A free and open textbook for today’s human rights challenges.

The internationally recognized human rights lawyer and advocate Philip Alston has updated his open access textbook International Human Rights. This resource is free and can be found here: https://humanrightstextbook.org/ The book addresses among other topics the normative foundations of international human rights, international and regional human rights organizations, state actors, challenges to universalism, and human rights challenges such as climate change, responding to mass violations and transitional justice. This book examines the world of contemporary human rights, including legal norms, political contexts and moral ideals. It acknowledges the regime’s strengths and weaknesses, and focuses on today’s principal challenges. These include radical inequality, resurgent racism, the rise of anti-gender ideology, the implications of new technologies for fact-finding and many other parts of the regime, the continuing marginality of economic, social and cultural rights, climate change, and the evermore central role of the private sector. The boundaries of the subject have steadily expanded as the post-World War II regime has become an indelible part of the legal, political and moral landscape. Given the breadth and complexity of the regime, the book takes an interdisciplinary and critical approach.