Globalizing Human Rights: The Work of Transnational Human Rights NGOs in the 1990s

Reviewed by: The International Human Rights Movement: A History by Aryeh Neier Wendy H. Wong (bio) Aryeh Neier , The International Human Rights Movement: A History (Princeton University Press 2012), 379 pages, ISBN No. 978-0-6911-3515-1. A number of important books in the field of human rights have attempted to trace the long history of the phenomenon (and importance) of rights in the political and social history of human civilizations.1 Aryeh Neier's The International Human Rights Movement: A History fundamentally shifts the focus of such discussions, electing instead to focus mostly on post-World War II developments and the global shift towards a human rights oriented world. The book takes its place in the burgeoning bibliography of books that offers a history of human rights, which speaks in itself to the rising importance of the topic across a variety of academic fields. It makes two contributions. First, it adds to the understanding that human rights as we know them today have unfurled most dramatically and most relevantly since the end of World War II.2 Second, Neier's emphasis on non-state actors and, in particular, the nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that helped reify the human rights project from aspirational international law to practical policies places it among the few sweeping histories of the work, highlighting the role of an international movement in disseminating the human rights regime.3 In these two senses, Neier's version of how we should understand where human rights come from and where they are going should be a primer for anyone starting the study of human rights. Given the growing interest of recent publications in the role that non-state actors play in the construction of human rights, Neier's book is a classic statement of a growing theme in both public and scholarly imaginations.4 Neier's basic thesis is that the international human rights movement has been the most important catalyst in securing human rights throughout the world in the past thirty-five years. He proceeds in the book to provide ample [End Page 804] evidence for why NGOs have affected human rights outcomes. Neier's credible analysis stems from a place of personal investment in the subject matter; after all, he served as Human Rights Watch's founding Executive Director and shaped the politics of human rights in the United States during some of the key moments of inconsistency in the Reagan administration. Neier's book brings to life the contributions of not only the organization dear to his heart, but also traces the history of Amnesty International and other lesser known human rights NGOs working in the US, including: Human Rights First, Physicians for Human Rights, The Committee to Protect Journalists, Global Rights, and others. Neier also discusses non-US-based NGOs. These stories serve to demonstrate the diversity of views and strategies within the worldwide human rights movement, and in turn, Neier gives smaller groups a platform. This is an important achievement of the book, as to date most scholarly examinations have focused on larger, politically salient groups, thereby giving a rather skewed view of international human rights work. As much as this book notes the importance of NGOs, it is also quite clear that Neier did not simply wish to tell a story of NGOs in international human rights politics; instead, he sought to draw a more complete picture by bringing in a broader discussion of human rights beyond non-state actors. In a later chapter, for instance, Neier tackles what he sees as a major goal of the international human rights movement in more recent years: how to hold states accountable for their most grave of abuses. It is in this discussion of the International Criminal Court and other such institutions of accountability that Neier's account of the role of NGOs gets a bit muddled. What exactly is the role of NGOs once tribunals like the ICC get established? Is the work of global activism pertaining to the realization of accountability for human rights abuses, at least the most atrocious of abuses, somewhat resolved now that states have decided to create their own international institutions? The desire to "go beyond" non-state actors...

From the mid-1960s, Brazilian and European activists collaborated to raise awareness about human rights violations in Brazil, which at the time was under an authoritarian military regime. From reports on torture, to week-long conferences, cultural events, boycotts, petitions and protests, a wide range of activities contributed to the emerging transnational human rights movement. For the most part, activists focused on the themes of political repression, torture, inequality and development. However, at some point during the dictatorship, the discourse of Brazilians—and, by association, of their solidarity networks—began to address the indigenous question, raising indigenous peoples’ struggles as a matter of human rights, as valid as any other, and contributing to their salience within the domains of international human rights organizations and institutions. Given the Brazilian Left’s failures to cohesively mobilize for indigenous rights thus far, this change in discourse is deserving of further attention. In this article, I address the emergence of indigenous rights within the Western European network of solidarity movements comprising resistance to Brazil’s military regime. These debates, as components of the transnational human rights movement of the 1970s, can be used to better understand the behaviour of Brazil’s Left in this international setting, as well as the wider movement itself. Furthermore, it will be shown that indigenous rights were portrayed through the conceptual framework of ‘Latin American Theory’, as opposed to more commonly cited concepts of minority rights or multicultural citizenship.

The international human rights movement is undergoing an internal reckoning. The legitimacy of the human rights project is being questioned within the movement. These internal critiques render more visible and contestable the influence of human rights movement actors in the Global North over the international human rights agenda. Yet these critiques are incomplete. Grounded in decades of experience as an international human rights practitioner, this article uses the concept of the international human rights imaginary to explain why and how the technologies of traditional international human rights practice (practice forms) embed colonizing tendencies to supplant local knowledge and priorities. It argues that the harms of practice forms can be mitigated if international practitioners incorporate a principle of solidarity with local human rights struggles. The common understandings of what human rights are and how they should be defended are advanced by international nongovernmental organizations based in western Europe and the United States with access to international decision makers, institutions, and funding. These are the actors who exercise power to set the priorities for the international human rights movement. The human rights practice forms commonly used by dominant NGOs are integral to the political economy of the international human rights movement. These dynamics are illustrated through the three quintessential practices of statement advocacy, human rights reporting, and standard setting advocacy. Their study exposes how the imaginary operates in practice. North-based human rights actors need to reimagine human rights to be relevant to a multi-polar, pluralistic, and global—rather than to a merely North-based, western, and international—human rights movement.

ABSTRACTThis article examines the relationships between the local human rights movement in Bahrain and global human rights movement. In addition, I argue that the postcoloniality of authoritarian governments in the Gulf region has added further complexities to the relationships between the local human rights movements, international non-governmental organisations and international institutions. Post-colonial authoritarian governments, such as that in Bahrain, have learned how to harness human rights discourse for their own ends. By focusing on these disparate actors and their interactions, this article interrogates the complications and dilemmas that the Bahrain human rights movement faces when acting in the transnational context with the global human rights community.

Strategic human rights litigation aims to seek for significant changes in law and policies, or influence public opinion and awareness, through situating individual client interests or human rights within larger social goals, or creating progressive jurisprudence, which advances human rights and rebalances the historic or systematic injustices. However, the law and society debate over litigation and social change sheds light on both the positive and the negative sides of strategic litigation. On the one hand, the positive view emphasizes that strategic litigation can change social understandings and create issues around which to organize a movement by attracting publicity, media attention and participants to a movement. On the other hand, critiques point out the limits of individual litigation as a strategy for social change and even its negative effects, arguing that legal victories bring no real change and individual litigation can narrow issues and atomize collective grievances, undermining broader collective action. In light of this debate over strategic human rights litigation and social movement, this article explores the role of the recent hate speech and hate crime cases in Japan, in which an elementary school for residential Koreans in Kyoto was raid by xenophobic nationalist groups in 2009 and 2010. These Kyoto Korean School incidents were part of the growing racism and ultra-nationalistic campaigns against ethnic minorities in Japan, in particular, against those who reside in Japan with Korean descent. This empirical socio-legal analysis examines the Kyoto Korean School cases in the dynamic process of the anti-hate speech and racism movement in Japan as an example of successful strategic human rights litigation, aiming to propose a broader framework through which we understand strategic litigation, focusing on the interaction between domestic and international laws and advocacy by civil society. This study has shown that the Kyoto Korean School cases had an enormous positive impact on the anti-racism movement in Japan including raising consciousness among the plaintiffs and public awareness without a big backlash and led to the enactment of the very first anti-hate speech law and a municipal ordinance, with the support of increased media attention and public opinion against hate speech. In this case, those effects were not originally pursued, but grew out of not only the judicial decisions but also of the process for seeking justice, thus calling the cases “unintended strategic litigation.” It was a transformative process for both plaintiffs and lawyers, namely iterative and interactive process of human rights norms diffusion, rather than top-down. This paper also analyzes the reasons behind this “success.” The rulings of the Kyoto Korean School case, which condemned hateful demonstrations as “racial discrimination” under the international human rights convention, framed the issue as the matter of universal concern which affects Japanese society as a whole. The rulings were accepted by the majority in Japanese society without inducing the backlash. Unprecedented application of the international human rights convention was highlighted by media, while some extreme characters of this hate crime case against elementary school children also attracted media attention. This brought the long-standing efforts of civil society groups and activists to vernacularize the universal human rights norms into the attention of majorities, which has been spread in Japanese society with the historic effort of civic networks of diverse actors, not only of lawyers but also of civil society organizations, local communities, and a massive number of individuals who joined in counter-movement. It pushed a majority of the society into major actors of the expanding anti-racism movement and also brought the Kyoto Korean School cases, its process of proceedings, and the subsequent results to domestic and international attention, with a help of the Internet media. In this sense, the recent anti-racism movement in Japan is not only a leftist elite or professional activist movement but also involves general public and local community members connected loosely via the Internet. The combination of the bottom-up human rights movement based on the locality and the international and national advocacy of leftist groups engaging lawmakers have provided an impetus in advancing legal development against hate speech. The culmination of activists’ efforts, in collaboration with policymakers and human rights workers with the support of public opinion, came in May 2016, when Japan passed its first law against hate speech. Consequently, this analysis shows the Kyoto Korean School cases were successful as unintended strategic human rights litigation since the multiple stakeholders brought a universal human rights ideology embedded in the rulings into a wide range of communities in society in a dynamic process involving diverse actors including lawyers, civil society organizations, local communities, individual activists, journalists, lawmakers, and even international human rights organizations, where the purpose of social movements is complemented by legal means.

This chapter examines the rise of the international human rights movement as significant force in world affairs. It draws attention to the Cold War, in which the context of international human rights took place. It also talks about the “Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch” as one of the leading non-governmental human rights organizations operating globally that was established at different stages of the Cold War era. The chapter focuses on the emergence of the human rights movement in the communist countries, as well as its development on the other side of the Cold War divide. It illustrates the demonstration over the arrests of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel in 1965, which marked the beginning of the emergence of a human rights movement in the Soviet bloc countries.

Information Technology and Human Rights Jamie F. Metzl1 (bio) I. Introduction The outbreak of the second Balkan war of 1913 caught the Western world unaware. Although the first Balkan war of the previous year had been considered a struggle by the Balkan Slavs against the Turks, the second war involved new and less identifiable groups, and conflicting allegations of atrocities were levied against all combatants. In response to this war-inspired confusion, the newly formed Carnegie Endowment for International Peace sent a delegation to gather basic facts and make an assessment. The seven member delegation set forth from Paris on 2 August 1913 and travelled over water and land for two months. When they arrived in the Balkans, they conducted numerous interviews and investigations which they considered during their passage back and while preparing their report. The report finally came out in the summer of 1914, a year after the delegation’s work had begun, but was overshadowed in the popular media by the more sensational news story of the outbreak of World War I. 2 One year’s work had allowed the delegation to produce an accurate and well written report. The time it took to prepare the report had also denied their report the relevance it would have had a year earlier. [End Page 705] When the newest round of Balkan troubles emerged with the breakup of the former Yugoslavia in 1991, information came dramatically faster. Every turn of political fortunes was reported immediately by journalists able to file stories and photographs through electronic media beamed across the world by CNN and other satellite news networks. News reports accompanied by digital photographs were available instantaneously to Internet users on the World Wide Web (WWW), 3 and discussed ad infinitum on Internet user-groups and discussion groups. 4 Concerned Internet users established links with the inhabitants of Sarajevo through “Sarajevo on-line,” a World Wide Web site allowing Internet users to pose questions directly to identified students (whose photographs and biographies were featured on the net) who posted answers regularly. 5 Action alerts were sent across the Internet directly to concerned observers by groups like Amnesty International, which led to letter writing campaigns and popular pressure on Western government officials to act. 6 When political developments were announced, computer network users could call up full texts of the Dayton accords or NATO Press releases. 7 Those who wished could track the daily developments of the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, with full access to documents, Security Council resolutions, rules of procedure and evidence, case files, press releases, and texts of indictments. 8 In the same time that it had taken to produce the single 1914 Carnegie report, a seemingly infinite stream of words had emerged which brought the Balkan conflict of the information age to life. From the perspective of the international human rights movement, this is a remarkable transformation. Accurate and timely information is an indispensable tool and an essential precondition for effective responsive action and the promotion of human rights, whether by organizations, individuals, governments, or international institutions. One of the critical functions which international human rights non-governmental organizations (NGOs) like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch perform is as collectors, filterers, translators, and presenters of information regarding alleged violations. The first essential step towards processing information is, [End Page 706] of course, gathering it. Groups must then determine whether the data received is trustworthy enough to serve as the basis for further investigation, public statement, or other responsive action. As Peter Willets has asserted: “[NGO] personnel, particularly at the leadership level, become professionals in the use of information. . . . Processing of information is always a major activity of pressure groups and often is overwhelmingly the most important activity.” 9 Human rights NGOs use information to garner concern regarding and popular support for various causes and translate that concern and support into activities designed to protect embattled individuals or groups, end invidious abuses of authority and power, and forestall potential violations of human rights. Information imparted by these groups also plays a crucial role in developing popular concern and generating political pressure for action in response to a particular situation. Tools such as the fax machine...

Reviewed by: Global Humanitarianism: NGOs and the Crafting of Community Chris Minnix Global Humanitarianism: NGOs and the Crafting of Community. By D. Robert Dechaine . Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005; pp v + 185. $65.00 cloth; $22.95 paper. Since the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, human rights non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have played a significant role in shaping the policies, agendas, and discourses of the contemporary humanitarian movement. The expanding influence of NGOs in international institutions has radically altered previous conceptions of state sovereignty and has brought discussions of cosmopolitan politics and global civil society to the forefront of international relations. In the past two decades, NGOs have utilized advances in communicative technologies and increasing access to international institutions to create dynamic, interactive spaces for international solidarity and activism. The increased visibility and influence of NGOs has inspired a large body of interdisciplinary work that has regarded them as harbingers of a growing global civil society or international community. These advancements, however, have occurred during a period where the economic and cultural forces of globalization have created significant challenges for international solidarity. In many studies of globalization, claims for the emergence of a global civil society are critiqued for ignoring the political fragmentation, economic colonization, and cultural homogenization that has accompanied this new sense of global connectedness. In Global Humanitarianism, D. Robert Dechaine presents a compelling and thorough analysis of the role of NGOs in symbolically framing and materially coordinating an international community capable of responding to the fragmentary forces of globalization through the shared discourse of universal human rights. Dechaine, a rhetorical scholar and professor of cultural studies, demonstrates the need to ground interdisciplinary discussions of international community and global civil society in the communicative practices of NGOs. In place of these terms, Dechaine suggests that "global rhetorical culture" more [End Page 157] fully captures the dynamic, discursive struggle of NGOs to symbolically frame an international community based on the public deliberation of universal humanitarian principles (18). As agents within this rhetorical culture, NGOs utilize their "symbolic resources" to "'conjure' a global humanitarian community into existence as a collective or 'people' united in the furthering of humanitarian goals" (20). NGOs frame this community in a contentious discursive context, in which their rhetoric of community is often placed in opposition to the fragmentary discourses of state sovereignty, economic globalization, and political nationalism. Human rights NGOs, as less powerful actors in international politics, utilize their rhetoric to reframe the dominant cultural and ideological terms that structure public awareness, and understanding of international politics and international community. Developing a methodology for the ideographic analysis of NGO discourse based in the work of Michael Calvin McGee, and Celeste Condit, and John Lucaites, Dechaine argues that NGOs are involved in a hegemonic, discursive struggle to construct the social reality and "public morality" of global civil society (22–3). Through his analysis of these ideographs, he traces the dynamic, contentious relationship of NGO discourse to the alternative articulations of community constructed in the discourses of states, international institutions, and other transnational actors. Humanitarian NGOs draw from a rich ideographic context that reflects the historical development of human rights norms. In his second chapter, Dechaine traces the historical genealogy of human rights and humanitarian NGOs, arguing that changing geopolitical conditions have shaped the emergence of international humanitarian NGOs and have fostered the development of global civil society. He argues that a new, universal "ethos" of international community has emerged from the human rights movement and is embodied in the ideographs of "<human dignity>, <universality>, <brotherhood>, <duty>, and <democracy>" that are constructed in The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (49). NGOs actively and dynamically frame and invoke international solidarity and community through their articulation of these ideographic terms in their campaigns and public rhetoric. The ideographs of universal human rights empower humanitarian NGOs with a universal rhetoric that can be read against discourses of political and national interest. As NGOs work to galvanize political will on the issues they address, they utilize this rhetoric to link actors across national, political, and ideological borders, symbolically framing and materially linking the actors of their rhetorical cultures. In chapters 3 and 4, Dechaine applies his ideographic analysis...

The human rights movement is largely the product of the horrors of World War II. The development of its normative content and structure is the direct result of the abominations committed by the Third Reich during that war. Drawing on the Western liberal tradition, the human rights movement arose primarily to control and contain state action against the individual. It is ironic that it was the victors of the war, most of whom held colonies in Africa, who determined and prevailed upon the United Nations to give form and content to the human rights movement. It is this exclusionary beginning and lack of genuine universality – the absence of major cultures and geographically specific historical perspectives – that are the source of serious tensions within the human rights movement today. This chapter examines the problems raised by the transplantation of this movement – which is uniquely a creature of the North – to Africa and the prospects for viable nongovernmental human rights organizations (NGOs) on the continent. There is no future for the human rights movements in Africa unless it can secure domestic ideological, financial, and moral support from interested constituencies.

Governments are more likely to agree to effective machinery for supervision and implementation of human rights if treaties are adopted in a regional setting where cultural, legal and intellectual traditions are similar. Non-governmental human rights organizations in the region maintain close contact with international human rights groups such as Amnesty International and the International Commission of Jurists. Asian scholars have published perceptive reflections on the international human rights movement. Sub-regional organizations for economic and political cooperation, such as Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) and South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), could eventually lead to human rights institutional developments, but they must become organizations of democratic governments and more effective organs of cooperation before such developments are possible. "Asia" is not an homogenous entity that can be viewed as a single "region." The term "Asia" covers an immensely complex and diverse number of states, communities, religions, languages and cultures.

The modern human rights movement is at a critical juncture in its history. It has been nearly seventy years since the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and some of the oldest and most active human rights organizations have been operating around the world for about forty years. More than twenty years have passed since the end of the cold war, and the time when people spoke in triumphal terms of the global success of Western values is now a fading memory. International human rights are ensconced as firmly as ever in international law and institutions, but what about the future of the “human rights movement”?

International Human Rights and the Politics of Memory: Limits and Challenges Andreas Huyssen (bio) Human rights as a transnational social movement, and memory discourses in many different parts of the world, first emerged in the 1970s, gained steam in the 1980s, and together reached inflationary proportions by the 1990s. Both discourses were historically overdetermined and both are now increasingly being questioned about their hidden assumptions, their effectiveness, and their future prospects. In a recent book, Samuel Moyn interprets the human rights movement as a last utopia after the collapse of the earlier utopias of the twentieth century such as communism and fascism, as well as modernization and decolonization.1 In my book Present Pasts, I argued analogously that the collapse of an earlier utopian imagination was one condition that made it possible for the new memorial discourses to arise. I argued that the time consciousness of high modernity in the West tried to secure utopian futures, whereas the time consciousness of the late twentieth century involved the no less perilous task of taking responsibility for the past. The human rights movement, however, remains firmly oriented to the future goal of establishing an international, perhaps even global, rights regime. Here it is important to remember that the international human rights movement in its contemporary configuration has as short a history as the current culture privileging a politics of memory. Of course, there always was a discourse of memory, and rights discourse itself does indeed have a deeper history. Greek tragedy provides many insights into the links between memory, justice, and the law. From the American and French Revolutions through decolonization, rights and memory were always umbilically linked to state and nation, to citizenship issues and the invention of national traditions. And yet, the current international human rights movement and the transnational flows of memory politics since the 1990s represent a fundamentally new conjuncture. This leads me to a simple question that defies easy answers: What do rights have to do with memory in the first place? At the most simple [End Page 607] level, one could argue that only memory of rights violations can nurture the future of human rights in the world, thus providing a substantive link between past and future. But, all too often, memory discourse and contemporary rights debates remain separated by more than just disciplinary specialization with memory discourse dominant in the humanities and rights discourse in the social sciences. From my vantage point in the humanities, I would argue that contemporary memory studies should be linked more robustly with human rights and justice discursively and practically to prevent memory, especially traumatic memory, from becoming a vacuous exercise feeding parasitically and narrowly on itself. But I would also suggest that unless it is nurtured by memory and history, human rights discourse is in danger of losing historical grounding and risks legalistic abstraction and political abuse. After all, the abstract universalism of human rights is both a problem and a promise. History of Human Rights and Memory Discourses Recognizing the inherent strengths and limitations of both human rights and memory discourse is important if we want to nurture their interaction. The individual strengths of both fields must be mobilized to supplement each other in order to mitigate the deficiencies of either. Both are concerned with the violation and protection of basic human rights, and both must draw on history to do so. Both want to acknowledge, if not right, past wrongs, and both project and imagine a better future for the world. Both grew to a certain degree out of legal, moral, and philosophical discourses about genocide and rights violations after World War II. Both the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and the United Nations's Genocide Convention of 1948 were the political result of memory (though in their phrasing both UN documents circumvented the ethnic and particularist dimension of the Holocaust). Memory, not only of the unspeakable genocides and forced population transfers of the first half of the twentieth century, but also of the legacies of the natural law tradition, was influential in the shaping of these UN documents. And yet it took several decades more before the international human rights movement took off. Some recent...

The emergence of national nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) is an important and largely unexamined development within the international human rights movement. With international human rights organizations stretched thin by the demands of covering the entire world and, in most cases, located far from the countries under scrutiny, national NGOs play a critical role by pressuring their own governments to observe international human rights norms and by informing international organizations of specific abuses.' In countries where repressive governments use terror and force to control political opposition, national NGOs operate at the risk of their members' lives. In other countries the risks are not as great, but it is nevertheless worthwhile to learn how such organizations mobilize participation, obtain resources, and promote human rights. This article is a case study of one such group: the Committee on the Administration of Justice (CAJ), based in Belfast, Northern Ireland.2 CAJ was

Reviewed by: Human Rights Discourses in a Global Network: Books beyond Borders by Lena Khor Amy Lynn Klemm Lena Khor. Human Rights Discourses in a Global Network: Books beyond Borders. Surrey, England: Ashgate, 2013. 294p. In her original study of human rights discourse, Lena Khor addresses the concern by other scholars and critics of the globalization of human rights discourse. While [End Page 233] other scholars maintain that the discourse of human rights is being forced upon us from an imperialistic stance from what is referred to as the “Global North,” Khor argues for an exemplary move away from using human rights as a term to mean an absolute and imprecise thing, and instead she focuses on how human rights is a communally constructed language. She first broaches and explains her term “global discourse network of human rights” in the “Introduction” (Khor, 4). She devotes the first chapter to show the reader how the human rights discourse is now a global network, and delves into the language that is constructed to elucidate the human rights movement. Khor uses Paul Rusesabagina as an example of someone who has witnessed genocide and explores his autobiography An Ordinary Man as well as Terry George’s film Hotel Rwanda in her second chapter. The non-profit humanitarian outfit of Médecins Sans Frontiéres (MSF) or Doctors without Borders is presented as a proposed human rights hero/savior in the third chapter, while in the fourth chapter Khor uses Michael Ondaatje’s novel Anil’s Ghost to illustrate the restrictions of the movement. In her Conclusion, she returns and revisits the subjects of Doctors without Borders to further highlight some of the controversies of the global human rights movement as well as the innate tensions. Throughout the entire book, it appears as though Lena Khor’s sole mission is to offer a new way of thinking about human rights through a network of global discourse and language. While there are numerous things that Khor executes very well throughout this book, this review will focus on the two which are the most successful. The first is her exploration of the ways in which scholarly criticism can oftentimes hold the cause back, and the second is that even the heroes and saviors of the cause are not above the same censure. It should also be noted that the book is formatted in such a way that it is impossible to miss Khor’s mission for her book. Each chapter is filled with italicized words and phrases that are key terms she wishes the reader to know, and the subheadings in each chapter keep the argument organized, something that is essential when tackling such a large subject matter as global human rights. Khor is breathing new life into the topic of global human rights by exploring the ways in which the language of human rights is crucial to either furthering or holding back the movement. She offers a complete overview of the difficulties in writing about and discussing global human rights, paying particular attention to the ways in which those who have witnessed genocide, such as Paul Rusesbagina, are sometimes criticized as making themselves out to be more of a hero than they really are. In the same vein, she uses Michael Ondaatje’s novel Anil’s Ghost to draw attention to how scholarly criticism, that so often accompanies these textual works on human rights, undermines the author, the subject of the work, and any [End Page 234] personal or professional interest of the reader. Every aspect of a film, organization, or textual work is under a critical microscope to ensure that it meets the criteria that scholars feel allows it to be a reputable voice in the field. This is one of the most important things that Khor discusses, since we can only get so far in the fight for global human rights when literature, film, and organizations are being criticized by scholars and theorists who find fault in each. Critics claim that authors such as Ondaatje have a bias about the topic on which they are writing since they are from a particular area; while others claim that he is not “Sri-Lankan enough” to...

Normative Consensus and Contentious Practice: Challenges to Universalism in International Human Rights Courts Courtney Hillebrecht (bio) I. INTRODUCTION In 2015 the Russian Constitutional Court announced that it would review all of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) rulings against Russia for their constitutionality.1 This decision, which both the Duma and the Kremlin supported, underscored a fundamental disagreement between Russia and the ECHR about both the substance of human rights norms and the ways in which disagreements about human rights can and should be resolved. Russia has been a member of the Council of Europe since 1996 and agreed to accept the compulsory jurisdiction of the ECHR in 1998. Russian citizens regularly seek recourse at the ECHR and Russia even complies with many of the Court’s demands to pay financial reparations to victims. And yet, Russia’s prolonged tensions with the ECHR are textbook examples of the [End Page 190] persistent, unresolved disputes at the center of the promotion and adjudication of universal human rights. Russia’s relationship with the ECHR suggests that underneath the façade of the institutionalization and judicialization of human rights remain fundamental divides about which rights “count,” and if and how those divides should be bridged. Simply engineering a different court or judicial process cannot ameliorate Russia’s contentious relationship with the ECHR. Instead, as we can learn from Reza Afshari’s long history of grappling with these inconsistencies in the international human rights regime, the problem runs much deeper than institutional design; they cannot be easily resolved. In his 2007 Human Rights Quarterly article titled “On Historiography of Human Rights,” Afshari begins with an observation about a related fundamental inconsistency in the historiography of the international human rights regime. He writes: One of the main issues that the current historiography has to grapple with is the apparent disparity between the often-celebrated normative global achievements in codifying human rights values among the UN member states and the often-lamented failures to enforce them. . . . I argue that the link should not be seen as mechanical or procedural. Weaknesses so obviously apparent in the enforcement process signify the lack of vigor in the normative consensus; the vim and vigor by which the face was adorned by high-flying colors might in fact have masked a frail body.2 This pattern of inconsistency is visible across a wide range of issue areas, from women’s rights to economic justice, and in diverse political contexts, from Iran to the United States. Examining the disjuncture between “often-celebrated” international human rights judicial instruments and their “often-lamented” enforcement and cooperation failures can give scholars and practitioners alike a clear view of the tensions that Afshari describes. II. UNVEILING THE DIVISIONS IN THE INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS JUSTICE REGIME As Afshari reminds us, high levels of state membership and participation in international human rights and criminal tribunals sometimes mask deep divisions among their members over both the meaning of human rights and their understanding of how human rights disputes should be resolved. This is, in essence, illustrative of variations in states’ levels of commitment to [End Page 191] international human rights institutions, as well as the basic norms under-girding them. As part of an in-progress book project, I examine four extreme manifestations of these variations in states’ normative and political commitments to international human rights tribunals: 1) member states’ withdrawing, or threatening to withdraw, from the courts; 2) member states and political elites’ undermining and usurping legal cases; 3) stakeholders’ imposing financial restrictions on the tribunals; and 4) both members and non-members’ creating alternatives to the tribunals. In each of these circumstances, while contenders are calling into question the form and function of the tribunals, they are also casting doubt on the underlying norms themselves. For example, Venezuela’s withdrawal from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in 2012 and the Organization of American States in 2017 cannot simply be dismissed as the consequences of a state’s displeasure with the international human rights system.3 Instead, it calls into question the principles of universality, compulsory jurisdiction, and the ability of international human rights laws and norms to protect individuals’ rights when the going gets...