Limiti e deficit dei diritti umani

In discussing criticisms of the “dark side” of human rights, the article firstly aims to highlight the need to distinguish, without separating, the conceptualization and practice of human rights. In this sense, the discourse on human rights and criticism of them should distinguish between the “limits” of rights, relating to conceptualization and specifically concerning the functions and ends that can be properly associated with human rights, and the “deficits”, concerning shortcomings in implementation and guarantee of rights. The analysis then aims to enhance the hermeneutic circularity of the two dimensions and to overcome different forms of reductionism. The connecting element between concept and practice is identified in the content of rights, to which it is assigned a role not only as to rights implementation but also as to rights conceptualization. The paper ends by highlighting the need to appreciate the role of epistemic communities within the processes of interpretation and implementation of human rights, so as to elaborate a less fragmented, more incisive international human rights law oriented by a specific content, such as to contain both the phenomenon of rights the overlap with humanitarian law and the merely emergency vision of rights.