Fabio Marcelli
 

The issue of rights is truly crucial for the future of international law. Their fruitful application requires the solution of five strategic and preliminary questions. The first concerns the need to prevent rights themselves, and especially the so-called civil and political ones, from being brandished as a propaganda weapon to support the superiority of a given system over another. The second question, which is intimately linked to the one just stated, concerns the need to ensure that the catalogue of rights set out and the specific characteristics of each of them are not affected by culturally unilateral approaches but instead reflect in the best possible way the profoundly multicultural nature that the international legal system is acquiring after several centuries of exasperated Eurocentrism. The third question then derives from the conditioning exercised by the dominant economic system, which primarily affects the so-called economic, social and cultural rights, but are obviously reflected in all rights, given the undeniable unity of the concept and the existence of multiple links between those of this kind and the others. The fourth question concerns the necessary distinction to be made between fundamental rights and property rights, which cannot be placed on the same plan. The fifth question consists in the very close connection between rights of one or the other kind. International cooperation, sixth question, is of primordial importance in order to satisfy global human rights, since a concerted approach among different States is necessary in order to cope with the many challenges of globalization. Therefore, seventh question, the present climate of war at global level represents an unprecedented threat to human rights, because the crisis focused on the Ukrainian conflict puts in danger the very survival of the human species, but also because it interrupts the necessary cooperation at global level for the satisfaction of human rights, delineating the passage to a model based on different international communities distinct and in struggle among themselves. The main achievement of international law in recent years has been the affirmation of unity between human rights of various kinds accomplished by the Vienna Conference in 1993, overcoming the previous discrepancy between civil and political rights on the one hand and economic, social and cultural rights on the other. Our task is today that of going forward on this path, posing global human rights, in all their multifaceted dimensions, as the content of the new multipolar government of the international society.