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He says the term “human right” is now used for everything from freedom of assembly, expression, religion and conscience to health care, housing, a fair wage, peace, water and food. In English language books, use of the term has increased 200-fold since 1940, and is used 100 times more than “constitutional rights” or “natural rights.”

The explosion in “rights talk” in the past half century reflected the fact that human rights were once “the dominant vernacular for social change.” They were the vehicle by which states could be held to account if they oppressed their citizens. But as it continued — winning legal victories, inspiring new generations of activists, and being enshrined in human rights codes around the world — we can now see the dark side of “rights inflation,” in which broad demands for justice are framed as specific demands for human rights.

“Human rights are becoming hollow rhetoric that is fast losing their evocative power,” according to Clément. “We should reject the impulse to frame all grievances as human rights.”

In his paper, he argues from the premise that human rights are a “sociological rather than a legal fact.” They are “a product of human interaction, not legal reasoning” and they “derive from from society and the state rather than an abstract pre-social individual.”

As such, they may be impossible to define fundamentally, once and for all.

“People have a very limited sense of human rights that I think is inconsistent with what you see beyond Canada,” Clément said in an interview. “That’s why I like the idea of rooting it in history and social practice, because it then reflects how people are actually living and experiencing human rights, rather than some theoretical abstract belief about what they could be.”