1968 is remembered as the year of the barricades: revolution swept the world as students, women, colonial and indigenous peoples threw off historic oppressions and claimed long-demanded rights. While today such movements are painted in the broad strokes of human rights, the term’s absence from the 1968 vocabulary is stark, despite the year being named the United Nations International Year of Human Rights to commemorate the twenty year anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In this paper I explore how the Australian government and emerging human rights NGO Amnesty International engaged with the term in this International Year. The conservative Australian government and its Minister for Foreign Affairs, Paul Hasluck, made no secret of what was held to be human rights’ undue privileging of “emotional” racial matters rather than “objective and rational” individual freedoms. Australian Amnesty International members, on the other hand, found themselves in a tense internal standoff over the status of Vietnam War contentious objectors: were their human rights being violated, or was theirs merely an unfounded “right to disobey”? The year demonstrated not renewed commitment to a universal ideal, but instead revealed “a discouraging disclosure of the wide field of international contention” human rights engendered.