Introduction

The 1948 Universal Declaration on Human Rights (UDHR) begins with the striking claim that the ‘recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world’. According to Johnson and Symonides, the Declaration ‘recognizes the fundamental unity of all members of the human family and their inherent dignity and diversity, and proclaims that the human genome is, symbolically, the heritage of humanity’ (1998, 84). Mary Ann Glendon (2001) has similarly spoken of ‘the spirit of the preamble, the spirit with which the document opens, the affirmation of the unity of the human family’ (qtd in Ramcharan and Ramcharan 2019, 223). The term ‘human family’ deliberately evokes images of the most intimate of human relationships: bonds of marriage, nurture of children, ties of kinship. Rather than use words that individualise and universalise in abstract terms (e.g. ‘human beings’, ‘humanity’, ‘homo sapiens’), the Declaration describes humanity as an extended family, knit together by ties that are personal, natural and communal.

Despite this language, the rights enshrined within the Declaration and other international instruments, such as the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), have generally been understood in a way that prioritises the rights of individuals. This is not only the case in relation to the liberty rights affirmed by the UDHR and the ICCPR, but is also affirmed through increasingly influential understandings of equality rights to non-discrimination as protecting individual selfidentity. In such analyses, the concept of human dignity is often cited as fundamental, but in a way that connects it immediately with individual autonomy. This emphasis on individual autonomy underplays the familial, societal and communal framing of the leading international human rights instruments. A close examination of these instruments shows them to presuppose a social ontology in which human beings are not merely isolated individuals, but constituted as members of communities at familial, local, regional, national and global scales.

An exploration of this communal embedding of the dignity of all members of the human family has implications for how international human rights are understood, particularly in controversial cases where the rights of human beings conceived as individuals have to be harmonised with the rights of human beings living in community with others.