Sustainable Development Rights? : Human rights language in development discourse

Sammanfattning: This paper deals with the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals of 2015. I examine the role of human rights language in the Sustainable Development Agenda in order to uncover the relation between sustainable development discourse and human rights discourse. Consid-ering discourse a practice I question the position of human rights internationally. I argue that human rights language is absent in the Agenda due to the reluctance of Member States to commit to legally binding obligations. Furthermore, I argue that human rights language is a moral practice itself, which frames, represents and changes the social practice of human rights as a whole. The usefulness and effectiveness of the human rights language varies with the context due to its highly politicized character and the limitations incorporated in the language and doctrine. I conclude that the Agenda and Goals could have benefitted from the use of hu-man rights language in terms of legitimizing and distributing responsibility.