Human Rights in the Emerging World Order

Abstract

Pursuing the so-called political account of human rights, this talk first explains some aspects of the relations between legal and moral rights, and between rights and interests, and then applies the analysis to provide an explanation of human rights. Using the rights to health and to education as examples, it rejects the traditional theory that takes human rights to be rights that people have in virtue of their humanity alone. But human rights are synchronically universal. They are rights which all people living today have, a feature that is a precondition of, and a result of, the fact that they set limits to state sovereignty and justify accountability across borders. Human rights function in the international arena to underline the worth of all human life. They give individual interests a central place in international relations, and have become a distinctive ingredient in the emerging world order where they generate new channels for political action in the international arena. They are by their nature moral rights that call for legal-political protection. Needless to say mechanisms for their protection should be efficient, reliable and fair, or they may cause more harm than good. Moral rights that cannot be fairly and effectively protected though legal processes are not human rights. The discussion of these points highlights the fact that the political account of human rights takes their existence to be contingent on social, economic and cultural factors, and the rights to health and to education are used to illustrate this dependence on factual contingencies. The fastchanging structures of the international scene include changes and challenges in the content and protection of human rights. The paper concludes with a discussion of the difficulties that cultural diversity creates for identifying the content of such rights, and for devising mechanisms for their protection. I will start with some—hopefully truistic—observations about rights, which will lead to a reflection on the role that human rights play in the emerging world order. I say ‘the emerging world order’ for it seems that we are going through a period of fast transition. If it is sensible to date its beginning to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Soviet Bloc, (2010) 1 Transnational Legal Theory 31–47 31 * Thomas M Macioce Professor of Law, Columbia University, and formerly Professor of The Philosophy of Law, University of Oxford. This article is an expanded and revised version of the lecture I gave at the opening plenary session of the 24th IVR World Congress in Beijing, September 2009, which was entitled ‘Human Rights in a New World Order’. I have retained its character as a mostly footnote-free and fluidly structured address. I am indebted to Professor Craig Scott for many comments and suggestions for improving the text. The unrevised ‘Human Rights in a New World Order’ speech will appear in the IVR proceedings as well as in translation in Chinese.