The very idea that all human beings have inalienable rights, and that humanity is distinctive and precious, is under serious assault.

This year threatens to be the one that makes or breaks the unique moral commitment to human rights that has underpinned, even when flawed, the global order for the past 80 years.

Instead, the message sent around the world by bombastic leaders, acted out by mobs, armies and militias and embedded into the technology that shapes daily life, is that some people are less than human, deserve less empathy, compassion, opportunity or even physical safety.

This is potentially even more dangerous than the implosion of the “international rules-based order”. It normalises heinous behaviour towards other human beings in a world that has never had greater capacity for self-destruction.

You hear it everywhere. The tone is set when the US president declares some people are scum or a Cameroonian “freedom fighter” succinctly says his opponents “don’t see us as human. Likewise we don’t see them as [human].”

Australia, thanks to the work of Labor party leader Doc Evatt, was one of the midwives of the UN declaration of human rights. But Australia remains the only liberal democracy not to have adopted its own constitutional or statutory bill of rights. Instead there is a patchwork of local laws and international........

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