Faced with the incessant and insistent preoccupation on the part of national and supranational institutions to promote, extend and link human rights education with education systems, it is necessary to distance ourselves and review with a certain degree of suspicion the political-discursive ways in which these projects are supported within the current system. In order to do this, in this paper, we have used the Foucauldian methodological notion of governmentality in order to highlight certain recurring practices which configure the discursive practices relating to human rights education from the realm of public policy in this issue, and which have an impact on a macro-level – from a conception of power as heterarchical – in the micro-practices of educational institutions. Revealing practices such as ´democratic system’, ‘human rights culture’, ‘citizenship training´, ‘subject of rights’, after which it is possible to examine forms of subjectivation within the power relations derived from the manner of governing.