This article explores the way in which the Covid-19 pandemic has worsened human rights conditions across the globe, particularly around the rise of authoritarianism, erosion of democracy, increase in hate crimes and racism, and deepening of economic inequality. We then advocate for the possibilities and significance of human rights education as a core component of every student’s learning experience and provide suggestions and specific resources for teaching human rights during and after the Covid-19 pandemic.

This article serves as an introduction to the articles in this special issue of the Journal of Human Rights on humanitarianism and responsibility. We thread the work of our contributors, along with other key scholars, together into a broader discussion about the possibilities and limitations of humanitarian responsibility. We first elaborate several constitutive dimensions of responsibility as it has been understood in humanitarian discourse, with particular attention to the way in which it has been deployed to both limit and extend the humanitarian mandate. We then consider how the discourse of humanitarian responsibility constitutes a departure from, and a possible alternative to, the discourse of human rights as the reigning lingua franca in which ethical arguments are advanced at the global level. Ultimately, we contend that while renewed emphasis on responsibility is no panacea for the difficult political and ethical questions that bedevil international humanitarianism and should not displace the focus on human rights, the process of critically engaging with this term may present a valuable opportunity to rethink the pursuit of global justice as a situated and contingent engagement between the self and those distant and proximate others who are exposed to catastrophes, natural and man-made.

This essay considers the significance of this special issue of History for modern historians of human rights with regard to three aspects of that history. First, there has been a division between those who seek to chronicle the history of human rights movements and those who focus on the history of human rights violations. The essays in this volume present a view of the early modern B ritish empire that seems defined by the absence of human rights movements and a ubiquity of human rights violations. Second, modern historians of human rights have pursued two approaches: deploying a standard definition of human rights as a ‘plumb line’ by which past movements and violations are assessed, or mapping the genealogy of ‘human rights’ as an empty signifier whose content is indeterminate. This edited collection approaches the violence of the period with genealogical care. Nevertheless, these contributions are also marked by a concern with the conceptual categorization of different forms of violence, which while less bound to a specific legal code, are perhaps normative across period and geography. Third, this special issue illuminates, but does not resolve, the tension between historicism and universality that characterizes the history of human rights. Each of the authors, by engaging with the assumptions and preoccupations of the human rights field, presents evidence that for both themselves and their subjects there is often an aspiration to conceptual and moral standards by which local circumstances and contingencies might be judged.

I examine the contributions of Lebanese diplomat and educator Charles H. Malik as a leading member of the UN Human Rights Commission, particularly in relation to his educational experiences in American-run institutions in Lebanon and the US. I also propose biography as a significant mode of inquiry for understanding the political discourse of human rights more generally.

This article examines the role of the Commission to Study the Organization of Peace (CSOP) as the essential intellectual and political force behind the identification of the Allied cause with the cause of human rights. Well before the Atlantic Charter and President Roosevelt's Four Freedoms, the CSOP called for a new international order rooted in universal respect for human rights. This vision was carried to both policymakers and the American public, resulting in Article 68 of the UN Charter. This Article required the international organization to create a human rights commission, whose first task would be the drafting of an international bill of rights.