ABSTRACT
In the last quarter of this century, we are celebrating two hundred years of an idea. How much difference have these centuries made? Surely none of us can be happy with the condition of human rights today, but we are not as unhappy, I think, as we might have been—or ought to have been—200 years ago. Even today, the condition of human rights could be much worse. Human rights are philosophically respectable and rhetorically irresistible. Constitutions are de rigueur, and each constitution holds at least the promise and the seed of constitutionalism. The deterrent effect of the international human rights movement, of transnational example and influence, cannot be measured, but neither can it be dismissed: dramatic violations, we know, are deterred or modified, and if transnational scrutiny were not significant, it would not be so strenuously resisted. 1
