The International Human Rights Movement Today (original) (raw)

The Imperialism of Rights: Tracing the Politics and History of Human Rights

2014

Voluminous scholarship that has followed ever since the advent of human rights has failed to sufficiently undertake a non-essentialist investigation of this seemingly attractive development of human history and progress. Rather than pursue critical tensions inherent in the obvious ambiguities of human rights, both as an ideology and a practice, scholarship has been devoted to the categorization of the colonizer and the colonized without probing the contradictions that beset each category. This essay identifies the otherness of the indigenous cultures in the calculation of the paternalistic, “superior” West as a problem that not only needs a critical probe, but also deserves to be the starting point of a more historically nuanced human rights discourse. It looks at the paradoxes of a human rights regime which touts common, equal, and universal humanity, while at the same time building and maintaining measures of legal and practical differences. As a major theme of this essay, the dif...

Human Rights and Jurisdictional Trajectories: Shedding Light on the Colonial Genealogy

National Law School of India Review, 2024

International law’s tryst with colonialism has continued to have a significant bearing on the shifting sands of jurisdiction in relation to human rights enforcement. Even as the apparition of empire loomed large over Third World states, a ‘universal’ yet nonbinding catalogue of human rights had become reality with the birth of the UDHR. As recognized in Article 2 of the document, peoples of non-self-governing territories could also not be deprived of their human rights. However, hopes were belied when the ECHR, as the first binding post-War human rights instrument, was accompanied by a restrictive jurisdiction clause. The original Article 63 of the ECHR, which now reads as Article 56, conferred an unbridled discretion upon colonizing powers to bar the application of Convention safeguards to territories under their administration. When the time came to embrace an international treaty for human rights, the potential absence of a territorial application clause became a bone of contention. The subjects of conquest would consequently acquire legitimacy as right-holders in colonized territorial spaces. To offer a pushback, a surrogate ‘emergency’ provision to derogate human rights was accommodated in Article 4 of the ICCPR for providing a veneer of legality to the repression unleashed in the colonies. As the responsibility to protect doctrine gained currency as an emerging norm in the post-Cold War era, jurisdictional strategies have also undergone another transformation. By making ‘human security’ a paramount consideration to reorient state sovereignty, a clandestine mode of expansive jurisdiction has been inaugurated. The neocolonial undercurrent of R2P offers an impetus to the idea of a humanitarian emergency that is externally imposed and justified in the name of shared international responsibility.

Human Rights from a Third-World Perspective: Critique, History and International Law

""This book takes up the point of view of the colonized in order to unsettle and supplement the conventional understanding of human rights. Putting together insights coming from Decolonial Thinking, TWAIL, Radical Black Theory and Subaltern Studies, the book constructs a new history and theory of human rights, and a more comprehensive understanding of international human rights law in the background of modern colonialism and the struggle for global justice. An exercise of dialogical and interdisciplinary thinking, this collection of articles puts into conversation important areas of research on human rights, namely theory of human rights, history, and international law. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction Decolonial Strategies and Dialogue in the Human Rights Field José-Manuel Barreto …………………………………………………… Part I: Critique of the Theory of Human Rights 1. Who Speaks for the “Human” in Human Rights? Walter Mignolo ………………………………………………… 2. Provincializing Human Rights? The Heideggerian Legacy from Charles Malik to Dipesh Chakrabarty Martin Woessner ……………………………………………….. 3. The Legacy of Slavery: White Humanities and its Subject Sabine Broeck …………………………………………………… 4. “Moral Optics”: Biopolitics, Torture and the Imperial Gaze of War Photography Eduardo Mendieta ……………………………………………… Part II: Signposts for an Alternative History of Human Rights 5. Imperialism and Decolonization as Scenarios of Human Rights History José-Manuel Barreto …………………………………………… 6. Las Casas, Vitoria and Suárez, 1514-1617 Enrique Dussel ………………………………………………… 7. The Haitian Revolution and the Making of Freedom in Modernity Anthony Bogues ……………………………………………… 8. Beyond Love and Justice: Natural Law in Martin Luther King’s Beloved Community Vincent Lloyd …………………………………………………… 9. Human Rights, Southern Voices: Yash Ghai and Upendra Baxi William Twining ……………………………………………… Part III: Decolonizing Constitutional and International Human Rights Law 10. The Rule of Law in India Upendra Baxi …………………………………………………… 11. Eddie Mabo and Namibia: Land Reform and Precolonial Land Rights Nico Horn ……………………………………………………… 12. Universalizing Human Rights: The Role of Small States in the Construction of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Susan Waltz ……………………………………………………… 13. Forging a Global Culture of Human Rights: Origins and Prospects of the International Bill of Rights Zehra F. Kabasakal Arat ………………………………………… 14. Mode d’assujetissement: Charles Malik, Carlos Romulo and the Emergence of the United Nations Human Rights Regime Glenn Mitoma …………………………………………………… LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Zehra F. Kabasakal Arat is Juanita and Joseph Leff Professor and Chair of Political Science at Purchase College, State University of New York. She is the author of Democracy and Human Rights in Developing Countries (iUniverse, 2003), Human Rights Worldwide: A Reference Handbook (ABC-CLIO, 2006) and Insan Haklarý ve Demokrasi Üzerine Tezler (Boyut Yayýnlarý, 2007). José-Manuel Barreto is Visiting Fellow, Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is the author of De los Derechos, las Garantías y los Deberes (with Libardo Sarmiento, Comisión Colombiana de Juristas, 1998). His works have appeared in collections such as Critical Legal Theory (Routledge, 2011) and Critical International Law: Post-Realism, Post-Colonialism, and Transnationalism (Oxford University Press, 2012). Upendra Baxi held the position of Professor of Law at the University of Delhi and served as Professor of Law in Development, University of Warwick. His publications include The Future of Human Rights (Oxford University Press, 2012) and Human Rights in a Posthuman World: Critical Essays (Oxford University Press, 2007). Anthony Bogues is Professor of Africana Studies and Political Science, Brown University. He is the author of Caliban's Freedom: The Early Political Thought of C.L.R. James (Pluto, 1997), Black Heretics and Black Prophets: Radical Political Intellectuals (Routledge, 2003) and Empire of Liberty: Power, Freedom, and Desire (University Press of New England, 2010). Sabine Broeck is Professor of American Studies at the University of Bremen. She is the author of White Amnesia - Black Memory? Women's Writing and History (Peter Lang, 1999) and Der entkolonisierte Koerper. Die Protagonistin in der afro-amerikanischen weiblichen Erzähltradition der 30er bis 80er Jahre (Campus, 1988). She is currently President of the International Collegium for African-American Research (CAAR). Enrique Dussel is Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the Autonomous Metropolitan University, Mexico. His publications include Ethics of Liberation in the age of Globalization and Exclusion (Duke University Press, 2012), Twenty Theses on Politics (Duke University Press, 2008) and The Invention of the Americas. Eclipse of "the Other" and the Myth of Modernity (Continuum, 1995). Nico Horn is Professor in the Faculty of Law, University of Namibia. He is the author of Human Rights and the Rule of Law in Namibia (with A Bösl, MacMillan 2008) and The Human Face in the Globalizing World, Ten Years of Human Rights Education (with M.O. Hinz and C. Mchombu, University of Namibia, 2002). Vincent Lloyd is Assistant Professor of Religion, Syracuse University. He is the author of The Problem with Grace: Reconfiguring Political Theology (Stanford University Press, 2011) and Law and Transcendence: On the Unfinished Project of Gillian Rose (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Eduardo Mendieta is Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York. He is the author of Global Fragments: Latinamericanism, Globalizations, and Critical Theory (SUNY Press, 2007) and Adventures of Transcendental Philosophy: Karl-Otto Apel's Semiotics and Discourse Ethics (Rowman and Littlefield, 2002). Walter Mignolo is William Wannamaker Professor of Literature, Duke University. His publications include The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Duke University Press, 2012), The Idea of Latin America (Blackwell, 2005) and Local Histories/Global Designs (Princeton University Press, 2000). Glenn Mitoma is Assistant Professor, Human Rights Institute, University of Connecticut. His research interests include the history and contemporary working of universal human rights as discourse, structure, and practices, and is currently focused on developing a “human rights biography” of Charles H. Malik. William Twinning is Emeritus Quain Professor of Jurisprudence, University College London. His publications include General Jurisprudence: Understanding Law from a Global Perspective, (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and How to Do Things With Rules (with David Miers, CUP, 2010). He is the editor of Human Rights: Southern Voices (CUP, 2009). Susan Waltz is Professor of International Relations and Public Policy, University of Michigan. She has written “Universal Human Rights: The Contribution of Muslim States.” (Human Rights Quarterly, 2004) and “Reclaiming and Rebuilding the History of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” Third World Quarterly, 2002. She currently sits on the Board of Amnesty International-USA. Martin Woessner is Assistant Professor of History & Society, The City College of New York's Center for Worker Education (CUNY). He is the author of Heidegger in America (Cambridge University Press, 2011). ""

Imperialism and Decolonization as Scenarios of Human Rights History

This text sets some landmarks for constructing an alternative history of human rights in modernity. This narrative supplements and destabilises the standard history, which usually takes into consideration events that ocurred within the borders of Europe, and locates rights in the framework of the struggles against absolutism and totalitarianism, and in the context of the relation between governments and individuals. From the perspective of the Third World colonialism and the struggles for self-determination since the times of the Conquest of America also constitute key events in the history of modern human rights. In this horizon of understanding, rights are seen as barriers protecting individuals and peoples from the advance of empires. Moreover, not Hobbes and Grotius, but Francisco de Vitoria and Bartolomé de las Casas are postulated as precursors of modern human rights and international law. Published in Jose-Manuel Barreto, Human Rights from a Third World Perspective. Critique, History and International Law. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013.