Universal Human Rights and International Regimes

Abstract

Examining the literature that comes under the general rubric of ‘human rights talk’,¹ the reader is likely to suffer rapid fluctuations of mood between hope and despair. This is because of a fundamental incompatibility between accepting the principles of state sovereignty while simultaneously advocating the universal protection of human rights. The literature can be divided into two broad approaches, which I shall call the cosmopolitan and the statist. The first of these assumes that the world is currently in a state of transition from that characterised by a society of states to that more appropriately described as a world society. The culmination of this transition will see the existing principles of state sovereignty and nonintervention replaced by new principles generated by the continued expansion of complex interdependence, transnational ism, globalisation and the cosmopolitan ideal of‘one world’. Early evidence of such a transformation, it is claimed, is seen in both popular movements that spawn influential nongovernmental organisations, and in the growth of supranational organisations that develop a hierarchical character above the state.² Such an approach looks forward to fundamental changes in the international normative order, expressed in the language of ‘idealism’, and draws upon moral and philosophical literature concerned with defining, assessing and evaluating the scope of human rights as a basis of analysis and subsequent action. It is thus an ‘open’ discourse in that its focus is the legitimation of values, principles and norms in a social environment where disagreement and contestability are the inevitable result of social dynamism.³