2012. Beck, Colin J., Gili S. Drori, and John W. Meyer. “World Influences on Human Rights Language in Constitutions: A Cross-National Study.” International Sociology 27(4): 483-501. (original) (raw)
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World Influences on Human Rights Language in Constitutions: A Cross-National Study
International Sociology, 2012
A recent movement has extended previous emphases on the rights of national citizens by asserting the global human rights of all persons. This article describes the extent to which this change is reflected in the language of national constitutions around the world. Human rights language – formerly absent from almost all constitutions – now appears in most of them. Rather than characterizing developed or democratic states, human rights language is, first, especially common in countries most susceptible to global influences. Second, human rights language is driven by the extent of the international human rights regime at the time of a constitution’s writing. Third, human rights language tends to appear in newer constitutions and in the constitutions of emergent and reorganized states. National constitutions are imprinted with global social conditions, which now stress the discourse of human rights.
Constitutions in World Society: A New Measure of Human Rights
Constitutions, once thought of as distinctly national documents, are now recognized as being written, adopted, and amended in conversation with national laws of other societies, international organizations, and transnational legal orders. This paper situates constitutions in the post-World War II growth of world society, examining trends in provisions for human rights. Human rights language and law, once absent from almost all constitutions, now appears in most of them. We argue that this striking change is driven by global-transnational processes as much as by national conditions. We introduce a measure of human rights in constitutions based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and data from the Comparative Constitutions Project. Results of analyses verify the robustness of the measure and support a global-transnational account of human rights inclusion in constitutions.
Current Sociology , 2016
Recent decades are marked by an impressive expansion of actors and legal structures intended to globally extend a certain 'Western' catalog of human rights. Recently, too, legal scholars have developed concepts to justify normatively the expansion of human rights (e.g. Habermas, Walker, Koskenniemi). This article reviews recent legal literature on global constitutionalization of human rights to reveal its blind spots, at two levels: i) the reaffirmation of European precedency for establishing the sources of human rights and ii) a lack of sociological tools for describing interpenetrations between law, power and social inequalities. In order to empirically illustrate these objections, the article analyses the recent global expansion of human rights of minorities, using two examples: cases treated by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the Brazilian legalization of ancestral territories of afro-descendants. Finally, the article argues for a decentered perspective that (at the local level) connects human rights with concrete claims for justice.
A Constitution for Human Rights: Between Abstract Principles and Social Transformation
The aim of this Working Paper is to assess the relevance of the hegemonic constitutional perspective on human rights. It argues that, detached from other social and political considerations, it is not effective in securing its own standards for humanity. A constitution alone cannot transform society by means of legal commands and discourses. It demands a more thorough involvement and transformation of social and political structures for effect. While most of the literature on the field has been focused on the constitutionalisation of rights, particularly after the boom of international human rights law, this paper aims to explore what follows the constitutional incorporation and social implementation of rights. To do that, this analysis will look critically to the process of constitutional inclusion and assess whether it has had a positive or negative impact on rights implementation and social transformation. For a better understanding of the relationship between rights and constitution, three different theories will be drawn on: social, political, and legal schools of thought. One of the goals of this work is to reject a hierarchical approach to rights and constitutions, on the one hand, and the democratic polity on the other, and to refocus the question more holistically how human rights are, or ought to be, about social transformation.