Two paradoxes inform and problematize every discursive and practical employment of "human rights". The first is substantive and directly political; it concerns the relation between "the human" and "the political". and belongs to the domain of political ethics in general. The other is more nearly epistemological and moral: it addresses the issue of how one understands and practices the relationship between idea and actuality, or moral universality and cultural relativity. Each stems from the fact that human rights would cobble together two kinds of concepts and practical relations that are not innately friendly and treats them as one, ignoring the inherent absence of complementarity in their relationship. Thus, the discourse of human rights synthesizes and occludes paradoxical features of the origins, history and character of human rights as an idea and a practice. making it far from self-evident as a conceptual "thing" or guide to moral and political practice. Paradox has always marked the invocation of human rights. Since their discursive inception, the initial paradoxes have not been solved so much as layered by new iterations of them - namely, that initiated in the UDHR (Universal Declaration of Human Rights), which identifies governments as the promissory for enforcement of human rights. Joining the paradoxes is an overarching feature that articulates human rights as a trans-political phenomenon besides being a political phenomenon designed to uplift all human societies.
The first important area of human rights paradox is concerned with
