Refocusing the perspective: towards endogenous roots of the crisis of international human rights regime

The year 2022 was just another one in the row characterised through the trend of declining human rights indexes of compliance and democratic standards of government and governance. Period of crisis of human rights, or some might say the backlash against human rights continues with persisting strength. This is to the extent leading to questions after what will happen with the entire international human rights regime in times of rooted scepticism regarding value based international order. Enabling for any change of this trend and establishment of confidence measures in the realisation of the human rights provisions in the future, we need to understand the nature and origins of this crisis. Claim of this paper is, that currently dominating focuses are mainly of consequentialist, external nature. That means, we have learned to understand crisis of human rights promotion as consequence of e.g. trending populist politics, rise of inequalities, lack of interest in human rights promotion by relevant leaders, triumphing realpolitik, or missing/failing institutional infrastructure for human rights enforcement. Surely, analyst providing with these explanation are holding key parts of the Truth. For obtaining better understanding of the root causes of this situation, we need first to admit that we are in need of changed, better balanced perspective on the given issue. Secondly, then refocus on the question, what is actually contentious on the human rights regime as such. This is might seem as logical and intuitive question, but this question was avoided for years. This paper pleads for debunking a taboo of analysing endogenous problems of the international human regime. Eliminating such a taboo is necessary for our preparedness to understand crisis of human rights regime not only in its consequentialist, but also endogenous perspectives. This would establish reflexive situation where we will be able to think about non-ideally designed regime that also operates in difficult times. The main added value, while turning to the very endogenous design of this regime, would be not only in understanding the situation better, but also having tangible outline of the weaknesses of the regime creating corresponding mitigating actions. This is something the consequentialists approaches cannot offer, since they usually elaborate on external phenomena negatively influencing the performance of human rights regime. Based on this new perspective of permissibility to identify also endogenous human rights weaknesses, in the second stage of the paper, I am proposing a practical investigation how to start with analysis of the nature of human rights regime – conducting contextual, textual and interpretative analysis of the founding document standing in the latest developmental version of international human rights regime promulgated in Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action adopted by the World Conference on Human Rights in 1993.