The module engages critically and in depth with the key debates in the theory and practice of human rights.  In the first part of the course, we trace the philosophical and historical origins of the concept of rights, and moreover its development within legalised frameworks.  Thus we shall observe that human rights questions began life as abstract claims but subsequently became statutory duties to which citizens and states alike became bound (at least in theory).  Of particular interest to us are the tensions involved in making assumptions about rights and their application.  For example, can it be said that rights exist somehow prior to their legal enforcement by states and supra-state institutions, and if so how?  To what extent are we able to claim that rights are universal and must thus trump the assumptions of local cultures and traditions?  To what extent if at all can rights be divorced from mainstream ideology and the interests of those national and global social forces it might be claimed to surreptitiously represent?  These are the type of tensions and indeed contradictions we shall attempt to confront.  Hence, the first section of the module examines the very idea of human rights, asking how human rights ought to be defined, and whether they can be morally justified and enshrined in law. It also looks at some important challenges to the idea of human rights: namely that they could be ethnocentric, superficially schematic or indeed simply instruments of ideological power in the hands of powerful global forces. The second section continues the theme by looking at specific practical instances in recent history that have given rise to problems of assumption and application of human rights.