As human rights have evolved into a comprehensive world view which dominates the current global legal and political discourse, the inevitable conceptual ambiguity came along. To try to clarify this ambiguity, one needs to look into the history of human rights.
The concept of human rights is said to be deeply rooted in the Western philosophy. The development of the natural rights thinking of 16th-18th centuries combined with the Revolutions of America and France established the modern basis for human rights of today. It is also known that the United Nations led the global efforts related to modern international human rights law.
Samuel Moyn, the author of ?The Last Utopia-Human Rights in History, however, disagrees with such conventional understanding. What we call human rights today is a revolutionary, transnational concept created and advocated outside the national sovereignty. This is fundamentally different from, and irreconcilable with, the rights originating from the natural law ideas and the French Revolution which were closely bound up with the creation of the sovereign space. Moreover, the concept of human rights remained at the margin of the intellectual, political world after the end of the Second World War, and the mainstream of international law scholarship paid little attention to human rights for considerable period of time up to the late 1970s.
What actually happened was a series of accidental events such as the adoption of the Helsinki accords, the activities of the dissidents from the Communist bloc, and particularly the success of Amnesty International and the inauguration of the Carter Administration in the United States in the late 1970s. These seemingly unrelated events resulted in the explosion of the modern human rights movement.
This critical re-evaluation of human rights history helps us see the two different approaches to the concept of human rights. One is to understand human rights as the universal list of rights connected to the natural rights theory; the other is to understand human rights as the universal movement of revolutionary character undermining the concept of the sovereignty, based on the massive awakening that took place in the late 1970s. For the sake of convenience, one is labeled the “human rights as domestic rights”, and the other “the human rights as transnational movement”. These two categories of human rights concept are distinguished from each other in terms of: the space in which to exercise rights; the direction of rights; and the fundamental relationship to the concept of sovereignty. This distinction of human rights concept is useful in understanding specific contexts of the human rights language, which, in turn, would help understand and analyze the usage of human rights more objectively. In particular, one may find it necessary to apply this distinction to understand more thoroughly the human rights issues within the Korean legal discourse, including the North Korean human rights problems.