TWAIL – “Third World Approaches to International Law” and human rights: some considerations

Abstract

TWAIL is both a political and intellectual movement and, therefore, has multiple perspectives. While the first academic conference of TWAIL was held at Harvard Law School in March 1997, Third World perspectives of international law are part of a long tradition of critical internationalism. In this essay we will try to explain the meaning of the movement according to its most important scholars, and the TWAIL concern to the human rights discourse. It can be said that according TWAIL the historical model of human rights cannot respond to the needs of the Third World except if there is a radical rethinking and restructuring of the international order, abandoning the efforts to universalize an essentially European corpus of human rights.