Traditionalist Religious and Cultural Challengers—International and Constitutional Human Rights Responses

The legal regime of human rights entitles individuals and groups to legal protection against the hegemony of the political majority, of the religious establishment and of other powerful social actors. This Article examines the way in which this protection is implemented at the constitutional and international levels. Within states, it is at the constitutional level that the supremacy of human rights is translated into a normative paradigm. However, within states there may be opposition to the human rights regime—pragmatic or ideological—from powerful lobbies: majoritarian or sectoral. This opposition may result in lack of political will to apply or enforce human rights through constitutional mechanisms. The author shows that, in contrast, the formulation of the human rights vision at the international level consistently underwrites the human rights of individuals and groups as against the power of traditionalist religious or cultural norms. She suggests that the future of human rights as a universal paradigm depends on the effectiveness with which international norms can be translated to the constitutional level thus suggesting a reversal of the previously observed process of translating from the constitutional to the regional.