Publication

This paper attributes the weakening of human rights to the gradual disappearance of the person as the subject of rights in contemporary legal systems. It argues that this vanishing legal personhood is not the side-effect, but the natural outcome of the prevalence of the risk-focused mindset in both the crime control and the human rights realm since the late 1970s. The author describes the key features of the risk-focused mindset in order to show how they jeopardize or even negate personhood, and how they correlate with certain deep changes in the legal frame of the protection of human rights in a democracy.