Human rights are supposed to be universal, both in the meaning that they are entitled to all human beings and that their validity ought to be acknowledged by everybody, across the time and the different cultures. But the genealogy of rights reveals their particularistic origin and shows a series of paradoxes: e. g. the concept of ius as a universal faculty and a power by individuals has been developed in order to legitimize the absolute power and the conquest of America. In contemporary thought such a universality has been contested by an impressive series of historians, philosophers, anthropologists, social theorists. But one could reconstruct a different genealogy in which rights are the offspring of social and political conflict, and the expression of the activity of claiming. In such a sense, rights can constitute a language of emancipation, even beyond the cultural context in which they have been originally theorized ad legally implemented.