Abstract

The aim of this article is to contextualize the right to peace in the practice of human rights and to examine its evolution in the last sixty years. Three phases can be identified. At the very beginning, peace was the propelling force of establishing the practice of protecting human rights, but very soon other compelling needs replaced it, mainly the right of Peoples to self-determination during the age of decolonization. The last development of the relationships between rights and peace regards the exaltation of human rights as just causes for wars. This paradoxical development can be considered a defective shift for human rights, not only from the point of view of the very meaning of the practice of human rights, but also from the point of view of the legal transformation that human rights aimed at implementing at their origins.