Bounded political contestation: the domestic translation of international health and housing rights in Australia

Political contestation within liberal democratic states is an important, albeit limited, guide in defining how these states domestically implement their international human rights obligations. While often ritualistically endorsing human rights standards, political actors allow themselves a limited policy space with their domestic political contest circumscribed by more pervasive influences, often at odds with the state's international commitments. This article examines recent health and housing policy initiatives by Australia's two major political parties and assesses them against its international commitments. Applying a social constructivist approach, this article argues that the dominant neoliberal political discourse and the state's institutional structure set contextual boundaries to the parties’ policy contestation and reveal the limited influence of domestic political contestation in determining Australia's rights implementation.     

The second generation of human security: lessons from the UN and EU experience

The concept of human security, while much contested in both academic and policy debates, and highly fragmented across different meanings and forms of implementation, offers a potential locus around which global security discourse might converge, particularly in light of current shifts in US security thinking. However, key pioneers of human security, such as the United Nations and Canada, appear to be losing their enthusiasm for the concept, just at the moment when others such as the European Union, are advancing a human security agenda. This article examines the divergence of human security narratives between the UN and the EU. It argues that the UN's use of the concept ran aground owing to a triple problematic of lack of clarity, confusion between previously distinct policy streams on human rights and human development and conceptual overstretch. After assessing the EU experience with the concept to date, the article argues that future use of human security will require greater focus on how it deepens ideas of individual security, rather than treating it as an agenda for broadening security. As well as a need to project clarity on the conceptual definition of human security, there is also a need to associate human security with greater clarity of intent. If successful, this would contribute to establishing second generation human security as a new policy paradigm.     

The Viability of the United Nations Approach to Economic and SocialHuman Rights in a Globalized Economy

The United Nations approaches economic and social human rights through a framework of legal positivism. States are called on to respect, protect and fulfil their legal obligations contained in international human rights law. The state remains ultimately responsible for guaranteeing these economic and social human rights. This article explores the viability of this statist approach in this era of economic globalization. The less developed countries often face economic deprivation caused not by state action/inaction but by the global economic system itself. In many key respects states appear to be losing their capacity to regulate their economies and labour markets effectively. Yet despite the shrinking nature of our global community, the state is still central in the creation of the proper environment for the fulfilment of these rights. This article analyses the national strategies that governments can pursue to respect, protect and fulfil the economic and social rights of their citizens, and thus meet their international legal obligations.     

In praise of folly: international administration and the corruption of humanity

Advocates of international administration tend to embrace conduct and utterance that proposes to vindicate fundamental human rights and freedoms by suspending an important part of its content: the principle that human beings should not be subject to coercion except where they have given their consent. This article begins by arguing that the character of this dilemma is obscured by a vocabulary of technique that divests the category 'international administration' of its normative coherence. In fact, international administration discloses two distinct modes of association—contract and trust—which presuppose different values, different obligations, and different expectations. The article proceeds in arguing that a trust instituted among equals is susceptible to objection in so far as trustee and beneficiary are necessarily joined in a coercive relationship that rules out the possibility of consent. The article concludes by arguing that recent attempts at reconciling this sort of relation with the demands of human rights entails a kind of corruption that is intelligible in making ordinary language correspond with the ideal, so that what was once described as the denial of human dignity—subjection to alien rule—is now described as the promotion and protection of fundamental human rights.     

Human Rights,Care Ethics and Situated Universal Norms

Abstract: As interest in the relationship between geography and ethics grows, it becomes important to examine how different approaches to ethical philosophy may fit with geographic scholarship. To that end, this article focuses on a particular approach to ethical responsibility—international human rights law—and asks how that approach can be put into conversation with discussions in geography about morality, distance and care. It explores three contributions of such a conversation: first, it examines how the relational ontology of care ethics provides a new perspective on the moral value of human rights, so that the relationships and context in question drive the relative value of rights. Second, the article discusses contributions that human rights can bring to questions of caring across distance. Finally, it unpacks the duties that accompany human rights and questions the scope of duty that attaches to the norm of equality.     

Humanitarianism,genocide and liberalism

The international response to genocide and human rights violations has received increasing attention by scholars in the humanities and social sciences. This article explores the history of the response to mass atrocity by assessing recent work on humanitarianism as an idea and in practice in the West. It argues that the impulse to defend the rights of others historically has been tied up with geopolitical and imperial concerns that shaped European politics. The current embrace of the responsibility to protect, or ‘R2P’, and debates over whether or not to recognize and prosecute perpetrators of past atrocities from the Armenian genocide to Rwanda remain embedded in this longer history of humanitarianism and geopolitics. As recent work on humanitarian intervention, the anti-slavery movement and humanitarianism and foreign policy demonstrates, the pressing need to understand the response to atrocity has called scholars to more fully participate in the contemporary conversation over human rights by exploring its roots in humanitarian practices of the recent and not so recent past. Understanding the history of humanitarianism as it connects both with the history of human rights and liberal ideals offers an important way of reassessing the role of the nation-state and international institutions in responding to human rights crisis. The article concludes by suggesting that scholars move away from the question of the origin of human rights as an idea to focus on historicizing the response to humanitarian crisis in order to problematize the story of the rise of western-led human rights regimes.     

How Constitutional Concerns Framed the US Contribution to the International Human Rights Regime From Its Inception, 1947–53

The United States has been reluctant to agree to binding international human rights instruments ever since the very first meeting of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in 1947. This article explores structural causes for that reluctance. Internal government papers show that US government officers worried that a human rights treaty might expand federal jurisdiction at the expense of the jurisdiction of the United States' constituent states and could provide an opening for judicial activism by the courts. These concerns made domestic political sensitivities more acute and raised principled questions about the desirability of pushing domestic reforms through international law-making. US representatives made repeated efforts to ensure that an international bill of rights was drafted as an aspirational declaration rather than a legally binding treaty. They also proposed clauses designed to delay or limit the domestic effects of any agreement, while reassuring the US Senate that domestic power balances would not be disturbed. Constitutional concerns thus framed the United States' contribution to the creation of an international human rights system from the very beginning.     

Patents and medicines: the relationship between TRIPS and the human right to health

The question of access to drugs in developing countries is at present largely influenced by the TRIPS Agreement. TRIPS compliance in the field of health requires substantial changes to existing patent laws in some countries. These changes must be analysed in the context of the spread of epidemics like HIV/AIDS and in relation to other international obligations that states have, for instance, with regard to the human right to health.
Intellectual property rights treaties today have significant impacts on the realization of some human rights like the right to health. This article examines the extent to which TRIPS encompasses flexibility for developing countries to be able to foster better access to medicines. It also examines these issues from the point of view of human rights and considers, in particular, the ways in which the relationship between human rights and intellectual property can be improved in international law.     

Germany and the European Union: from ‘tamed power’ to normalized power?

Germany has traditionally played a key role in promoting European Union solutions to domestic policy problems. In doing so it gained a reputation as a ‘tamed power’ (Katzenstein). This article reviews Germany's diplomacy two decades after unification. It explores the ‘tamed power’ hypothesis with reference to three policy areas: constitutional reform in the EU; Justice and Home Affairs policy; and an issue that has made German European policy very salient of late, the management of the Eurozone. The article argues that Germany has become a much less inclusive actor in European policy, pursuing policy solutions through ‘pioneer groups’ where these offer greater promise than the EU itself and becoming increasingly attentive to domestic political constraints. The article argues that Germany has become a normalized power, with significant implications for the EU.     

Implementing International Environmental Agreements: The Case of the Wadden Sea

It has been a feature of the past 30 years or so that individual sovereign states have been increasingly willing to partially set aside their own interests in favour of international treaties on pollution control and wildlife protection. It is the political will of the government signatories to such agreements that is the key to successful implementation as that political will provides the legitimate enforceable authority that is necessary to ensure compliance. This paper examines a trilateral agreement made by the Governments of Denmark, Germany and Holland for the protection and management of the Wadden Sea—one of Europe's most important wildlife sites. The examination of that agreement explores the key mechanisms used for its implementation and, in the case of the Wadden Sea, those mechanisms include the operation of key European Union environmental Directives. The paper finds major differences in approach and application of the Birds, Habitats and Environmental Impact Assessment Directives across the Wadden Sea region and argues that these differences undermine the trilateral agreements made by the three governments.     

Women's Rights as Human Rights after the End of History

This article is based on the 2022 Gender & History annual lecture. It reconsiders the recent history of women's rights as human rights. The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union brought to an end a twentieth-century discourse of women's rights, understood not only as legal norms, but as a political language harnessed to a narrative of women as a collective subject progressing towards emancipation and equality. This was enabled by an international order in which human rights were tied to visions of self-determination, social rights and strong states, creating spaces for new subjects to make their voices heard in international law, albeit in particular and circumscribed ways. After 1989, women were again written into international law primarily as victims of violence, while the emergence of gender as a category of analysis challenged the notion of ‘women’ as a collective subject of rights. The story of women's rights, the article concludes, suggests that recent revisionist histories of human rights as a neoliberal utopia are only one part of a more complex human rights history.     

Human rights in a global ecumene

How should we understand the cultural politics that has surrounded the development of international human rights? Two perspectives frame contemporary debate. For ‘cultural particularists’, human rights are western artefacts; alien to other societies, and an inappropriate basis for international institutional development. For ‘negotiated universalists’, a widespread global consensus undergirds international human rights norms, with few states openly contesting their status as fundamental standards of political legitimacy. This article advances an alternative understanding, pursuing John Vincent's provocative, yet undeveloped, suggestion that while the notion of human rights has its origins in European culture, its spread internationally is best understood as the product of a ‘universal social process’. The international politics of individual/human rights is located within an evolving global ecumene, a field of dynamic cultural engagement, characterized over time by the development of multiple modernities. Within this field, individual/human rights have been at the heart of diverse forms of historically transformative contentious politics, not the least being the struggles for imperial reform and change waged by subject peoples of diverse cultural backgrounds; struggles that not only played a key role in the construction of the contemporary global system of sovereign states, but also transformed the idea of ‘human’ rights itself. In developing this alternative understanding, the article advances a different understanding of the relation between power and human rights, one in which rights are seen as neither simple expressions of, or vehicles for, western domination, nor robbed of all power‐political content by simple notions of negotiation or consensus. The article concludes by considering, in a very preliminary fashion, the implications of this new account for normative theorizing about human rights. If a prima facie case exists for the normative justifiability of such rights, it lies first in their radical nature—in their role in historically transformative contentious politics—and second in their universalizability, in the fact that one cannot plausibly claim them for oneself while denying them to others.     

Militarism and Human Rights

Through an analysis of the impact of military spending on economic growth, the author argues that militarism and human rights are incompatible. Implementation of the economic, social, cultural, civil and political rights set out in the International Bill of Human Rights requires national mobilization of economic resources. If limited national capital is consumed in excessive military expenditures the feasibility of rights fulfilment diminishes. The article outlines initial public policies designed to limit militarism and to allow international human rights to serve as the cornerstone of domestic and foreign policy.     

Europe at the crossroads of three worlds: alternative histories and connections of European solidarity with the Third World, 1950s–80s

Abstract

Over the past few years, there has been growing interdisciplinary interest in the history of European solidarity movements that mobilized on behalf of the ‘Third World’ in the wake of the post-war decolonization process. Focusing on European campaigns against the Vietnam War and Pinochet’s Chile, this article aims at positioning these international solidarity movements in the broader history of North–South and East–West exchanges and connections in Europe during the Cold War. It explores some key ideas, actors and alternative networks that have remained little studied in mainstream accounts and public memories, but which are key to understanding the development of transnational activism in Europe and its relevance to broader fields of research, such as the history of Communism, decolonization, human rights, the Cold War and European identity. It delves into the impact of East–West networks and the Communist ‘First World’ in the discovery of the Third World in Western Europe, analyses the role of Third World diplomacy in this process, and argues how East–West and North–South networks invested international solidarity campaigns on ‘global’ issues with ideas about Europe’s past and present. Together, these networks turned resistance against the Vietnam War, human-rights violations in Pinochet’s Chile, and other causes in the Third World into themes for détente and pan-European cooperation across the borders of the Iron Curtain, and made them a symbol to build a common identity between the decolonized world and Europe. What emerges from this analysis is both a critique of West-centred narratives, which are focused on anti-totalitarianism, as well as an invitation to take North–South and East–West contacts, as well as the role of European identities, more seriously in the international history of human rights and international solidarity.     

Internationalizing the Spatial Identity of Cross-Border Cooperation

The adoption of Schengen Agreement and acceleration of cross-border region building among European Union (EU) member states have considerably diversified the character of identity policies in European border areas. One important outcome is the formation of different spatial identities for improving the policies of cross-border cooperation. Using the formation of internationalized spatial identity of North European twin cities Haparanda (Sweden) and Tornio (Finland) as study example, this article argues that the promoters of cross-border cooperation still pay little attention to the strategic planning and coordination of identity policies. As a result, the promotion of an international spatial identity of cross-border cooperation remains unbalanced failing adequately to support the aims of cooperation policies. The ineffective integration between cooperation policies and international identity of cooperation complicates the building of competitive and dynamic cross-border regions in the EU peripheral areas as well as responding to challenges of EU's territorial cohesion.     

Collateral damage: human rights consequences of counterterrorist action in the Asia–Pacific

A number of states in the Asia-Pacific region have long been recognized to be indifferent or even hostile to the international human rights regime and to have rather poor records when it comes to protection of the right to personal integrity. Since 9/11 many of these same states have become closely involved in the US-led anti-terrorist campaign, and in the course of that involvement have been identified with the serious abuse of the personal security rights of those held in detention as terrorist suspects. This article uncovers some of the bases for that indifference to human rights treaties and why the human rights records of some of these states have become of even greater concern, particularly to domestic and transnational NGOs, in the contemporary anti-terrorist era. It argues that long-standing factors associated with intra-state armed conflict and separatist rebellions, the governmental tendency to accuse domestic NGOS of following a western rights agenda, and strong attachment to the non-interference norm have undercut official governmental concerns about the abuse of the right to personal security. More recently, emulation of the worst aspects of US anti-terrorist behaviour has given rise to a sense of impunity in some cases, and has justified a militarized response to political and religious unrest in others. Finally, the difficulties that the local human rights NGOs have had in making their case to the wider domestic populations have been compounded in a climate where many of their fellow citizens are fearful of the apparent rise in support for terrorist causes and methods.     

Realizing the Right to Development

The Right to Development as established in the 1986 UN Declaration on the Right to Development has now been recognized, through an international consensus arrived at in Vienna in 1993, as a universal and inalienable right and an integral part of fundamental human rights. That has not, of course, settled all the controversy regarding the nature and the content of the Right to Development, but the inter‐governmental debate has shifted more to the methods of implementation of that Right. This article reviews the nature and contents of the Right to Development by virtue of which every individual is entitled to a process of economic, social, cultural and political development in which all human and fundamental freedoms can be realized. It spells out a programme for implementation of the Right, step by step, through national efforts supported by international co‐operation. While the states are primarily responsible for realizing this Right for their citizens, the international community has the obligation of enabling the states to do so. A mechanism is proposed through international compacts to design, promote and monitor the process of implementation.     

Identity and European integration: diversity as a source of integration1

ABSTRACT. This article explores the concept of European Union identity and its significance for European integration by drawing upon insights from theories of nationalism and national identity. European Union identity is viewed as an ongoing process which is banal, contingent and contextual. The central hypothesis is that: European integration facilitates the flourishing of diverse national identities rather than convergence around a single homogeneous European Union identity. The role of the EU as facilitator for diverse understandings of collective identities encourages the enhabitation of the EU at an everyday level and the reinforcement of a sense of banal Europeanism which is a crucial aspect of the European integration process. Facilitating diversity may thus provide a vital source of dynamism for the integration process.     

Conditionality and the EU–ACP Partnership: A Misguided Approach to Development?

The Cotonou Partnership between the states of Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific (ACP) and the European Union (EU) provides a case in which the human rights approach to development is being put into practice. This article uses the partnership to address broader questions regarding the effectiveness of the new approach to development. The EU–ACP partnership is innovative because it reflects the changing international consensus on development, but it is not clear if the norms used in the Cotonou Agreement have achieved the consensus needed to comprise any real shift in development policy. Moreover, it can be argued that what diminishes the efficacy of the human rights approach in the EU–ACP relationship is political conditionality as this mechanism may lead to interventions that are counterproductive to the establishment of stable democracy.     

European Union Constructive Engagement with Iran (2000–2004): An Exercise in Conditional Human Rights Diplomacy

In 2002, the European Union (EU) announced that it would enter a Trade and Cooperation Agreement with Iran. The deepening of economic and diplomatic relations between the EU and Iran was, however, linked by the Commission to progress in four areas: human rights, non-proliferation, terrorism and the Middle East Peace Process. This article argues that the current focus on efforts to find a solution to Iran's nuclear ambitions has overshadowed the dynamics of EU human rights diplomacy towards that country. Unlike diplomatic pressure on the non-proliferation issue, the EU-Iran Human Rights Dialogue did not only enjoy great support by politicians and human rights activists, but did indeed result in changes in legislation and policies aimed at the protection of human rights. Europe's multi-track strategy allowed Iranian activists and members of the legal profession to approach the notion of human rights from within the Shi'a notion of justice and rationality and thus managed to assert Islamic roots for human rights and uncovered the very secular realities of human rights violations in the Islamic Republic. The Dialogue was launched at a critical juncture in Iran's reformist movement and helped likeminded politicians, particularly the executive and parliament, to gain momentum domestically and credibility internationally. While efforts at reform were and still are often impeded by the country's competing centers of power, this article argues that efforts to promote and protect human rights in Iran must not be sacrificed for concerns over the nuclear issue.