Human rights after October

The language of human rights is under fire on the right and the left. While right-wing authoritarian leaders frame civil rights and anti-discrimination agendas as the exclusive concern of cosmopolitan elites, left-wing critics have argued that the human rights movement has ignored economic inequailty and legitimised military interventions that further neoliberal ends. Faced with mounting criticisms, human rights NGOs and advocates have recently turned their attention to social and economic rights. In 2015, Philip Alston, the United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, argued that extreme inequality should be seen as 'a cause for shame on the part of the international human rights movement'. He pointed to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1943 by representatives of forty eight states, as having emphasised the key place of social and economic rights - to food, housing, medical care and employment, for instance.