Home | Databases | WorldLII | Search | Feedback Edited Legal Collections Data

Ivison, Duncan --- "Human Rights and Political Agency: On Pogge’s Analysis of Human Rights Violations Today" [2013] ELECD 1267; in Kinley, David; Sadurski, Wojciech; Walton, Kevin (eds), "Human Rights" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2013) 73

Book Title: Human Rights

Editor(s): Kinley, David; Sadurski, Wojciech; Walton, Kevin

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781781002742

Section: Chapter 4

Section Title: Human Rights and Political Agency: On Pogge’s Analysis of Human Rights Violations Today

Author(s): Ivison, Duncan

Number of pages: 16

Abstract/Description:

Human rights discourse is ubiquitous in global politics and yet the statistics concerning their actual fulfilment are dismal. As Thomas Pogge and others have made clear, nearly one quarter of all human beings today live in extreme or life-threatening poverty. Literally billions of our fellow human beings lack secure access to such things as clean water, medicines, shelter, electricity and education. There are at least two responses one could have to this state of affairs. First that the rise and rise of human rights discourse has helped us grasp the moral abomination of severe poverty and lowered our tolerance for injustice. The challenge is thus to deepen and make real our commitment to human rights. The second response might be one of despair: how can so much suffering be occurring during the very period in which human rights have become so prevalent in global political discourse? Maybe the relentless proliferation of human rights declarations, covenants, charters, commissions and lawyers is actually obfuscating more fundamental injustices. Human rights, in other words, have become ideology and squeezed out other more critical and potentially transformative alternatives. The jury is still out, I believe, on whether it’s time to start ditching human rights. To a certain extent it’s a moot point, given their prominence in contemporary politics. But it is important to remain alert to the way human rights are always implicated in larger structures of power.