This paper analyses the university students' social representations of human rights involvement and the relationship of these representations with the students' political positioning. A study carried out with 400 students of João Pessoa shows that the representation of human rights involvement can be analyzed from 4 dimensions: personal-abstract, personal-concrete, governmental-abstract and governmental-concrete. On the whole, students regard their real involvement in Human Rights is superior to the Brazilian government involvement. However, in the abstract order of how it should be, they consider that enforcing the rights is government responsibility. It is also shown that there is a positive relationship between students' political activism and Human Rights involvement. Finally, as far as political parties are concerned, it is observed that political sympathy with PMDB correlates positively with the belief that the Brazilian government is really concerned with Human Rights, whereas political sympathy with PT has negative correlation with that belief.
Social representations; human rights; political ideology
