Human Rights, Peace, and the Concept of Law. The Story of an Incomplete Legal Revolution

Abstract

The article is an observation of the relationship between human rights and peace from the perspective of the definition of law.The first part concerns the relationship between peace and human rights: 1) arguments supporting the idea that human rights have become important enough to turn them into a just cause for war are examined; 2) it is demonstrated that this transformation implies an aporetic relationship between human rights and peace in the both notions available, negative and positive, leaving the question of their relationships unsolved; 3) it is shown that historically this transformation reverses their original purpose; 4) the logic of human rights is contrasted with the logic of war. The conclusion is that the link between human rights and wars is at the same time the result of the importance they have attained, but also of their defective implementation. The second part contains the explanation of this result from the point of view of the concept of law. It is demonstrated that the loosing the original purpose of protecting human rights “against” wars is not mainly the fault of human rights, but rather of the dominant legal paradigm. It is stressed three aspects of an incomplete legal revolution in which individuals’ wellbeing was paramount: 1) the push for human law; 2) the centrality of the rule of law for the concept of law; 3) the transformation of law in a pluralistic way (human rights require a revision of the vertical frame of law, typical of the Modern State Conception, in favour of a more horizontally oriented one). The author defends two main ideas: the first one is that war as a way of enforcement is no longer the cross-check of legal systems, in other words, that we have to rethink the meaning and role of the force of law; the second one is that law comes before justice.