Three Generations of International Human Rights Governance

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Abstract

Among global security regimes, the international human rights regime stands out for its importance and ineffectiveness. Human rights are strongly linked to both international and domestic peace, as well as human security. Yet, progress towards guaranteeing even the most basic political, civil and socio-economic rights for all people has been fitful and partial. Multilateral efforts, mainly within the UN, to promote human rights through standard-setting and voluntary compliance measures have made little difference, especially in the most repressive contexts where it matters most. Attempts by the Western-led human rights movement to strengthen the regime through policies of naming, shaming, and sanctions have not fared much better, and in fact have often done more harm than good. In this chapter, I critically review the existing international human rights regime and argue, theoretically as well as empirically, for the need to further develop and strengthen a new and complementary approach to promoting human rights. This approach, which I call ‘principled engagement’, acknowledges the importance in the absence of a central authority or world government of ensuring states’ voluntary compliance with international human rights norms, but seeks to ‘give teeth’ to the existing multilateral regime through much stronger and deeper engagement on the ground in repressive states. It does not deny the potential usefulness of strong international pressure on repressive states to help create the space for such engagement, but emphasises the advantages of ‘mediation’ over coercion.

Keywords

Target State Authoritarian Regime Human Security Target Country Repressive State 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Copyright information

© The Author(s) 2017

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.School of Humanities and Social SciencesUniversity of New South WalesCanberraAustralia

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