Human rights: A secular religion with legal crowbars. From Europe with hesitations

This contribution offers to steer a discussion on the constitutive stance of fundamental rights in Western legal systems. The story of the democratic constitutional state, a story of rule of law and human rights, is an already 250 year old utopia, which strangely persists despite long-standing patterns of slavery, war, torture, poverty, hunger, deportations, racism, and other unfavorable matters to human rights.
This paper aims at questioning this perpetual paradox. After a historical assessment of human rights, we maintain that the traditional narrative emerges as the result of an interchangeable religious process: human rights as the gospel of a secular religion. Despite this, our perspectives on the rights apparatus can be adjusted by a more realistic vision of legal practices.
Under certain conditions, human rights can function as legal crowbars in courts. With the crowbar metaphor, we adopt a constructive and pragmatic approach to human rights.
Yet, what stands out is an expectation to move beyond the human rights axioms, rather than an endeavor to fix them. Ultimately, we suggest that other less toxic frameworks could replace traditional human rights narratives as constructs that may better realise our hopes.