The human-rights turn re-sacralized state law instead of empowering nonstate norms.

Evidence

Ironically, it was the moral revulsion against the legal atrocities of the Nazi state that led, after World War II, to a renewed interest in the old natural law tradition, and that contributed in a major way to the framing of The Declaration. (It was the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal that retrospectively introduced the notion of crimes against humanity into international law.) But the condemnation of a particular state’s system of law and of its behavior in terms of norms entirely external to them led not to a recognition that nonstate norms have authority as such. They led instead to the formulation of sacred laws that must ultimately depend, as laws, on their recognition by states. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 671

Categorization

• CANDY: Punchy irony: punishing Nazi juridical evil through ‘crimes against humanity’ only reaffirmed the state’s monopoly on defining law.