Human rights and social work : beyond conservative law

We can think about social work and human rights in two ways: social workers joining broader human rights campaigns, and achieving human rights through social work practice. This paper concentrates on the latter approach, identifying the limitations of conventional legal-based human rights narratives for social work. By extending the idea of human rights to concentrate on the 'human', and by recognising the limitations of individualist liberal constructions of human rights, this paper argues for human rights based social work grounded in the humanities. It also identifies some important future challenges for human rights based social work within a less anthropocentric world view.