Social work, human rights and ethics

Social work has embraced the idea of human rights. They are clearly positioned as foundational to ethical practice with many scholars arguing that social work is a human rights profession. This chapter provides an overview of human rights and its relationship with ethical social work practice. It explores the idea of human rights in depth before moving onto an examination of the position of human rights as a foundational principle for ethical practice. It concludes with an examination of human rights in the scholarly social work literature and proposes a critical human rights–based approach to practice. This chapter argues that despite the conceptual challenges associated with the idea of human rights and the human rights discourse, human rights nonetheless provide a strong foundation for ethical practice that challenges the inequality, exploitation, domination, and oppression experienced by people and communities around the world.