International human rights norms have been advancing since the establishment of the UN, which included the promotion of human rights as a goal in its Charter. The current studies on human rights norms tend to explore how international norms have been developed, adopted by states, used by advocacy groups, or challenged by states and non-state actors. The tendency is to treat international human rights norms as external to societies, especially to developing countries. This paper is based on a comprehensive study that questions the merits of this “external treatment” and examines human rights norm development at the intersection of domestic and international politics through a longitudinal study of Turkey. Turkey has been engaged in the UN-led and European human rights regimes early on, joined the ILO in 1932, and is an original signatory of the Helsinki Final Act (1975) of the OSCE, that upholds “respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms” as one of its ten guiding principles. Despite these engagements, however, Turkey maintained an inconsistent and problematic human rights record. Focusing on human rights norms, the project examines the articulation of human rights by political parties and governments in their programs during the 1920-2018 period, when Turkey maintained some form of parliamentary system. It includes the analysis of 66 government programs and 102 party programs issued by 63 major political parties represented in the parliament or received attention in the media. It involves manifest and latent content analyses of these two sets of documents to identify: (1) when “human rights,” as a term, appears in each program; (2) which specific rights (e.g., freedom of press, the right to education) or rights of vulnerable/marginalized groups (e.g., the rights of children, women, disabled) are spelled out and gained frequency; (3) if rights are mentioned favorably or critically; (4) if there is a variation in the human discourse of ideologically distinct parties; (5) the extent to which party programs inform the government programs; (6) if there is a discernable pattern of change in the discourse of parties and governments; and (7) what factors – national and international – might have triggered changes. The paper presents some selective findings of this comprehensive study and provides evidence that in addition to adopting international human rights norms, governments and especially political also generate new norms in response to the national political developments and human rights practices.