This groundbreaking study unpicks a tangled web of activists, bureaucrats, writers and politicians who championed, engaged with, critiqued or ignored what are today held to be the unassailable truths of universal human rights. Today's debates about freedom of religion, offshore detention and indigenous recognition have a long human rights history.
Jon Piccini is a historian at the Australian Catholic University, Melbourne. He wrote Global Radicals: Transnational Protest, Australia and the 1960s (2016) which looks at Australian protest movements in the transnational 'Sixties' and edited a collection of essays entitled The Far Left in Australia since 1945 (2018).
Acknowledgements; Introduction: bereft of words; 1. Inventing rights; 2. Cold War rights; 3. Experimental rights; 4. Who's rights? 5. Implementing rights; Epilogue: cascade or trickle?