The United Nations initiated the Palermo Protocol in as an international quantitative research design into account, institutions on the domestic level have a Key words: compliance, anti-trafficking protocol, Palermo Protocol, United. Nations .. The last theory we are going to discuss in this thesis is the institutionalist.
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- Liberal Institutionalism: An Alternative IR Theory or Just Maintaining the Status Quo?
- The United Nations: Strengths and weaknesses
Western countries often make foreign aid conditional on human rights and have even launched military interventions based on human rights violations. Many people argue that the incorporation of the idea of human rights into international law is one of the great moral achievements of human history. Thus, international human rights law provides people with invaluable protections against the power of the state. And yet it is hard to avoid the conclusion that governments continue to violate human rights with impunity.
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Why, for example, do more than countries out of countries that belong to the UN engage in torture? Why has the number of authoritarian countries increased in the last several years?
Why do women remain a subordinate class in nearly all countries of the world? Why do children continue to work in mines and factories in so many countries? The truth is that human rights law has failed to accomplish its objectives. There is little evidence that human rights treaties, on the whole, have improved the wellbeing of people. The reason is that human rights were never as universal as people hoped, and the belief that they could be forced upon countries as a matter of international law was shot through with misguided assumptions from the very beginning.
The human rights movement shares something in common with the hubris of development economics, which in previous decades tried and failed to alleviate poverty by imposing top-down solutions on developing countries. But where development economists have reformed their approach, the human rights movement has yet to acknowledge its failures. It is time for a reckoning. Although the modern notion of human rights emerged during the 18th century, it was on December 10, , that the story began in earnest, with the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the UN general assembly.
The declaration arose from the ashes of the second world war and aimed to launch a new, brighter era of international relations. The weaknesses that would go on to undermine human rights law were there from the start. The universal declaration was not a treaty in the formal sense: It was not ratified by nations but approved by the general assembly, and the UN charter did not give the general assembly the power to make international law.
Moreover, the rights were described in vague, aspirational terms, which could be interpreted in multiple ways, and national governments — even the liberal democracies — were wary of binding legal obligations. The US did not commit itself to eliminating racial segregation, and Britain and France did not commit themselves to liberating the subject populations in their colonies.
Several authoritarian states — including the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Saudi Arabia — refused to vote in favour of the universal declaration and instead abstained. The words in the universal declaration may have been stirring, but no one believed at the time that they portended a major change in the way international relations would be conducted; nor did they capture the imagination of voters, politicians, intellectuals or anyone else who might have exerted political pressure on governments. Part of the problem was that a disagreement opened up early on between the US and the Soviet Union.
These rights were, not coincidentally, the rights set out in the US constitution. The Soviets argued that human rights consisted of social or economic rights — the rights to work, to healthcare, and to education. As was so often the case during the cold war, the conflict was zero-sum. Either you supported political rights that is, liberal democracy or you supported economic rights that is, socialism. The result was that negotiations to convert the universal declaration into a binding treaty were split into two tracks.
It would take another 18 years for the United Nations to adopt a political rights treaty and an economic rights treaty. As the historian Samuel Moyn has argued in his book The Last Utopia, it was not until the late s that human rights became a major force in international relations. Allies such as Iran and Saudi Arabia were just too important for American security, and seen as a crucial counterweight to Soviet influence.
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- The case against human rights.
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Still, something changed with Carter. It is not that presidents have become more idealistic. Rather, it is that they have increasingly used the language of rights to express their idealistic goals or to conceal their strategic goals. Despite the horrifying genocide in Rwanda in , and the civil war in Yugoslavia, the s were the high-water mark for the idea of human rights.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, economic and social rights lost their stigmatising association with communism and entered the constitutional law of many western countries, with the result that all major issues of public policy came to be seen as shaped by human rights. Human rights played an increasingly important role in the European Union and members insisted that countries hoping to join the EU to obtain economic benefits should be required to respect human rights as well.
NGOs devoted to advancing human rights also grew during this period, and many countries that emerged from under the Soviet yoke adopted western constitutional systems. Even Russia itself made halting movements in that direction. The United States was a traditional leader in human rights and one of the few countries that has used its power to advance human rights in other nations.
Moreover, the prohibition on torture is at the core of the human rights regime; if that right is less than absolute, then surely the other rights are as well. The rise of China has also undermined the power of human rights. In recent years, China has worked assiduously behind the scenes to weaken international human rights institutions and publicly rejected international criticism of the political repression of its citizens.
It has offered diplomatic and economic support to human rights violators, such as Sudan, that western countries have tried to isolate. Along with Russia, it has used its veto in the UN security council to limit western efforts to advance human rights through economic pressure and military intervention. And it has joined with numerous other countries — major emerging powers such as Vietnam, and Islamic countries that fear western secularisation — to deny many of the core values that human rights are supposed to protect. Each of the six major human rights treaties has been ratified by more than countries, yet many of them remain hostile to human rights.
This raises the nagging question of how much human rights law has actually influenced the behaviour of governments.
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There are undoubtedly examples where countries enter into human rights treaties and change their behaviour. The political scientist Beth Simmons , for instance, has described the observable impact in Japan and Colombia of the ratification of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. The puzzle is how to reconcile this with the many examples of blatant human rights violations. Saudi Arabia ratified the treaty banning discrimination against women in , and yet by law subordinates women to men in all areas of life.
Child labour exists in countries that have ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child: Uzbekistan, Tanzania and India, for example. Powerful western countries, including the US, do business with grave human rights abusers. In a very rough sense, the world is a freer place than it was 50 years ago, but is it freer because of the human rights treaties or because of other events, such as economic growth or the collapse of communism? The central problem with human rights law is that it is hopelessly ambiguous. The ambiguity, which allows governments to rationalise almost anything they do, is not a result of sloppy draftsmanship but of the deliberate choice to overload the treaties with hundreds of poorly defined obligations.
In most countries people formally have as many as international human rights — rights to work and leisure, to freedom of expression and religious worship, to nondiscrimination, to privacy, to pretty much anything you might think is worth protecting. The sheer quantity and variety of rights, which protect virtually all human interests, can provide no guidance to governments. Given that all governments have limited budgets, protecting one human right might prevent a government from protecting another. Take the right not to be tortured, for example. In most countries torture is not a matter of official policy.
As in Brazil, local police often use torture because they believe that it is an effective way to maintain order or to solve crimes. If the national government decided to wipe out torture, it would need to create honest, well-paid investigatory units to monitor the police. The government would also need to fire its police forces and increase the salaries of the replacements.
It would probably need to overhaul the judiciary as well, possibly the entire political system. Such a government might reasonably argue that it should use its limited resources in a way more likely to help people — building schools and medical clinics, for example. If this argument is reasonable, then it is a problem for human rights law, which does not recognise any such excuse for failing to prevent torture. Or consider, as another example, the right to freedom of expression. From a global perspective, the right to freedom of expression is hotly contested.
The US takes this right particularly seriously, though it makes numerous exceptions for fraud, defamation, and obscenity. In Europe, most governments believe that the right to freedom of expression does not extend to hate speech. In many Islamic countries, any kind of defamation of Islam is not protected by freedom of speech.
Human rights law blandly acknowledges that the right to freedom of expression may be limited by considerations of public order and morals. 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.
That said whilst Hoffman and Grieco are right to criticize liberal institutionalism and the ineffectiveness of the United Nations, many liberal instituionalists would argue this is a fallacy, as since the end of the Cold War, states have been dealing with security issues such as nuclear non-proliferation, civil war and the threat of terrorism through international organizations such as the United Nations. On the other hand both realists and liberal institutionalists neglect the impact that domestic forces and policies have in promoting a more cooperative strategy to deal with moral and ethical issues.
Helen Milner in her book Interests, Institutions and Information highlights the impact that domestic policies can have on international cooperation stating:. Domestic interests have had a major impact on cooperation in International Relations, public reactions to the deaths of US soldiers in Somalia led to the Clinton administration pulling out of a peacekeeping mission to the war torn country whilst public demand for action on Climate Change has led to member states such as Australia to sign up to the Kyoto Protocol.
This reflects the fact that domestic issues and policies have a major influence on how states cooperate with other states on an international stage.
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If a state was to go into agreement with another on trade relations, but that state had a bad record on human rights, the government might reconsider doing a deal if its constituents elected them on the basis of a strong human rights stance. This reflects the need for greater development of the liberal institutionalists argument in terms of domestic influences on decision making at an international level. Furthermore whilst Liberal institutionalists have acknowledged the influence non-state actors in world affairs such as transnational organizations and non-governmental organizations play, they have failed to recognize the role that global political advocacy networks have had in international relations.
Advocacy work on human rights, the environment and poverty has had major effects on the way states are viewed and global movements have challenged the notion that sovereignty is sacrosanct. Technological advances and telecommunication networks have allowed for swifter mobilization and organization of groups that can lobby governments and organizations about issues such as human rights and questioned the liberal institutionalists argument that states remain the key actors in world affairs.
J Walker has stated:. Social movements challenge the very institutions, structures and governments that explain in realist and liberal institutionalist terms how international relations and world affairs is conducted.
Liberal Institutionalism: An Alternative IR Theory or Just Maintaining the Status Quo?
Additionally the World Trade Organization has been criticized as an undemocratic organization that represents the interests of global corporations as it has consistently ruled against governments that pass legislation that impedes the free flow of goods, services and capital. Liberal institutionalists clash on the role that free markets play in international relations with some arguing that there should be minimal government interference in the global market, whilst others support institutions and regimes that manage the economic processes of globalization to prevent the widening of the gap between the rich and the poor.
The failure of the free trade market to close the poverty gap and the current global economic crisis suggest that the formers views are mistaken. Whilst liberal institutionalism in recent years has made a shift towards a more realist stance there are forms of the theory that should still be explored and encouraged.
The United Nations: Strengths and weaknesses
The development of norms and principles such as the Responsibility to Protect R2P and humanitarian intervention question the validity and sanctity of state sovereignty whilst advocacy networks and domestic politics have a major impact on how states act on the world stage. These developments suggest that the role international organizations play in international relations is changing and becoming more not less significant. The globalization of world affairs has had a major impact on international relations theory and it is this that institutionalism must adapt to.
An institutional perspective, which places emphasis on the structure of international society and focuses on the importance of institutions as advocates of norms and values such as human rights and which also takes into consideration domestic politics and outside players such as global movements would go a long way in combating criticisms that it is just another theory in the rationalistic paradigm. Baylis, J and Smith, S ed. Bull, H, The Anarchical Society: Bull, H and Watson, A ed.
Claude, Inis, Swords Into Plow shares: Donahue, J and Nye, J, ed. Evans, G, The Responsibility to Protect: Keohane, R, After hegemony: A and Kupchan, C. From Idea to Norm-and Action? J , One World, ,Many Worlds: C, , pg Before you download your free e-book, please consider donating to support open access publishing.