The Future of Human Rights in a Global Order of Change and Continuity (original) (raw)
Related papers
Human Rights in the Emerging World Order
This article has been published by the journal Transnational Legal Theory (http://www.hartjournals.co.uk/TLT). The article is an expanded and revised version of the lecture I gave at the opening plenary session of the 24th IVR World Congress in Beijing, September 2009, which was entitled and previously uploaded as ‘Human Rights in a New World Order.’ The unrevised ‘Human Rights in a New World Order’ speech will appear in the IVR proceedings as well as in translation in Chinese. The present article is made available for download here immediately after publication by special arrangement with the journal. The article is a reflection on the importance and some of the problems involved with the practice of human rights in international relations in the age of globalization. Beginning with rights in general to claim that their justification is in protecting and advancing individual interest, and distributing power to individuals. This is the main distinctive contribution of human rights in the international arena: they empower individuals, and voluntary organizations, endowing them with a voice alongside states and multinational corporations, and creating an additional channel of political action. I argue that human rights recognized in human rights law and practice are not universal rights, but they are syncronically universal, pertaining to all human beings alive today. I explain and justify that feature by the fact that human rights set a limit to state sovereignty. This fact makes clear the importance of impartial, efficient and reliable institutions for administering and enforcing human rights. Where such institutions are impossible there are no human right. Even when they are possible we face the risk that the practice of human rights would lead to an international regime which is blind to cultural diversity, and tends to serve the interests of big businesses and nothing more. This - I claim - is not something inseparable from the idea of human rights, but it confronts its practice with as yet unresolved problems. The human rights to education and to health are used to illustrate the points made in the paper.
Globalization has been a popular subject for decades and addressed in a wide variety of academic studies and popular readings. Scholars and advocates who work in the expanding field of human rights have been no exception and have contributed to the burgeoning literature on globalization. The Globalization of Human Rights and Globalization and Human Rights are two welcome additions to this body of literature. As their titles imply, the two volumes attempt to emphasize relatively different aspects of the relationship between two terms: globalization and human rights. Both volumes are undertaken with an understanding that there has been an increasing international acceptance of human rights at the normative level, but that the norms have not been applied to improve human rights conditions, and their meanings and relevance are contested. As the literature that came out in the 1990s pointed to state sovereignty as the main obstacle to globalization and raised hopes about transnational civil society and networks, 1 these two volumes examine a broader set of actors and the processes of globalization in addressing the practice and prospects of human rights.
Introduction: Global Human Rights Law and the Boundaries of Statehood
This is the introduction to a Special Issue of the Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies on 'Global Human Rights Law and the Boundaries of Statehood', with contributions by Upendra Baxi, Fleur Johns, Larry Cata-Backer, Claire Cutler, Sheldon Leader, David Bilchitz, Radu Mares, Hans Lindahl, Daniel Augenstein, and Neil Walker. One of the virtues of the more recent ‘business and human rights’ debate – most prominently the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) endorsed by the Human Rights Council in June 2011 – is that it has documented in considerable detail the significant impacts of global business operations on human rights protection in the international order of states. In response, many ‘global’ approaches to human rights protection suggest – whether explicitly or implicitly – a radical departure from human rights law’s state-centred heritage. As human rights impacts escape the state’s public and territorial authority, new private and trans-national human rights regimes emerge that fly under the radar of the state legal order yet contribute to further undermining the hegemony of its (constitutional and international) human rights law. The principal aim of the essays collected in this Special Issue, by contrast, is to examine how human rights responses to violations committed in the course of global business operations transform the boundaries of statehood constitutive of the state-centered conception of international human rights law. A guiding concern in examining this transformation is to recover the public and political nature of human rights law under conditions of globalisation.
The Jurisprudence of Human Rights in a Global Context
The International Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities Invention
This paper is a study of the conceptual dimensions of human rights gleaned from the writings of scholars and jurists, judicial precedent, and domestic and international human rights instruments, particularly under the United Nations System. Human rights have become an international subject and have today attained the status of a jus cogens rule of international law. The need to determine and clarify the history and dynamics of this subject has given impetus and inspiration to this paper. Applying a theoretical and doctrinal methodology, the paper set out to appraise the different dimensions, and for that matter ramifications, to the concept of human rights and how they affect our everyday life. The paper found, among other things, that human rights law and its observance are much more entrenched at the international forum than in domestic jurisdictions. The paper concluded that human rights issues are no longer a matter of domestic affairs of any nation in the light of extant intern...
Human Rights: Effectiveness of International and Regional Mechanisms
This chapter examines the study of human rights regimes in the field of International Relations (IR). In particular, it explores the links between theories of regimes (how are the origins, development and effects of regimes on politics explained?) on the one hand, and the evolving norms and practices of human rights embedded within the institutions of international and global society on the other. Despite the ubiquitous institutional presence of human rights in world politics, the subject of human rights regimes remains somewhat elusive. The first section therefore seeks to give a general overview of how the study of human rights regimes has developed at the interface between IR and international law with a view to outlining the subject of research; to survey the main approaches adopted; to give a sense of why regimes matter and to what extent they could be understood to be ‘effective’. In particular, the implications of the analytical shift from the inter-state dynamics of international society to its transnational dimensions for the study of human rights regimes are outlined. Building on this last point, the second section explores the ways in which the norms and practices of global human rights institutions have evolved since the Second World War and into the age of globalisation. The focus here is on the institutionalization of human rights globally through the United Nations system and the connections between the development over time of international human rights institutions on the one hand and their relative effectiveness in shaping human rights behaviour on the other. Against this global background, the third section examines the comparative development of regional human rights regimes. Particular emphasis is put on the role and influence of regionalism in shaping the development and impact of international human rights law and policy.
Global Protection of Human Rights: Aspirations, Challenges and Reflections
US-China Law Review, 2015
This paper appraised the impact of the International Bill of Rights on the promotion and protection of human rights across the globe. The paper examined the concept of international human rights, its global exchange and attempts to institutionalize its principles for the protection of individuals as a matter of universal validity in contemporary times. The author observed that in spite of arguments to the contrary, international human rights standards as set out in the International Bill of Rights have assumed the status of international customary law. The paper discloses that whatever the aspirations of the drafters however, violations of human rights stills persist in virtually all nations of the world some six decades after the adoption of the international documents for the universal protection of human rights were initiated on the floor of the United Nations.
The Human Rights State: Theoretical challenges, empirical deployments: Reply to my critics (2017)
I respond to a broad range of challenges that the seven articles of this special issue (The International Journal of Human Rights, vol. 21, no. 3, 2017, pages 219-386) raise for the theory of a human rights state. The first two articles address the theory as a whole. The first reconfigures the human rights state as an analytical tool for measuring implementation. I counter that such measurement is not possible without normative interpretation. The second article insists that any human rights project can only be valid if valid transcendentally. By contrast, I advocate validity as a this-worldly project undertaken by the addressees themselves. The next three articles examine what happens when the model is deployed empirically. One imagines a Mexican human rights state for indigenous peoples that would develop local structures of autonomy and self-governance. While the author proposes communal agency and cultural unity, I discuss the danger that collective rights pose to the rights of individual members. Another article sketches a Brazilian human rights state that would diminish social authoritarianism, incorporate international human rights law within the state, and transform an authoritarian culture. But if the human rights in question are self-authored, as I advocate, then they are not gifts of international law, as the author asserts. The last of this set describes a Bosnian-Herzegovinian human rights state that would preclude the ethnic instrumentalization of religion. But the common ethos sought by this model is itself open to manipulation and could undermine individual autonomy. The final two articles probe the possibility of a moral universalism that both regard as simply given. One champions a human right to democracy and finds that right embedded in various international human rights instruments. I contend that the rule of law, more so than democracy, facilitates the human rights project. The other article draws on a human rights cognitive style yet rejects what, given the practical imperative of localism, I argue is key to that approach: moral relativism. I conclude by sketching the variety of future research programs on the idea and practice of a human rights state that flow from the contributions to this special issue.