Aaron Xavier Fellmeth, Paradigms of International Human Rights Law

Adopting a combination of legal and philosophical reasoning, this book looks at three core trends that characterize the development of international human rights law (IHRL) and the ways in which its value system is protected, promoted and enforced. The three systemic features of IHRL identified by Fellmeth include the focus on rights instead of duties (first paradigm), the distinction between substantive and non-discrimination rights (second paradigm) and the dichotomy between negative and positive rights (third paradigm). As explained in the introductory section, the term ‘paradigm’ is used in the Platonic, colloquial sense of a typical pattern or model (p 5). The author suggests that the primacy of each paradigm’s first element has gone almost under-questioned and under-explored in scholarly work on IHRL, and aims at beginning a structural critique of the three trends