Abstract
In the recent years, there has been a new trend in discussions about human rights, the misappropriation of human rights language for matters that are not really relevant. In this article, we looked at this phenomenon through the example of how the European far right began labeling all kinds of things as human rights violations. The examples ranged from the censuring of racist texts as violation of the right to free speech, which is a stretch, to very far-fetched ideas such as immigration or building a place of worship being a human rights violation. We collected examples from various European far-right groups, such as the French Rassemblement National (RN) and Nouvelle Droite, the German Alternativ für Deutschland (AfD), PEGIDA, National Democratic Party (NDP), Identitäre Bewegung(IB), and the Finnish Finns party and extremist groups such as Suomen Sisu. Instead of just saying that these are almost without fail false claims of human rights violations, we categorized the different references to human rights and attempted to trace the lineage of them to earlier developments. What we discovered is that many of them utilize a Nazi era legal doctrine called relative human rights, in which human rights are not seen as belonging to everyone, but rather something reserved to members of a certain ethnic group or nationality. What remains mystifying is how groups who advocate for racism, anti-Semitism, anti-immigration xenophobia, identitarianism and ethno-nationalism are able to portray themselves as protectors of human rights, in blatant contradiction to the actual content of human rights.
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