liberal international order, the “mansion on the hill” designed to protect the person from the power of the state, is crumbling.
The most chilling example comes not from a dictator in a far-off land, but from the United States. When Trump openly declares, “I don’t need international law,” and Republican Senators stay silent, we see a political retreat from a rights-based global order. This is not merely isolationism; it is a philosophical regression. It is a quietly accepted return to the idea that power creates its own reality. When a superpower decides it is no longer bound by the rules that protect the “someone” from the “something,” the rest of the world takes note. We see the consequences in the carnage of Ukraine, Gaza, and Sudan, where the “sinister spirits” of the past are enjoying a revival.
This regression is probably not just a passing moment in our politically tumultuous times. When the US Supreme Court grants presidents near-blanket immunity, it is fair to ask: If an US President commits crimes against humanity… is he going to be subject to examination by the courts? If the US Supreme Court has its way, the answer appears to be no. This is the logic of kings, returning in the guise of democracy.
The Struggle for Human Rights
Where do we find hope when the legal and political structures seem to be failing again and again? There is hope in the unfolding of international legal rights legislation and the impact it has over time. If Sands succeeds in holding Myanmar responsible for genocide, it will be a triumph for the rule of law. But laws are only as strong as the conscience that upholds them. Sands himself suggests that while we need the law to establish facts, we may need something else to establish truth. He argues that a fine work of literature can often do more for peace and reconciliation than a court judgment – Leo Tolstoj comes to mind.
We face an eternal tension in the human psyche. Law manages an objectified world: it deals with evidence, borders, and statutes. But literature, like religion and therapy, deals with “persons” and their fluid subjectivity. It forces us to inhabit the mind of the other. This dialogic dimension, the ability to feel with the wounded other, brings us closer again to the idea of “Imago Dei,” by making us recognize the sacredness in the stranger. In this sense, the Christian belief is a lasting bridge to a deeper humanity and its social and legal manifestations.
The struggle for human rights is not just a legal battle, it is also spiritual and psychological. The flame of justice burns even if there is no hope for so many people. It is the stubborn insistence that even in a world of raw power, the person remains a creature of infinite value.