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The Limits of Human Rights Limits
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 January 2021
Extract
Rescuing Human Rights: A Radically Moderate Approach (Rescuing) was published shortly before the outbreak in 2020 of the novel coronavirus and its myriad human rights and class issues regarding equality, discrimination, health, and labor rights of people of color. This was also prior to the concurrent public murder of George Floyd as an unarmed Black man by the Minneapolis police in late May 2020, and the resulting continuing Black Lives Matter massive national and international movement against the deaths of Floyd and others and the history of systemic American racism, including police shooting deaths, discrimination, and brutality against African Americans, particularly unarmed Black men. Such comprehensive street protests have not been seen in America since 1968. They represent, inter alia, the cover of disguises of national racism being publicly stripped away, and the national confrontation with irrefutable evidence of a wide spectrum of systemic rights violations and the deficits of American law and government to ensure African Americans’ basic rights. Further, Rescuing was published before it became fully apparent that the federal government's responses to Black Lives Matter, particularly the executive branch, would fan the racial conflicts of national mourning and demands for new justice narratives, rather than healing and unifying for American citizens as a whole, even as these protests were the most diverse in recent memory.
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- Copyright © 2021 by The American Society of International Law
Footnotes
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Of the Board of Editors.
References
1 John Ruggie's “Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights: Implementing the United Nations ‘Protect, Respect and Remedy’ Framework,” UN Doc. A/HRC/17/31, Annex (Mar. 21, 2011) (a prominent set of principles reflecting comments from governments and other stakeholders, opposing previous UN Norms on corporate responsibility for human rights, as discussed in: Philip Alston & Ryan Goodman, International Human Rights 1478–90 (2013)).
2 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, Dec. 16, 1966, 993 UNTS 3.
3 David Kennedy, The Dark Side of Virtue: Reassessing International Humanitarianism, ch. 1 (2004).
4 Yogyakarta Principles, at www.yogyakartaprinciples.org . In 2006, a distinguished group of international human rights experts met in Yogyakarta, Indonesia to outline a set of principles related to sexual orientation and gender identity. The result was the Yogyakarta Principles: a universal guide to international human rights which affirm binding legal standards with which all states must comply. On November 10, 2017, a panel of experts published additional principles on the original document reflecting developments in international human rights law and practice since the 2006 Principles: The Yogyakarta Principles Plus 10, which cover additional state obligations in areas such as torture, asylum, privacy, health, and the protection of human rights defenders.
5 For an excellent recent overview, see James Gathii, Grotius Lecture, ASIL Annual (virtual) Meeting, June 25, 2020 (to be published in the ASIL Proceedings of the Annual Meeting). See also James Gathii, Writing Race and Identity in a Global Context: What CRT and TWAIL Can Learn from Each Other, 67 UCLA L. Rev. __ (forthcoming 2020).
6 Kennedy, supra note 3.
7 Wing borrowed and discussed this concept from Professor Patricia Williams as an extension of her own formulation of “spirit injury” suffered by abused women. See Wing, Adrien, Critical Race Feminism and International Human Rights, 28 U. Miami Inter-Am. L. Rev. 337, 343 (1997)Google Scholar.
8 Makau Mutua, Human Rights: A Political and Cultural Critique 71 (2002); Gathii, Grotius Lecture, supra note 5.