The past and future of human rights

This chapter reflects on the lessons to be derived from the advocacy campaigns in Pakistan, Argentina, and Ireland discussed in earlier chapters. Insights drawn from those campaigns are used to refine the experimentalist account of human rights advanced in Chapter 2, particularly as regards the importance of social movements and of building broad social support for human rights campaigns. The remainder of the chapter describes five major challenges of the current era—illiberalism, climate change, digitalization, pandemics, and inequality—and considers the difficulties they pose for the experimentalist account of human rights advocacy. It argues that the experimentalist practice of human rights advocacy is reasonably resilient and adaptive, and that internal contestation from within the human rights movement as well as external critiques have already helped to catalyze reform and to push activists and advocates to think more innovatively about the changes needed to strengthen the ability of the movement to engage with these major challenges in the future. It concludes that in a turbulent era, rather than abandon human rights, we should redouble our efforts to bolster, renew, and reinvigorate a movement that has galvanized constituencies and communities around the globe to mobilize for a better world.

The activation of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in Argentina

This chapter examines the activation of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) in Argentina, and in particular the ways in which local and national disability rights organizations and movements have mobilized domestically and engaged repeatedly over time with international human rights bodies and national institutions to promote reform on a range of disability rights issues. Although the chapter focuses mainly on disability rights advocacy and particularly on the issue of inclusive education, drawing on the Emiliano Naranjo and Alan Rodríguez cases, the experimentalist approach to human rights is also used as a lens through which to view other aspects of human rights advocacy in Argentina including in the area of child rights. With an active civil society involved in aspects of both advocacy and policymaking, Argentina’s ratification and incorporation of international human rights treaties since the dictatorship has in different ways catalysed and enhanced domestic mobilization for change on a range of fronts.

Introduction

This chapter describes the current climate in which human rights law and institutions are under threat from the rise of political illiberalism, and are also being sharply critiqued by sceptical scholars who predict the decline and demise of the human rights movement. These developments are juxtaposed with the simultaneous rise of social movements and protests around the world, many of which invoke and claim human rights as part of their campaigns for social, political, environmental, racial, economic and other forms of justice. While some commentators have argued that human rights are ‘not enough’ in the pursuit of justice, this book takes the view that politics without human rights—i.e. without the kind of moral and institutional underpinning provided by the human rights framework with its explicit set of commitments to human dignity, freedom, and welfare—are not enough. It challenges the view of human rights as an ineffective, marginal or apolitical movement, and argues that human rights are the product of ongoing contestation and engagement between a multiplicity of actors, institutions and norms at different levels, including grassroots activists and advocates as well as international bodies and domestic institutional actors.

Using international human rights law to mobilize for children’s rights and reproductive rights in Ireland

This chapter uses the experimentalist framework to examine two processes of social change in Ireland in recent decades—children’s rights reform and reproductive rights reform—which included the engagement of domestic advocacy groups with international human rights law as a key element of those campaigns. In the case of child rights, a coalition of hitherto separate organizations and groups came together following Ireland’s ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, and re-oriented their work and advocacy around the idea of children’s rights. By bringing issues before the Committee on the Rights of the Child, and requiring the government to engage repeatedly with the Committee and with the meaning and consequences in practice of the obligations taken on under the Convention, they injected fresh impetus into existing campaigns, opened a public conversation about children’s rights, and placed Ireland’s practices and attitudes towards children and the family in the context of international standards. In the case of abortion law reform which was a bitterly divisive and difficult issue in Ireland, domestic activists drew upon and engaged with a variety of international human rights institutions and laws over decades to keep pressure on the government and the state to introduce change, as well as to create public awareness of the suffering of specific women and to highlight existing and emerging international norms on reproductive rights. Both campaigns ultimately succeeded in pressing for the adoption of a range of important legislative and policy reforms.

Mobilization for gender equality in Pakistan and the role of international human rights

This chapter examines the struggle for women’s rights and gender equality in Pakistan in recent decades through the lens of the experimentalist account of human rights. It describes the work of women’s groups and other activists in Pakistan to advance the rights of women in a highly patriarchal political and social system, and their engagement over time with international human rights law and institutions as part of those efforts, in particular the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). Activists have drawn on the support of transnational networks and have used international human rights institutions, including CEDAW as well as the Universal Periodic Review of the UN Human Rights Council, to increase pressure on governmental and other domestic actors to introduce change. Despite the huge scale of the social and political obstacles facing their efforts at reform, many significant changes have been introduced as a consequence of domestic mobilization and engagement. The chapter outlines some of these contested legal and political processes over time and the reforms that have gradually been brought about, as well as the limitations they have confronted.

The Effectiveness of Human Rights

This chapter surveys existing theories of the effectiveness of human rights, and notes that several prominent accounts have adopted either a ‘top down’ or a ‘bottom up’ theory of effectiveness, emphasizing either external intervention or grassroots mobilization as the primary motor of change. The experimentalist theory advanced in this chapter and throughout the book, however, argues that the effectiveness of much human rights law and advocacy comes neither primarily from top-down intervention nor primarily from bottom-up action but through the iterative interaction between multiple actors, norms and institutions situated at different levels within and outside the state. Building on an emerging scholarship from political scientists, anthropologists, and human rights practitioners, the chapter advances an experimentalist account of international human rights law and advocacy, and introduces the three case studies of human rights campaigns which will be discussed in subsequent chapters. The experimentalist account emphasizes the crucial importance of social mobilization and civil society activism, but argues that the interaction of domestic activism with international accountability institutions is particularly effective in promoting human rights.