The Chilean National Institute of Human Rights: its challenges to advance towards an integrated vision in the discourse and practice of human rights in Chile

Abstract

When they are set up, domestic mechanisms that promote and protect human rights need to not only deal with issues of management and institutional positioning that all new organisms face, they must also deal with the context into which they are inserted and with the history that precedes them in matters of human rights. It is within this framework that the National Institute of Human Rights set as a goal for its first term the addressing of three sets of issues that, from a discursive and a practical standpoint, limit an integrated vision of human rights in Chile: the difficulty faced by Chile to incorporate international human rights law in the context of globalization; the existing tension between the historical experience of human rights lived by Chileans during the dictatorship and the need to widen the field of the promotion and protection of human rights under democracy; and the absence of a broad understanding of human rights that takes into account their indivisibility and interdependence within a discursive framework that denies the validity of economic and social rights as rights and that fails to significantly take into account a modern view of the principle of equality and non-discrimination that is geared towards the protection of structurally discriminated groups.