Re-Appraising the Significance of 'Third-Generation' Rights in a Globalized World

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Some forty years after they were initially proposed, many so-called “third-generation” rights — including rights to development and a healthy environment — are either languishing or have been left for dead. In the global North in particular, such rights have been met with a degree of hostility and derision, generating more controversy and contentiousness than consensus. Meanwhile, the gap between the mainstream human rights regime and some of the most pressing humanitarian issues of the twenty-first century appears to be growing. Problems of crushing poverty, radical inequality, pervasive economic and structural violence, climate change and ecological collapse often seem to elude protections of earlier generations of rights, rooted as they are in paradigms of a state-based and mercantilist world that has long been eclipsed by the forces of globalization. Given the suffering inflicted by radical poverty, inequality and environmental devastation, it would not be going too far to say that rights to development and a healthy environment are true survival rights that likely would have long been understood as preemptory norms of international law were the guardians at the international legal temple forced to walk a mile of the shoes of those deprived of them. In this chapter, I will argue that if further development of and acceptance of these rights as “real rights” is not without challenges, their effective dismissal in many quarters during previous decades represented a wrong turn for the international human rights regime and movement as a whole. Renewed engagement with third-generation rights is critical to the future of human rights because: (1) they can help to address grave threats to human security in the changing landscape of the twenty-first century; (2) they challenge traditional conceptual boundaries of human rights law that may help push the field forward in ways better adapted to a globalized world; and (3) forging greater consensus around the meaning and significance of third-generation rights would help further a sense of human rights as a shared global project. While taming power in times of globalization is a task with many dimensions, revitalizing the debate around third-generation rights should be an important part of the landscape.