The Coloniality of LAW: Constitutionalism and Human Rights

Human rights are usually and traditionally understood as an outcome of the political and legal context of modernity, which did not take into account the existence of other subjects besides the abstract and ideal individual, other kinds of knowledge and other forms of structuring power. It is in this perspective that we intend, applying the historical-dialectical method and undertaking bibliographical research, to deepen the knowledge on the critical perspective on human rights and on constitutionalism itself, with the aim to highlight the obscure side to colonialism, which has been obfuscated by modern hegemonic thinking. The decolonial perspective, as it points to the unveiling of the dominion over the non-European other and to the universalism of Eurocentrism as a way of being, of knowing and of exerting power, can demonstrate the inconsistencies of the dominant perspective on law and especially on human rights and their low effectiveness.