In the Long Run: Rights, Sovereignty, and Bombing

Will historians looking back a hundred years from now see the rise of human rights as an agent or reflection of the decline of national sovereignty? I take this question (asked at a recent meeting by Richard Wilson, director of the Human Rights Institute at the University of Connecticut) as an expression of worry about the effects that the decline of national sovereignty is likely to have, including effects on human rights themselves. Human rights advocates will recognize an obvious reason for this worry. Human rights are often seen, correctly but narrowly, as a key line of protection against an invasive and oppressive state. But the project of winning respect for human rights also relies heavily on the state's legal and bureaucratic powers—the power to enforce, to educate, to take positive measures, and so on. This is especially true in the domain of economic, social, and cultural rights, which require for their fulfillment that states exercise what has come to be called “due diligence.” Violence against women, for example, which has only been classified as an abuse of human rights since 1993, is often perpetrated not by states but by private individuals and groups. It can come under the protection of human rights discourse only if a sovereign state, which is held responsible for intervening to punish and prevent, is strong enough to do so. Weaken national sovereignty, and you may subvert the cause of women's rights.