Human Rights

This class is designed to provide a broad introduction to the conceptual and legal problems raised by the development of a global human rights regime. The aim of this course is not to train human rights experts, but to give students the tools to think their way through some of the complexities of international human rights law. The course will focus on the globalization of human rights, and assess how states have responded to the challenges it raises. How did an idea that was initially consigned to a few European states become the ideology of choice of the international community? How deep does the globalization of rights go? What constraints does international law impose on the diffusion of human rights? Can there be proper enforcement of international human rights norms in a world of power politics and sovereign states? How are human rights being transformed as a result of being globalized, and how is international law changing as a result of adopting human rights? The course will examine the birth of the international human rights regime, from minority protection in the inter-war to the 1993 Vienna Conference. It will try o tackle fundamental “structural” issues in human rights: who owes what types of obligations to whom and in what circumstances? It will provide an introductory analysis to the substantive international law of human rights by looking at different generations of rights, their content and relation to each other. The “enforcement” dimension of international human rights will also be examined. The course will assess the role of international (United Nations) and regional (American, European, African and Asian) human rights mechanisms, whether judicial or otherwise, in promoting and protecting human rights, as well as some of the tensions that may arise with states as a result. The course will also consider "transnational" human rights issues (refugees, conditionality in development assistance, multinational corporations, transnational human rights litigation). Finally, some human rights problems arising out of global governance arrangements (world trade and human rights, collective security and human rights) will be studied. Finally, the course will consider some of the implications of international human rights law for US law.