How is human rights enforced

But a government trying to comply with the international human right to freedom of expression is given no specific guidance whatsoever. Thus, the existence of a huge number of vaguely defined rights ends up giving governments enormous discretion. If a government advances one group of rights, while neglecting others, how does one tell whether it complies with the treaties the best it can or cynically evades them?

The reason these kinds of problems arise on the international but not on the national level is that within countries, the task of interpreting and defining vaguely worded rights, and making trade-offs between different rights, is delegated to trusted institutions.

It was the US supreme court, for example, that decided that freedom of speech did not encompass fraudulent, defamatory, and obscene statements. The American public accepted these judgments because they coincided with their moral views and because the court enjoys a high degree of trust. In principle, international institutions could perform this same function.

But the international institutions that have been established for this purpose are very weak. In truly international human rights institutions, such as the UN human rights council, there is a drastic lack of consensus between nations. To avoid being compelled by international institutions to recognise rights that they reject, countries give them little power.

The multiple institutions lack a common hierarchical superior — unlike national courts — and thus provide conflicting interpretations of human rights, and cannot compel nations to pay attention to them. People throughout the world have different moral convictions, but the problem is not entirely one of moral pluralism. The real problem is the sheer difficulty of governance, particularly in societies in the throes of religious and ethnic strife that outsiders often fail to understand.

Many human rights advocates respond that even if human rights law does not function as a normal legal system, it does provide important moral support for oppressed people. When the Soviet Union signed the Helsinki Accords in , which required it to respect human rights, various Helsinki committees sprouted in the eastern bloc, which became important focal points for agitation from dissidents. Advocates for children can point to the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The human rights legal regime, taken as a whole, has made human rights the common moral language of international relations, which has forced governments to take human rights seriously.

But while governments all use the idiom of human rights, they use it to make radically different arguments about how countries should behave. Certain Islamic countries cite the right to religious freedom in order to explain why women must be subordinated, arguing that women must play the role set out for them in Islamic law. The language of rights, untethered to specific legal interpretations, is too spongy to prevent governments from committing abuses and can easily be used to clothe illiberal agendas in words soothing to the western ear.

And while NGOs do press countries to improve their behaviour, they cite the human rights they care about and do not try to take an impartial approach to enforcing human rights in general.

Sophisticated organisations such as Human Rights Watch understand that poor countries cannot comply with all the human rights listed in the treaties, so they pick and choose, in effect telling governments around the world that they should reorder their priorities so as to coincide with what Human Rights Watch thinks is important, often fixing on practices that outrage uninformed westerners who donate the money that NGOs need to survive.

But is there any reason to believe that Human Rights Watch, or its donors, knows better than the people living in Suriname, Laos or Madagascar how their governments should set priorities and implement policy? Westerners bear a moral responsibility to help poorer people living in foreign countries.

The best that can be said about the human rights movement is that it reflects a genuine desire to do so. But if the ends are admirable, the means are faulty.

Westerners should abandon their utopian aspirations and learn the lessons of development economics. Animated by the same mix of altruism and concern for geopolitical stability as the human rights movement, development economists have also largely failed to achieve their mission, which is to promote economic growth.

Yet their failures have led not to denial, but to incremental improvements and increasingly humility. Westerners no longer believe that white people are superior to other people on racial grounds, but they do believe that regulated markets, the rule of law and liberal democracy are superior to the systems that prevail in non-western countries, and they have tried to implement those systems in the developing world.

Easterly himself does not oppose regulated markets and liberal democracy, nor does he oppose foreign aid. Since the second world war, western countries contributed trillions of dollars of aid to developing countries.

The consensus among economists is that these efforts have failed. The reasons are varied. Giving cash and loans to a government to build projects such as power plants will not help the country if government officials skim off a large share and give contracts to cronies incapable of implementing those projects. Providing experts to improve the legal infrastructure of the country will not help if local judges refuse to enforce the new laws because of corruption or tradition or incompetence.

Pressuring governments to combat corruption will not help if payoffs to mob bosses, clan chiefs, or warlords are needed to maintain social order. Demanding that aid recipients use money in ways that they believe unnecessary can encourage governments to evade the conditions of the donations.

The Washington consensus failed because economic reform requires the consent of the public, and populations resented the imposition by foreigners of harsh policies that were not always wise on their own terms.

International human rights law reflects the same top-down mode of implementation, pursued in the same crude manner. But human rights law has its distinctive features as well. Because it is law, it requires the consent of states, creating an illusion of symmetry and even-handedness that is missing from foreign aid. Hence the insistence, wholly absent from discussions about foreign aid, that western countries are subject to international human rights law as other countries are.

However, in practice, international human rights law does not require western countries to change their behaviour, while in principle it requires massive changes in the behaviour of most non-western countries. Both foreign aid and human rights enforcement can be corrupted or undermined because western countries have strategic interests that are not always aligned with the missions of those institutions.

But the major problem, in both cases, is that the systems reflect a vision of good governance rooted in the common historical experiences of western countries and that prevails albeit only approximately in countries that enjoy wealth, security and order. There is no reason that this vision — the vision of institutionally enforced human rights — is appropriate for poor countries, with different traditions, and facing a range of challenges that belong, in the view of western countries, to the distant past.

Development economics has gone some distance to curing itself of this error. The best development scholars today, such as Esther Duflo , have been experimenting furiously with different ways of improving lives of people living in foreign countries. Rigorous statistical methods are increasingly used, and in recent years economists have implemented a range of randomised controlled trials.

Much greater attention is paid to the minutiae of social context, as it has become clear that a vaccination programme that works well in one location may fail in another, for reasons relating to social order that outsiders do not understand. Expectations have been lowered; the goal is no longer to convert poor societies into rich societies, or even to create market institutions and eliminate corruption; it is to help a school encourage children to read in one village, or to simplify lending markets in another.

This logical progression has taken us from realist theories of law obedience to liberal and communitarian theories, showing that the international human rights legal system is a dynamic and evolving process.

Once law is obeyed for communitarian reasons on a horizontal, state-to-state plane, the vertical internalisation of legal norms and values seems the logical next step. Through the transnational legal process described above, norms are integrated into domestic law. Once in place as domestic law, these values become internalised. In an increasingly liberal democratic international society, and within predominantly liberal regional organisations, the acculturation of societies within each state is inevitable — peer pressure and socialisation, coupled with the increase in communications, INGOs, and globalisation lead to an assimilation of beliefs about human rights and the power of international human rights law.

The acceptance of human rights norms into popular culture, political society, and behaviour is the most powerful method of enforcement. Due to this process, the values we now hold about human rights as codified in the human rights Declarations and Covenants of the UN are now so internalised that any disobedience of international human rights law is all the more shocking, and often triggers over-criticism of the enforcement mechanisms for international human rights law.

Whilst any human rights abuse comes at a humanitarian cost which cannot be ignored, obedience to international human rights law globally is set at a high level. For reasons of conciseness, this essay shall however examine UN Charter-based enforcement mechanisms only; there are separate mechanisms for enforcement at regional and domestic levels, and independent bilateral enforcement methods such as diplomacy and sanctions.

This shall be done in reply to criticisms of the UN human rights mechanisms. These shall be examined in order. Firstly, the ad hoc manner of adoption of human rights treaties is to be expected in an international system characterised by sovereign states with differing political systems.

The proliferation of liberal democracy is still a modern and ongoing concept. If the development of international human rights law is due to the spread of liberal democracy and acculturation, then human rights law is bound to grow with liberal democracy in a reactive manner — rarely is law pre-emptive.

Secondly, perceived low levels of public awareness do not correspond with the internalisation element of the legal process. However, lack of public awareness of international human rights norms is not to say that there is no public awareness of domestic human rights norms, which, from the drip-down of norms from the international arena identified above, are likely to be very similar. Thirdly, the absence of effective follow-up mechanisms for recommendations is a damning critique of the UN human rights protection system.

Two examples of the mechanisms that do exist — the Human Rights Council and the Universal Periodic Review — are examined below. However, the principles laid out under Article 2 4 of the UN Charter the ban on the use of force , severely curtails the options of enforcement by the UN toward states that commit serious human rights abuses.

The contested concept of humanitarian intervention is a heated debate, and the UN Security Council historically tends not to have a unified opinion on this. Currently, these states are only likely to intervene in their direct sphere of influence, region, or ex-colonies. There is potential for regional organisations with more cohesive human rights policies due to the communitarian reasons for adopting human rights norms to intervene in their sphere of influence in humanitarian crises.

However, the recent adoption of Security Council resolution over Libya shows that UN-authorised humanitarian intervention is a possibility UN Security Council One could find reason for this in the horizontal transnational legal process of acculturation of human rights values, particularly through the spread of the media and internet. Get updates on human rights issues from around the globe.

Join our movement today. Help us continue to fight human rights abuses. Please give now to support our work. Human Rights Watch. Donate Now. Take Action. Join Us. Give Now. What are human rights? How are human rights defined? The core human rights treaties include: The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights : Civil and political rights primarily protect individuals from state power.

They include rights to life and liberty, fair trials and protection from torture, and the freedoms of expression, religion, association and peaceful assembly. The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights : Economic, social and cultural rights, such as the rights to housing, education and health, require governments to use all available resources to gradually achieve them. How are human rights enforced? What about human rights in armed conflict?

What about prosecutions of rights violators?