Human Rights as an Imagined Order

Human rights are powerful not because they can be found in nature like gravity or DNA, but because human societies agree to treat them as real. They are an intersubjective order: a set of principles made durable through shared belief, institutions, laws, courts, and the willingness of people and states to organize themselves around them.

The conflict between Rodrigo Duterte and the International Criminal Court exposes what happens when one imagined order encounters another. The ICC represents an international legal system in which certain rights and crimes are considered important enough to transcend national borders. Yet within the Philippines, Duterte's political legitimacy was sustained for years by millions of people who accepted a different ordering of priorities—one in which public security, social order, and national autonomy could carry greater weight than the liberal conception of individual rights emphasized by his critics. The ICC maintains that its jurisdiction extends to alleged crimes committed while the Philippines was still a party to the Rome Statute, even after the country's later withdrawal.

This does not make either system unreal. It reveals that both depend upon human recognition. International law has power because states and institutions sustain it. National sovereignty has power because political communities sustain it. Human rights have power because people collectively decide that certain protections should bind even those who reject them. The difficult question begins when these systems disagree: which imagined order has the authority to overrule the others?

Developed from an essay originally published through TAMAD XYZ Facebook page on March 15, 2025, and revisited after writing Where Does Sovereignty End?