This volume presents human rights in action, focusing on their effectiveness as legal tools designed to benefit human beings. By combining conceptual analysis with an emphasis on procedures and mechanisms of implementation, it provides a multidimensional overview of human rights. After examining briefly the history of human rights, the author analyses the intellectual framework that forms the basis of their legitimacy. In particular, he covers the concept of universality and the widely used model that classifies human rights into clusters of different generations. The volume then moves on to analyse the activities of the political institutions of the United Nations, the expert bodies established by the relevant treaties and the international tribunals specifically entrusted at the regional level with protecting human rights. The author explains how and why in recent years, the classical array of politically inspired informal devices has been enriched by the addition of international criminal procedures and by endeavours to introduce civil suits against alleged individual violators of human rights.