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Corradetti, Claudio --- "Can Human Rights be Exported? On the Very Idea of Human Rights Transplantability" [2010] ELECD 115; in Bakardjieva Engelbrekt, Antonina; Nergelius, Joakim (eds), "New Directions in Comparative Law" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2010)

Book Title: New Directions in Comparative Law

Editor(s): Bakardjieva Engelbrekt, Antonina; Nergelius, Joakim

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781848443181

Section: Chapter 4

Section Title: Can Human Rights be Exported? On the Very Idea of Human Rights Transplantability

Author(s): Corradetti, Claudio

Number of pages: 16

Extract:

4. Can human rights be exported? On the
very idea of human rights
transplantability
Claudio Corradetti

INTRODUCTION
In order to formulate an answer to the question of human rights trans-
plantability, it is essential to refer, first, to the idea of a conceptual-legal status
of human rights, and then to provide an understanding of the notion of trans-
plantability itself. These points can be validly argued only if a general precon-
dition is first satisfied: general comparability among systems of rights. Indeed,
it is only if the possibility of general comparability among legal systems can
be admitted that the moral and political obligation might arise to expand,
through legal transplantability, the system of protected liberties and funda-
mental rights.
Now, as within one single system of fundamental rights there seem to arise
several difficulties in commensurating between individual rights themselves,
in the same way, between different right-systems there seems to be little util-
ity in looking for a common neutral ground of commensuration assessing
whether one exemplar liberty in a legal system S1 is better formulated than an
analogous liberty exemplarily formulated in a legal system S2. And yet, a form
of partial commensurability among different systems of liberty-rights can be
conceived as taking the form of a general balance of satisfied freedoms. While
exemplar rights per se remain reciprocally incommensurable, both at an infra-
system level and at an inter-system level, in relation to general balance of
guaranteed freedoms it is still possible to provide ...