New Advocates and the Future of International Human Rights

Opening remarks by Binaifer Nowrojee at Chatham House on June 15, 2026. Remarks as prepared for delivery.

It is an honor to open this conversation at Chatham House—an institution founded, more than a century ago, on the conviction that international affairs should be examined openly, rigorously, and with clear eyes. It is in that spirit that I offer these remarks: not as a set of settled conclusions, but as arguments for us to discuss.

The premise of this evening's discussion is that governments and multilateral institutions are retreating from human rights leadership. The retreat is real in many places.

Many governments that once prided themselves on their human rights records at home and their commitment to them globally are failing on both fronts. But I want to resist the two stories most often told about human rights in this moment.

The first is a story of nostalgia—that our task is to restore the order we have lost. That world has gone, and it will not return. We should not invest our energies in mourning it, but should retain the best of it.

The second is a story of despair—that human rights have lost their meaning, that international law no longer matters.

There is no denying the horrors of this moment: the gravest of crimes committed in Gaza and Sudan, the war waged on Ukraine, the targeting of schools, hospitals, and people queuing for food, so casual now that it has become necessary to ask whether any standards exist at all.

But both stories carry false claims of prophecy. They are stories told by humans; they are not iron laws of history.

And both rest on the same analytical mistake: they measure the health of human rights by the conduct of the most powerful states.

If we look only at who is leaving the stage, we will miss who is stepping onto it.

When we speak of international human rights, we mean something specific: the bodies of law and institutions built to constrain how states treat people—the Universal Declaration, the covenants and other treaties, international courts, and the laws of war. This system is under severe strain.

But the broader spirit of a shared humanity that it was built to serve—for dignity, for justice, for accountability—is not retreat. If anything, in many parts of the world, it is growing stronger. We should not mistake our disenchantment with the structures we have known for the condition of the world.

Rights were never a gift from above, or an act of charity from the West to the rest. They were won from below. What this moment has done is make that truth impossible to ignore—and the question for us is what follows from it.

Start with where leadership has actually gone. It has not disappeared. It has moved.

Often to the people closest to the violations. The Gen-Z movements that turned a protest against unjust taxes in Kenya into a struggle for economic justice; that shattered a wall of fear in Bangladesh; that reclaimed a nearly stolen election in Senegal. The feminist movements of Ni Una Menos and the Marea Verde, which redefined gender violence as a political crisis rather than a private matter—and exported that redefinition to Italy, Spain, and Turkey. The women of Afghanistan defying the Taliban at risk of their lives, and the girls using technology to claim back the education stolen from them.

These are not movements that we need to romanticize, as is often the temptation with new youth movements. They have their flaws and weaknesses.

The gains they have made are fragile, the coalitions they have built are shaky, and the leaders of these movements often lack policy and governance experience.

But some things stand out. First, they are speaking the language of human rights—of truth, dignity, and justice. These are often people who have not lived under democracies, but are demanding their voices be heard, that they have a seat at the table, and that they have a say in how they are governed.

They also display a boldness that’s needed in this moment—both of how they are organizing and what visions they are fighting for. Each of these movements have shown a fearlessness on the streets, knowing they will be met with repression, whether it’s the hundreds who were killed by security forces in Bangladesh or the women who were beaten and arrested in Herat, Afghanistan last week— or the people in Minnesota, who placed themselves between U.S. ICE agents and the migrant families they live among.

They are harnessing technology not just as a tool to connect, share information, document repression, and amplify voices—to debate, to source and generate new ideas, to collectively build alternatives.

They are not trying to reform existing systems, but to imagine entire new worlds that have dignity and justice as the principles of their designs.

We also see leadership move across states. International law has its origins in the age of empires. It was not meant to be international, but to establish a set of rules between self-styled civilizations that codified their freedom to conquer, to take control of countries weaker and poorer than them, to exploit their resources.

We now, however, see two rival trends. One is the brazen assault on international law through wars of aggression, regime change, and impunity for the most serious crimes—including crimes against humanity and genocide.

But at the same time, we see states using and reshaping international law to assert their sovereignty and solidarity as middle powers and small states to insist on what binds together our shared humanity.

In a world where power is being renegotiated and the West’s moral authority has been waning. These new coalitions will be essential to the survival of international law and its renewed relevance in this moment.

Over 100 states, are currently engaged in human rights-related cases at the International Court of Justice. Half the world took part in the climate advisory proceedings—driven not by a great power, but by Vanuatu and a coalition of Pacific students. South Africa and Gambia that brought forward cases on genocide.

The Hague Group has brought together states who refuse to accept a world governed by lawlessness and are seeking to strengthen accountability.

While the Security Council is paralyzed, these states are using the General Assembly and the courts to keep norms alive. They are not abandoning the framework. They are giving it new life from below.

What these new advocates share and acknowledge is a harder-won understanding of how rights are actually secured.

They understand that the law alone will not save us. I say this as a lawyer who has seen what persistence in the courtroom can achieve: the first international convictions for rape as an instrument of genocide came because the survivors I worked with in Rwanda refused to let prosecutors look away. The law gives form to a political consensus. It cannot be a substitute for one. The practitioners reshaping advocacy today—the Kenyan lawyers demanding justice for abducted protesters, the constitutional courts in Uganda, South Korea, and Senegal blocking executive overreach—succeed because they treat litigation as one instrument within a political struggle, not a referee standing above it, waving a colored card. The movements understand the same thing from the other side: they fuse organizing, mass mobilization, and legal strategy, where we once filed reports and hoped.

And they are forcing an honesty upon civil society that the attacks alone did not. The pressure is severe—funding choked off, leaders prosecuted as foreign agents—and the adaptations are real: regional sanctuaries where threatened defenders continue their work, funding diversified away from traditional donors, formal NGOs giving way to looser movement structures. But the deeper reckoning is this: in many places, civil society had drifted away from society—professionalized, fluent in the language of donors, concentrated in capital cities. When the attacks came, parts of it found itself defending rights before publics who no longer felt those rights belonged to them. The organizations that endure are those closing that distance.

The rise of more assertive middle powers should not be heard as an attack on universality, but as its recovery.

It contests who owns the idea. Universality was never the property of the West: the first known charter of rights is inscribed on the Cyrus Cylinder; our principles of solidarity owe much to the spirit of ubuntu—I am, because we are. It was Hansa Mehta of India who insisted the Universal Declaration speak of all human beings, not all men. Recovering those sources disarms the claims that human rights depend on on wealthy and powerful states from one part of the world, or that rights are a foreign imposition. It contests the hierarchy the framework built—civil and political rights treated as absolute, but economic and social rights left at subsistence. We set a floor beneath how low the poor could fall, but refused a ceiling on how high the wealthy could rise. For the vast majority of people in the world, inequality is a human rights question. It determines their ability to exercise other rights, and the fate of the countries they live in.

And it contests the framework's individualism—bringing collective traditions, like the Indigenous and Afro-descendant concept of buen vivir, found across Latin America, of “living well,” to have harmony between communities and with nature—something that’s urgently needed in this moment of the climate crisis.

Which brings me, finally, to the institutions we engage with. If leadership has moved, legitimacy must now be earned where it was once assumed.

Europe cannot be complacent about its own record right now. The rights to freedom of expression, assembly and association are under assault right now. People are being punished for peacefully opposing the policies of their governments.

The role of European governments today is to ensure that they don’t abandon the freedoms they were once most proud of. The way to honor that inheritance is to live those ideals—to defend democratic institutions, protect the dignity of all who live on the continent, and resist the lie being told that one person’s rights come at the cost of another’s. To refuse to cede ground to those who seek to exploit differences and traffic in fear. And applying one standard—to Gaza, Sudan, and Ukraine alike—because a standard applied selectively soon ceases to be a standard at all.

For the multilateral system: share power. The order built in 1945 formalized the privilege of the powerful. It had inequities built into and perpetuated by it. Its future depends on welcoming, not managing, the wider coalition of states—looking at who sits at the table, who sets the agenda, and whether debt, inequality, and climate are finally treated as the human rights questions they are.

And the same test falls on philanthropy, my own institution included. Support the the frontlines, not just the familiar. Transfer power, not just resources. Stand with communities as allies, not as saviors.

The old certainties are gone, and we need not mourn them. They were never as solid as they appeared, and they were never meant to serve as a final resting place. Eight decades ago, when the Indian feminist activist and freedom fighter Hansa Mehta was part of the drafting committee of the Universal Declaration, she spoke of the importance of that moment, the inauguration of a new era of rights where everyone, everywhere would be guaranteed the same freedoms and protections.

“To create a new world,” she said, “it is necessary to create a new way of thinking.”

That’s our task once again, when defending human rights has become more difficult, but also more necessary.

Binaifer Nowrojee, president of the Open Society Foundations, speaks at the University of California Berkeley Law School on protecting human rights defenders.

Binaifer Nowrojee, president of the Open Society Foundations, speaks on human rights at the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City on August 1, 2025.

Binaifer Nowrojee, president of the Open Society Foundations, speaks on human rights at the University of Pretoria on March 12, 2025.