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International Dialogue

International Dialogue

Andrew Fagan

Abstract

These are troubling times, in which we appear to be facing an ever-expanding litany of harms and injustices entirely of our own making. Our awareness of these pathological conditions is expressed through various critical perspectives and platforms, which together reinforce a pervasive sense of crisis. We all contribute to the making of our world in a variety of ways. Few of us can claim to possess entirely clean hands when it comes to accounting for how the world could have become so disenchanted and so unpleasant for so many. However, some may wish to claim that the very purity of their cause provides them with a secure alibi. The sounds of utterly marginalized voices do not carry very far and

remain inaudible to those who occupy the various sites of economic, political and legal power. This cannot be said of human rights, which cannot claim the status of ignored outsider. In a relatively short span of time, human rights came to fill the mouths of countless millions of people in their attempts to give voice to “justice.” Human rights, at least according to many of its most ardent supporters, is the language of humanity. Setting aside the metaphysical presumptions of such sentiments, the very fact that so many human beings across the world, including so many of the most and the least powerful of humankind, adopted the language of human rights appeared to confirm its status as the globe’s foremost moral doctrine for the public sphere. The elevated status of human rights does not rest upon rhetoric alone. That human rights occupy a prominent place within the global order is apparent in a variety of ways and settings, one of the most visible of which is the rapid development of an entire body of international human rights law. The moral power of human rights was given hard, concrete form through the hard, concrete institutions of international and domestic law. Through its legal embodiment, human rights became an integral component of the global order and, in so doing, lost the moral alibi afforded those doctrines that seek only to protest and condemn from the sidelines.

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