Soziale Arbeit als "Menschenrechtsprofession"

What is the supposed, and especially recently within the profession much discussed, connection between human rights and the social work profession? How should one interpret the profession’s discourse about whether or not it wants to understand itself as a human rights profession? The work at hand attempts to make a small contribution towards answering these and similar questions.
In order to do this, the first part of this work starts out discussing human rights on the one hand and social work on the other hand separately from each other (each discussion taking into account the implications of terminology, history and current issues). Using the theoretical background knowledge gained from this first part, (historical) connections and similarities between human rights and social work are then analyzed in order to introduce the second part of this work, in which at first the previously mentioned existing social work profession’s discourse about inherently being a human rights profession is systematically presented. Thereafter, possible implications of a self-definition as a human rights profession are discussed, primarily in regards to the issues of human rights education as well as social work practice.
With this, the initial question of if and how social work can be understood as a human rights profession ultimately becomes answerable. Again, the implications of human rights based social work are discussed for both the theoretical and the applied sides of the profession.