Reimagining Human Rights for an Uncertain World

It is a great honor to be here in Vienna, to deliver this presidential lecture at the Central European University (CEU)—an institution founded by George Soros that holds a special place in the story of the Open Society Foundations, where I serve as president. 

I want to congratulate you on your 35th anniversary. In these years, CEU has produced generations of scholars, civil servants, lawyers, economists, and civil society leaders working to transform their countries.  
 
But this university has also lived something that others only study. 

Founded in 1991, CEU was part of a moment of real momentum behind the opening of closed societies. Following the collapse of communism, democracy took hold in dozens of countries.  
 
Nearly a decade ago, you also saw what happens when an authoritarian leader acts on his fear of independent institutions—and forced this university out of Budapest. 

You did not watch the closing of a society from a distance. You lived it, and you persevered. That leader is now gone. Meanwhile, your commitment to building open societies continues. 

There is an older history in this city worth recalling alongside your own. In the 1930s, under the shadow of Nazism, Vienna saw many of its finest minds driven into exile by a hatred that threatened their lives.  
 
But their ideas endured, and in time returned. Karl Popper wrote “The Open Society and Its Enemies” from exile in New Zealand, and that book went on to inspire both my institution and your own—here, in the city of Popper’s birth. 

It is a reminder that ideas can imagine new beginnings, and outlast the people who try to shut them down. 

The Future Is Not Something We Simply Await 

The year of CEU’s founding was a moment of widespread optimism—an assumption that events were curving toward a more just future, that countries everywhere would now develop along the same path, embracing democracy, liberalizing their economies, and affirming human rights for all. 

That optimism was not entirely misplaced. Apartheid fell in South Africa. There were more democracies and fewer dictatorships, more peace, and less war. In what was then called the “developing world,” hundreds of millions were lifted out of poverty.  
 
A new spirit of multilateralism bound countries together. And there were crucial advances in human rights—for women and girls, for racial and sexual minorities, for refugees and asylum seekers, for those long pushed to the margins. 

These gains were real, and they should be honored and defended. Indeed, one reason the backlash is so fierce is that those who abuse human rights feel threatened by these gains, and are determined to roll them back. 

But this was not the whole story. Soon after CEU opened its doors, war returned to Europe, as violence, hatred, and nationalism were let loose in the Balkans. In 1995 came the massacre of Bosniak men and boys at Srebrenica—later ruled a genocide. 
 
The next year I was in Rwanda, documenting the widespread and systematic use of rape as a weapon in the genocide there —work that helped secure the first international convictions for sexual violence crimes. 

These were early reminders, which should have been heeded: That history does not move in straight lines.  
 
There are no “iron laws,” as Popper said, carrying us to a final resting point. There are gains, and there are setbacks. The work of human rights is never finished. 

What we were told back then was a well-intentioned but misguided story of inevitable progress. That world has gone, and it will not return. We should not spend all our energies nostalgically trying to restore it—but we should keep the best of it. 

We should also refuse the story now being told: that we have entered an age of inevitable doom; that human rights have lost their meaning; that international law no longer matters; that the future belongs to a closing world—one where, as the French philosopher Henri Bergson, who first gave us the idea of an open society, warned, people hold only to their own and care nothing for the rest. 

There is no denying the horrors of this moment—the gravest crimes committed in Gaza and Sudan, the wars waged on Ukraine, Lebanon, and Iran, the self-styled strongmen who depend on repression to hold their fragile rule.  
 
We now live in a world where even schoolchildren and people queuing for food can be targeted and killed, with little recognition of their humanity.  

Where such crimes have become so casual that we must ask whether any standards exist at all. 

But this need not be our fate. The present is not something we experience as spectators, and the future is not something we simply await.  
 
Chaos and uncertainty need not be met with fear alone. They can also open new possibilities. 

As George Soros said, the arc of the moral universe does not bend toward justice on its own. We have to bend it.

Reimagine the Future of Human Rights 

Our task is to tell our own story—one that imagines a different future for human rights and restores dignity to its rightful place: owed to all, and the bond that holds our common humanity together. 

The human rights system as we have known it is an immense achievement—the collective labor of millions, across time and around the world, who mounted heroic struggles in the most challenging circumstances, often at great risk to themselves.  
 
They show us that rights were never a gift from above, nor an act of charity from the West to the rest, but a genuinely universal endeavor.  
 
It is that universal experience we must renew for the times we live in now. 

Universality, not Uniformity 

One weakness of the human rights movement—now revealed as a major vulnerability—has been its failure to truly realize the universality of human rights, and its dependence on the leadership of a few powerful states that preside over the international order. 

Contrary to the story often told, human rights did not begin in the wake of the Second World War. 
 
We can trace the traditions of human rights back thousands of years. Among the first known charters is the Cyrus Cylinder, inscribed in 539 BC and named for the Persian king. Rules to protect human beings in war came down through ancient Hindu scriptures.  
 
Our principles of solidarity owe much to the African spirit of ubuntu—I am, because we are.  
 
And the Indigenous and Afro-descendant tradition of buen vivir calls us to honor human dignity and to live at one with nature—a wisdom that could not be more urgent now, when our planet is at risk. 

Here is the point we have too often missed: universality was never meant to be uniformity.  
 
It does not require that the world speak with one voice, or trace its values to a single source.  
 
It is precisely the meeting of these many traditions—cultural, religious, legal, new and old, on every continent—that gives human dignity its true universality.  
 
As the philosopher Seyla Benhabib has argued, the universal is not a possession to be handed down, but a claim to be reached, again and again, through dialogue across difference.  
 
Pluralism, in other words, is not the rival of universality. It is the road to it—the only road by which universality can be made legitimate rather than imposed. 

So when authoritarian governments in Russia or China denounce human rights as a Western creed, they do not strip them of their universality. It is the violators who deny that rights are universal—never their victims. 

And when human rights are narrowly identified with the policy of a handful of states, like the United States and Europe, they rise and fall with the credibility of those governments.  
 
They become entangled in their interests, their selectivity, their silences, and their wars—implicated in an economic order of extreme inequalities, within and between countries.

All of this has let human rights be discredited—dismissed as an instrument of the powerful rather than a shield for everyone. We are now at a moment of sober reflection, in which many states that once did much to advance human rights have voluntarily discarded the moral authority they held. 
 
For Europe, there are lessons, too. As Ivan Krastev has observed, Europe can no longer expect to change others; but neither should it allow others to change it.  
 
The way to honor that advice is for Europe to live up to its ideals—defending the freedoms it was once proudest of, the rights to speak, to assemble, to associate, now under strain on this very continent, where people are punished for peacefully opposing their governments. 

That means defending its institutions against those who would hollow them out, refusing the politics of fear and hate, and recommitting themselves to the promise at the heart of human rights: that all people are equal, and that the fate of each is the concern of all. 

There are no exemplary states. But there are possibilities now for governments to come together across continents—working with one another, not above one another—to form a new coalition and build a more just international order, one that overcomes the inequities built into the old.

We can already see its outlines. Recently, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez brought together leaders, groups, movements, political parties in a commitment to a more just world.  
 
It was Gambia and South Africa that brought genocide cases to the International Court of Justice.  
 
It was Vanuatu—a small, sinking island—with a coalition of Pacific law students, that drew half the world into the climate proceedings there—where more than a hundred states are now engaged in human rights cases.  
 
Pakistan and Qatar mediated the recent deal between the United States and Iran, something that traditionally happened in Oslo, Paris, or Madrid.  
 
Coalitions such as the Hague Group are gathering states, in different ways, to stand for international justice and refuse a world governed by lawlessness.  
 
And while the Security Council remains paralyzed, these states keep the norms alive through the General Assembly and the courts—not abandoning the framework, but giving it new life from below. 

The Law Alone Will Not Save Us 

The second weakness of the human rights system was the belief that the law could carry its weight largely on its own, through legal standards and institutions. 

The law gives form to a political consensus—but it cannot be a substitute for one.  
 
It is a site of constant struggle—a struggle that is, at root, political.  
 
The law is never enough, on its own, to uphold or to overthrow unjust systems.  
 
And when the consensus beneath the law is weakened, we see how much we had been asking the law to do alone. 

I say this as a human rights lawyer—someone who has seen, across a lifetime, what the law can do, and how it can be turned from an instrument of power into a tool of justice.  
 
When I worked with the survivors of rape in Rwanda, they had no avenue left but the International Criminal Tribunal.  
 
It was only through persistence—pushing prosecutors who at first declined to charge the crimes committed against these women—that justice was finally done. 

But the law has its limits. It is not always neutral, not always fair, not always within reach, not always a self-evident good. 
 
It has just as often taken the shape of a decree that silences, a statute that criminalizes identity, a slow and grinding process that wears down those who seek justice.  
 
And the advances won in law can be reversed—as in the U.S. Supreme Court, which stripped away a woman’s right to abortion and gutted the Voting Rights Act.  
 
Courts are not automatic guarantors, of justice or of legitimacy. 

The Fight for Human Rights Is Political 

What we see now, more clearly than before, is that human rights are fundamentally political. They were won through struggle—of women, of Black people, of colonized peoples, of every community pushed to the margins.  
 
It was not the human rights system, nor the law, that won the civil rights movement or brought down apartheid. Segregation was law. Apartheid was law. 

The rights we now take for granted—the abolition of slavery, the vote for women, the protections of labor, the end of colonial rule—were not granted from above.  
 
They were won from below, by people who organized, argued, persuaded, suffered defeats, and kept going. 

At the Open Society Foundations, George Soros has always been clear to call us a political philanthropy—because the work of human rights is about giving voice and moving power. 
 
And that is what makes it threatening to many governments. 

More Than Civil Society 

For decades, we assumed that supporting human rights organizations would, in itself, be enough to hold governments accountable and resist repression. 

Civil society groups have done, and still do, crucial work: legal defense, documenting violations, pursuing justice, advocating with governments, breaking silences when no one else would—often courageous work, at great personal cost.  
 
But there is an honesty we must bring to this.  
 
In many places, civil society has drifted away from society: narrow in scope, overly professionalized, fluent in the language of donors, concentrated in capital cities, far from the communities it serves.  
 
So when governments choke off its funding, branded its leaders foreign agents, or casting human rights as a threat to “traditional” or “family values”, parts of civil society find themselves defending rights before publics who no longer feel these rights belong to them. 

It Is Not Enough to Say No 

The movement has also not been ambitious enough—a strange thing to say when rights are under such sustained attack.  
 
But it has too often preferred rights in the negative: no to torture, no to censorship, no to detention without trial. These are fundamental refusals.  
 
Yet there must also be an affirmation of something positive. The role of the human rights movement is not to be a referee, blowing a whistle and holding up a red card. It is to hold out a vision of what could be. 

On economic and social rights, the movement too often settled for subsistence.  

As the historian Samuel Moyn has put it, we set a floor beneath how far the poor could fall, but no ceiling on how high the wealthy could rise.  
 
We made our peace with an economic order that produces extreme inequality—treating it as natural, rather than the deliberate design it is. 

And the cruelties of war have reached a point where, in many places, it is now safer to be a combatant than a civilian.  
 
Part of this is a transformation in the means of war: its technologies have outpaced the law and the politics meant to govern them, and the speed and automation that military AI now brings threaten to override our capacity for moral judgment.  
 
Faced with this, we have too often confined ourselves to minimizing deaths, calling out war crimes, or hoping for a genocide to end.  
 
We have too rarely dared to affirm a positive vision—one in which human rights are not only about the violations that can be stopped, but the kind of world that can be built.  
 
One where everyone has the right not merely to survive, but to thrive. 

New Challenges, and New Allies 

In this world we face not only the interlinked crises of war, inequality, and climate, but technologies that could render our world unrecognizable—and that could, if not regulated, compound each of them. 

To show what is at stake, let me turn to a single day. 
 
Three days ago, Russia unleashed hundreds of drones and barrages of missiles, striking a revered church complex in Kyiv, killing and wounding dozens, including children. 

Three months ago, in the town of Minab, in Iran, the children had left home that morning with their colorful backpacks, eager to learn. They were girls, most between seven and twelve. That morning, two U.S. Tomahawk missiles struck their school.  
 
When the parents heard the blasts, they called phones that no one answered; when they reached the damaged building, they clung to the hope that the classrooms had been spared. When they saw the rubble, they searched it, praying. 

They found no survivors—bodies so badly burned the girls could not be recognized, the bright backpacks smeared with blood and dust.  
 
Somewhere far away, a button had been pressed. The school was only a target, unverified, sitting in a database. The destruction was unleashed with little care or fear for the consequences. 

I tell this story not because it is what AI is destined to do to our world, but because of what is at risk if we surrender to the idea that how technology develops, and how it reshapes our world, is beyond our control. 

Last month, Pope Leo made an important intervention, an encyclical with an urgent message for the future of humanity.  

Technology, he reminded us, is not an inherent evil; it holds the potential for great gains.  
 
I have just spoken of Minab—of what happens when these tools make death come faster and reach wider. But the same technologies can serve life.  
 
Next door, in Afghanistan, girls are using AI to defy the Taliban’s ban on their education, and at Open Society we are proud to support a project that uses chatbots to deliver the learning that has been stolen from them.  
 
There are great advances in health and education still to come. 

But in its current form, AI is being built and rolled out in a particular way, serving particular interests—above all, concentrating extraordinary power and wealth in the hands of a few men.  
 
The world’s richest companies have taken humanity’s collective achievements—our writing, our art, our science, our stories—and enclosed them as private property.  
 
These systems rest on the labor of workers, many in the Global South, who train them for subsistence wages, and on communities whose water and energy are consumed to sustain them. 

Left unchecked, this concentration carries grave risks. It can strengthen the hand of states that wish to surveil and control.  
 
It can render people economically superfluous, stripping them of livelihood and the dignity that comes with it.  
 
And it is transforming war itself—letting conflicts be waged not only against armies but across whole societies, at a speed that leaves no room for deliberation, for the restraint that fears a life cut short, or for the law. 

Where governments have failed, the fight for human rights is alive among communities across the world.  
 
At the level where people live closest to the consequences, they refuse to accept the suffering of others.  
 
We see it in the people of Ukraine, waging a heroic fight for their freedom.  
 
We see it in the global solidarity with the people of Gaza and Sudan, who endure so much and still show an indomitable resilience.  
 
We see it in the neighbors in Minnesota who placed themselves between U.S. immigration agents and the migrant families they live among. 
 
If we look only at who is leaving the stage, we will miss who is stepping onto it. 
 

These are the stories we must carry forward—and from which we can begin to reimagine human rights for the world we actually live in.  
 
Let me set out what that will involve. None of it is simple, and I will not pretend otherwise. 

First, human rights must be reclaimed as the inheritance of the many.  
 
We have seen where they come from—traditions the world over, religious and secular, reaching back millennia.  
 
To insist on those roots is not a rhetorical flourish; it changes who owns the idea.  

Held in common, rather than as any governments to grant, human rights cannot be any governments to take away. 

Second, human rights must be returned to politics—because that is where they were won.  
 
This means recovering practices we have let fall away: not merely asserting rights, but arguing for them; persuading the very people offered a false bargain by authoritarian-minded leaders—the lie that one community’s rights must be bought with another’s.  
 
Those people are not beyond our reach. Many carry real grievances that demagogues have learned to exploit—on migration, above all—and the answer is not condemnation but better politics: addressing those grievances honestly and opening safe, legal pathways, rather than surrendering the question to those who spread hate and fear. 

It also means rethinking our relationship with the state. We will go on resisting states when they repress—but resistance cannot be the whole relationship.  
 
To build schools and hospitals, to create jobs and pay a fair wage, to protect the environment and act on climate: these are things only states can deliver at scale.  
 
Proximity to power need not mean compromise; partnership can serve common ends. It demands careful judgment, and it will not always succeed. 
 
But the alternative—a movement that knows only how to oppose the state, never how to strengthen its capacity to do good—is not adequate to the task. 

Third, the circle of those who fight for rights must be widened—far beyond ourselves.  
 
For too long we looked for allies among those who already thought as we did: secular, liberal, professional.  
 
There was a complacency in this—an assumption that everyone else would, in time, come to resemble us. That assumption has not held. 
 
New coalitions will have to include communities at the coal face, the Gen-Z activists organizing in bold new ways, the women building new forms of peace, the Indigenous communities defending the environment—people who may never use our vocabulary or our framework, who may not call themselves human rights activists, and who will sometimes disagree with us on questions we hold fundamental. 

The Vatican is one such ally. We will not agree on every issue, or on every right.  
 
But we can agree that dignity is owed to all—and from that ground, work toward shared ends.  
 
One of those—as that same encyclical urged—is making sure these technologies serve the common good, and not a powerful few.  
 
It is through this work, seeking out new spaces and unlikely allies, that majorities are built. 

And running through all of it must be the affirmation the movement has too often withheld: human rights not as a list of harms to prevent, but as a vision of what every human life might become. 

What Survives 

Let me end where I began—with this university, in this city.  
 
The writer Rebecca Solnit has reflected on what survives political defeat, and her observations are ones this region knows well.  
 
You can take away rights, she writes, but not the belief in them; the memory of rights once held, then taken away, is not easily uprooted.  
 
And she notices something more: that ideas have power—and that while those who hold ideas often underestimate it, those who fear ideas understand exactly how much the world can be changed by them. 

That is the task before us. Not the restoration of a vanished order, but the patient making of a better one—political in its methods, plural in its sources, built alongside allies we have not yet met, and grounded in the one conviction that has outlasted every prophecy: that every human being is owed dignity. 

Our Stories, and Our Future 

As I said at the outset: just as optimism must never harden into a belief in the inevitable, we must also refuse the narrative of despair. 

We are the authors of our own stories—and the actors who can seize the possibilities of this moment to bring a more just world into being, one that places human dignity at its center. 

Thank you.