The human rights state: theoretical challenges, empirical deployments: reply to my critics

Abstract

ABSTRACTI respond to a broad range of challenges that the seven articles of this special issue raise for the theory of a human rights state. The first two articles address the theory as a whole. The first reconfigures the human rights state as an analytical tool for measuring implementation. I counter that such measurement is not possible without normative interpretation. The second article insists that any human rights project can only be valid if valid transcendentally. By contrast, I advocate validity as a this-worldly project undertaken by the addressees themselves. The next three articles examine what happens when the model is deployed empirically. One imagines a Mexican human rights state for indigenous peoples that would develop local structures of autonomy and self-governance. While the author proposes communal agency and cultural unity, I discuss the danger that collective rights pose to the rights of individual members. Another article sketches a Brazilian human rights state that would diminish social authoritarianism, incorporate international human rights law within the state, and transform an authoritarian culture. But if the human rights in question are self-authored, as I advocate, then they are not gifts of international law, as the author asserts. The last of this set describes a Bosnian-Herzegovinian human rights state that would preclude the ethnic instrumentalisation of religion. But the common ethos sought by this model is itself open to manipulation and could undermine individual autonomy. The final two articles probe the possibility of a moral universalism that both regard as simply given. One champions a human right to democracy and finds that right embedded in various international human rights instruments. I contend that the rule of law, more so than democracy, facilitates the human rights project. The other article draws on a human rights cognitive style yet rejects what, given the practical imperative of localism, I argue is key to that approach: moral relativism. I conclude by sketching the variety of future research programmes on the idea and practice of a human rights state that flow from the contributions to this special issue.