It is not only ideology that shapes human rights discourse but also reference points, 'best examples', cases that at their most successful combine a victim, a perpetrator and a right.
Are we caught between support for liberal intervention which often has disastrous, unintended, but often foreseeable consequences, on the one hand, and an anti-interventionism where we simply ignore the repression faced by many people, on the other?
The ECHR still struggles to reconcile effective rights with the deep structures of a market economy.
Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Human rights discourse relies on an abstracted human who is too often male and white. The challenge is to develop a human rights politics that is inclusive without obliterating differences.
Liberal relativism that celebrates civil and political rights is a neo-colonial construct which should be understood as such. What we see is really competing relativisms prioritised by the whims of private and public donors.
From within the liberal imaginary, human rights appear to be something that ‘we cannot not want’, even though they cannot give us what we want.
The rights-bearing individual emancipated us from feudal absolutism in Europe. But that historical moment has passed with empire, and has the language of rights now lost its relevance?
Latin American constitutions are exemplary in going beyond liberalism in the way they formulate human rights. But they are at the same time illiberal in the powers they afford the executive to limit political freedoms.
Human rights are a hybrid of liberal law, morality and politics. Their ideological power lies in their ambiguity, not in their adherence to liberal values of individual freedom.
Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Human rights have often been critiqued for their abstract universal claims, but human rights approaches are now beginning to lose their universalist baggage in the shift towards more pragmatic approaches of community empowerment. A response to
Are human rights nothing but liberal? If so, how do we understand mobilisations for human rights against neoliberal marketization?
