Abstract

Recent critical approaches on human rights have exalted the potentiality of this category for seeking progressive agendas insofar as they are enacted within counter-hegemonic cognitive frames towards the construction of “subaltern human rights”. Others, however, have pointed out that the human rights institutional and political hegemony makes other valuable emancipatory strategies less available, and that this foregrounds problems of participation and procedure at the expense of distribution. Finally, others have explained how the abstractedness of the category entails a de-politicization or an emptiness that, of course, can be filled by progressive activism, but whose substance is easily reappropriated by those in power. By engaging with the above-mentioned perspectives, and following the decolonial approach, I suggest that the category human rights can be decolonized and being used for progressive agendas only after a comprehensive critique of liberal legality has been performed.