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Abstract
In the 1970s, United Nations debates on human rights and economic inequality were deeply shaped by the New International Economic Order (nieo) advocated by the developing countries and the basic needs development strategy championed by the World Bank and the United States. This article uses archives from Sweden, Denmark, and Norway as well as UN records, to examine the contributions Scandinavian diplomats and policymakers made to these debates. It demonstrates that the Scandinavians took a favorable position on both the nieo and basic needs, viewing them as complementary strategies to realize economic and social human rights. This view matched their activist foreign policies centered on UN diplomacy, human rights, and Global South solidarity. Finally, the article argues that the Scandinavian position reflected and was underpinned by a broad conception of human rights that put economic and social rights on an even footing with civil and political rights.

Human rights organisations (HROs) are the principal arbiters of the social problems that are documented and decried as human rights issues. They do so, however, within specific contexts, and through lenses that render some social and political problems more visible and amenable to human rights advocacy than others. This article examines the case of a controversial atrocity denial law passed in Cambodia in 2013 to reflect on how rights-based organisations think about and intervene in the social and political worlds that they inhabit. The law was a response to statements from an opposition leader that questioned the authenticity and 'staging' of a key site of atrocities perpetrated under the Khmer Rouge (1975–1979), circumscribing the opposition's ability to tap popular strands of anti-Vietnamese feeling. Rights groups, in theory, were confronted with a classical dilemma within human rights: the curtailment of free expression against the potential harm of hate speech. I situate the responses of HROs in context and explore three questions about the work and worldviews of HROs: the politicisation of human rights techniques and interventions; the (in)visibility of forms of structural violence in relief of abuses by the state; and the solubility of rights-based advocacy within prevailing populisms.

This is a review of the book Hans Joas, Georgetown University Press, Washington DC, 2013, xi+217pp., ISBN: 978-1589019690. This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Contemporary Political Theory. The definitive publisher-authenticated version CHERNILO, D., 2016. Review: the sacredness of the person: a new genealogy of
human rights. Contemporary Political Theory, 15 (3), e41–e44 is available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2015.48

Adapted from the source document.