1 where / the rift is, the break is

In its bones international human rights law holds a story that has been retold again and again over millennia. Like Cinderella, its story ‘can be told in many different ways, and the details vary, but its fabula or bones remain the same’. Whatever way it is told, whatever idea-systems used to support its existence, we, as Hersch Lauterpacht discerns, you and me, are its material source. In part 1, I hold out the golden bough to you, dear reader, and step into the shadows: the half-light and failing-light. Here, I begin by telling not just what’s in the story, but what created it. The darkness, the beauty it deflects, and the silences and absences left behind.

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