2023 marked the 75th anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations General Assembly. As an idea, human rights have existed far longer. Theoretical debates about an idea of a right to which all people are equally entitled, irrespective of their descent or social status, date back to the discourses on natural law in the 17th and 18th centuries. However, human rights are not a supra-temporal idea. Instead, they are a specifically modern achievement whose emancipatory potential is far from being realized: today, millions of people, especially stateless persons, refugees, women and LGBTQI* are still not protected by human rights to the same extent as other groups, even in the states that have recognized them. Human rights are to be grasped as a ‘traveling idea’ (Saïd 1983) which has not yet reached its goal – either theoretically or practically – and should therefore continue to be the subject of scholarly research and public debate across the globe. In my contribution, I show that the idea of human rights is not so much about travel in temporal or territorial terms. Rather, at present, the genuine political meaning of contemporary human rights needs to be explained from their historical European-Eurocentric context of origin as an existing desideratum for political theory, which is my field of research. Recent discussions suggest that the idea of human rights urgently needs new, revitalizing impulses for its practical future viability in order to be better understood and realized.