Human Rights and Global Justice

We live in a period of rising scepticism concerning human rights, their foundations, purposes and efficacy. Yet, the language and law of human rights remains one of the truly global languages of political, moral and legal claim-making. This course will unpack and examine the tensions and contradictions of contemporary human rights law and politics. It will first consider the historical origins of contemporary human rights frameworks, with special attention to the polemical debates about the origins of human rights. It will then examine various theories of human rights and their foundations, and as the question: what is global justice and what do human rights have to do with it? Finally, the course will inquire into the utility and uses of rights to challenge harms widely perceived as instances of global injustice: inequality and uneven development, labour exploitation and military occupation. In the end, we will ask, what can we expect from human rights law today?