3 Development of the Current System of International Protection of Human Rights

The serious will to establish a viable international regime of effective protection of human rights had to first go through a process of reflection. At the outset, the final goal of that journey could not be foreseen. Three steps have to be taken on the road from Utopia—in the positive sense—to legal positivism.1 First of all, candidates for human rights must be identified. Those who have the power to initiate a process of norm creation at the international level must agree on which wishes and desires are suitable for being translated into legal substance. There...