Chairs:

• Magdalena Correa Henao magdalena.correa@uexternado.edu.co
• ZHU Guobin lwzhugb@cityu.edu.hk

Throughout the history of liberal democracies and fundamental (human) rights, references to human duties have been recurrent in constitutions and treaties, but their substantive development has remained very limited. Moreover, the concept of human duties is problematic because, rather than complementing human rights theory, it is often posed as a substitute formula or interpreted as rendering rights inherently limitable. This issue stems from the moral, political, and legal foundations of liberal, social, and even postsocial constitutionalism. Indeed, individualism prevails, and it is rights—not duties— that define the relationship between individuals and the State, as well as among individuals themselves.

Representative democracy remains the primary democratic mechanism. The principle of legality continues to safeguard liberty; thus, although the law (in a material sense) is no longer the supreme norm, it retains its role as the foundational legal source of rights. Consequently, the idea of fundamental or human duties could be risky insofar as they lack the clarity afforded by legal mandates that limit or delineate rights and freedoms. However, alongside the discourse widely accepted in liberal democracies, a separate/distinct scenario and narrative of human duties has been developed in former socialist countries in Central and Eastern Europe and in todays’ authoritarian countries. Human duties have been constitutionalized and implemented in national laws and policies. As a matter of practice, human duties as social construct often marginalize, prevail or substitute human rights, and the latter submits to the former.