A Radically Realistic View of Human Rights Justifications

It is widely acknowledged that human rights law and politics are interwoven. This paper focuses on a specific aspect of this connection: states using human rights discourse to justify their actions while simultaneously shaping the very frameworks meant to hold them accountable. We argue that this creates a circular self-legitimation where states determine their own grounds of justification. Unlike critics who call into question the human rights project entirely, we acknowledge this flaw without abandoning the framework. We introduce radical realist social analysis as a novel jurisprudential instrument for studying and critiquing how states deploy human rights law. This instrument demonstrates how most state applications of human rights justifications are epistemically flawed, thereby failing in their justifying function. Meanwhile, our proposal avoids outright rejection of the human rights framework while strengthening material human rights against political exploitation.