Chapter 1 • International Human Rights Law and the Role of the Legal Professions: A General Introduction 5. The Role of the Legal Professions in the Implementation of Human Rights As a consequence of legal developments over the last few decades, human rights have ceased to be a “fringe activity”, instead becoming “an area of law which is fundamental to everyone and which permeates all legal activity, economic and social, in public law and in private”.60 In a particularly interesting recent development, the “pervasive importance of human rights law” to corporations and business lawyers has also been recognized.61 Yet, whilst the influence of international human rights law on many dimensions of domestic law is thus steadily gaining ground, its true potential still remains to be explored.62 It is the professional role and duty of judges, prosecutors and lawyers throughout the world to explore this potential, and at all times to use their respective competences to ensure that a just rule of law prevails, including respect for the rights of the individual. Whilst this entire Manual focuses on providing knowledge and guidance to the legal professions in their daily work, Chapter 4 will focus on the specific rules and principles conditioning the work of judges, prosecutors and lawyers. These rules and principles have to be consistently and meticulously applied, since judges, prosecutors and lawyers perhaps have the single most important role to play in applying national and international human rights law. Their work constitutes the chief pillar of the effective legal protection of human rights, without which the noble principles aimed at protecting the individual against the abuse of power are likely to be sapped of much or even all of their significance. 6. Concluding Remarks The present chapter has provided a synopsis of the modern development of the international protection of the human person, which originated in a devastated world’s yearning for peaceful, secure and just domestic and international legal orders. Further, it has explained some of the basic legal notions relevant to international human rights law and offered a description, however general, of the role to be played by the legal professions within their respective fields of competence in order to be able effectively to use the legal tools available to protect the human person against abuses of power. We shall now turn to a succinct examination of the terms and functioning of the major existing universal and regional human rights conventions. 60 See editorial of Lord Goldsmith QC and Nicholas R. Cowdery QC, “The Role of the Lawyer in Human Rights”, in HRI News (Newsletter of the IBA Human Rights Institute), vol. 4, No. 2, 1999, p. 1. 61 Ibid., loc. cit. See also Nicholas R. Cowdery QC, “Human Rights in Commercial Practice – an IBA Perspective”, ibid., pp. 16-18, and Stephen Bottomley, “Corporations and Human Rights”, ibid., pp. 19-22. 62 See reference to speech of Justice Kirby, ibid., p. 10. Human Rights in the Administration of Justice: A Manual on Human Rights for Judges, Prosecutors and Lawyers 25