40th anniversary special issue of the Nordic Journal of Human Rights (NJHR) Human rights seem to be at a crossroads and are subjected to harsh criticism quite often. According to some scholars, the idea of human rights has failed to deliver on its radical promise of emancipation. Since its inception in the aftermath of World War II, the international human rights system has evolved through a number of successive phases and, arguably, we are now in the middle of a new stage of rethinking and development. In his landmark 2005 report, In Larger Freedom, the late UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan…