The Concept of Legitimacy and the Crisis of Human Rights

In this article the author focuses on the concept of legitimacy and its specifics in a relation to human rights. His aim is trying to answer questions as “How are human rights in contemporary world legitimized?” “In what kind is their legitimacy specific in comparison with legitimacy of law or politic power in general?” “Does delegitimization deal with these rights?” In the first part of the text author analyses the concept of legitimacy. At first, he presents several possible definitions of legitimacy and analyses its different types. He also examines descriptive and normative attitudes to legitimacy. Instead of their definitions he also compares it with foreign conception of subjective and objective theories of legitimacy and contemplates about their advantages. Special attention is dedicated to the concept of metanarrative, which is known from theories of Jean- François Lyotard, and to the concept of infiction, which was constructed by Jiří Přibáň. The first part of the text is finished by the analysis of delegitimization. This analysis is considering differences which emerged from descriptive or normative attitudes to legitimacy. In the second part of the text the author tries to research questions of legitimacy of human rights with help of some facts and attitudes which he analyses in the first part. The author is also concentrated on the concept of legitimazation by power and effectiveness and some others approaches which try to resolve the lack of legitimacy in the area of human rights by putting emphasis on practical consensus. At the end of the work the author presents general evaluation of researching issues.