Professor Seyla Benhabib |
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Your Excellencies and Distinguished Members of the UNDEF Advisory Board! It is an honor and a pleasure for me to address you this afternoon. Being a political philosopher by training, who has published on democracy, immigrants’ rights and multiculturalism in Europe and the USA, and women’s issues, I wish to speak to you today about the Human Rights Revolution largely initiated by the United Nations and its various covenants, treaties and declarations. The actions of your illustrious body have generated a lively and contentions debate about state sovereignty and human rights, the prospects of global constitutionalism and transnational democratic governance. It is now widely accepted that since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we have entered a phase in the evolution of global civil society which is characterized by a transition from international to cosmopolitan norms of justice. This is not merely a semantic change. While norms of international law emerge through treaty obligations to which states and their representatives are signatories, cosmopolitan norms accrue to individuals considered as moral and legal persons in a world-wide civil society. Even if cosmopolitan norms also originate through treaty-like obligations, such as the UN Charter and the various human rights covenants that are binding upon their signatory states can b e considered to be, their peculiarity is that they limit the sovereignty of states and their representatives and oblige them to treat their citizens and residents in accordance with certain human rights standards. States have now engaged in a process of “self-limiting” or “self-binding” their sovereignty, as the very large number which have signed the various human rights covenants that have come into existence since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 shows. Consider a list of the human rights declarations which have been signed by a majority of the world’s states since the UDHR in 1948: the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted by Resolution 260 (III) A of the UN General Assembly on December 9 1948 (Chapter II); the 1951 Convention on Refugees (which entered into force in 1954); the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR; opened to signature in 1966 and entered into force in 1976, with 163 out of 195 countries being parties to it as of 2009); the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR; entered into force the same year and with 160 state parties as of June 2009), the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW; signed in 1979 and entered into force in 1981, with 186 states parties as of June 2009); and the Convention on the Rights of the Child with 193 states party to it. These developments have led some scholars to predict the rise of “global constitutionalism;” while others point out that state sovereignty may be limited but not surpassed, and states remain the enforcer as well as the guarantor of these rights. Even the European Convention on Human Rights, to which 47 states are parties, and the European Court of Human Rights, are wholly dependent upon the cooperation of their respective states to redress wrongs committed against their citizens. I do not see an easy resolution either theoretically or politically to these issues, except to emphasize the tremendous significance of the “self-limitation of state sovereignty” in the light of the abuse to which such sovereignty has been put in human history. I wish to leave you with a final thought which is much more germane to the work of this Board. These covenants, treaties and agreements have a “jurisgenerative character” – a term I borrow from the late legal philosopher Robert Cover. Jurisgenerativity means the law’s capacity to create a normative universe of meaning which can often escape the “provenance of formal lawmaking”. Law can also structure an extra-legal normative universe by developing new vocabularies for public claim-making; by encouraging new forms of subjectivity to engage with the public sphere and by interjecting existing relations of power with anticipations of justice to come. Law anticipates forms of justice in a future to come. And this is what the human rights revolution has enabled for civil society actors and social movements in our times: it has created a new and powerful vocabulary for public claim-making; it has enabled new social actors such as women, migrants, indigenous peoples to enter the public arena as political agents, and it has created anticipations of new forms of justice in a future world. For that and for much else I am personally grateful for the work of the UN and its various bodies. Thank you for listening!
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