Human security has been qualified as "the emerging paradigm for understanding global vulnerabilities". Articulated by UN and regional bodies over the last twenty years, its person-centred axis of freedom from fear, from want and to live in dignity and its protection and empowerment strategies, suggest communicating bridges with human rights law. However, this connection has seldom been explored at a deeper level that transcends human rights as discourse or token. This thesis analyses whether human security may provide tools for an expansive and integrated legal interpretation of international human rights, state and non-state obligations in the context of structural vulnerability; and whether a gendered and human rights-based approach can more accurately define the scope of human security and the types of violence and deprivation it considers. Thus, on the basis of an initial interdisciplinary research, this thesis maps and critically evaluates the expressions of human security/human rights interaction in international law, particularly human rights law, with a cross-cutting emphasis on socio-economic vulnerabilities as authentic security concerns. Then it explores the practical applications of the human security/human rights symbiosis in the legal analysis of two thematic cores: 1) violence against women and girls, and 2) undocumented migrants and other non-citizens; throughout the UN, and the Inter-American, European, and African systems of human rights. In the last chapter, the thesis extrapolates this evidence to reveal and propose ways in which human security is and can be relevant to human rights law, and how human rights standards and indicators can deliver a needed more precise, normatively grounded and operational conception of human security. These identified 'interpretative synergies' offer promise for shifting the boundaries of international human rights law: in constructing integrative approaches to fill legal gaps, better preventing and addressing protectively collective threats, and creating an 'enabling environment' to fulfil all human rights, especially, for those not only confronting isolated moments of risk or individual human rights violations, but rather conditions of structural vulnerability affecting their everyday lives.