There is an ethical and idealistic spirit to the notion of human rights that is easily lost sight of in complex discourses. It is in the sense of aspiration for an everyday justice, the pursuit of minimum standards of human well-being, and the striving for a doctrine that is humane, universal and inclusive.

This spirit was evident in world politics during the years following the Second World War, and can be identified in the various international conventions of the time as well as the United Nations Charter itself. The renewed idealism was in part a response to the horrors of the war and particularly to the murder of millions of Jews, gypsies and other groups in the Holocaust. Those people had been targeted by the Nazi regime because of a more profound element of their humanity than mere nationality. That perhaps was a factor in the shift of thinking that brought the leaders of the post-war world away from an international system configured solely around states.

Although the nation state continued to be the major unit of international relations, the rise in recognition of the individual in international society spelled a massive re-imagining of the world. Sixty years later, the individual occupies a distinct space in the international order and is protected by the body of human rights instruments stemming directly from that period.

Human rights do not represent a panacea for oppression, and indeed they remain a controversial notion in many quarters. In 1948 the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) declared itself to be ‘a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations,’ but many question the veracity of this claim.  A cultural critique of the human rights regime, for example, would argue that it represents the Western individualist tradition incompatible with many community-oriented cultures outside the West – this argument is usually made under the contemporary banner of the ‘Asian values’ school.

A feminist critique would see the UDHR as impotent in the private realm of the home, where the human rights of women have been subverted in favour of a man’s perceived right to preside over his domain.  Even such relatively straightforward criticisms point to a central truth in human rights: that in determining the rights we consider most important we reveal a picture of our ideal subject of those rights.

In defining, though, this process also excludes – and for those marginalised by their society, rights can offer only limited protection, while for others, the growth of international human rights conventions has effected genuine relief. Clearly the complexity associated with human rights discourse is considerable, continually frustrating simple classifications and solutions.

Chris Brown’s chapter introducing the human rights ‘regime’ does not shirk this complexity. On the contrary, he embodies Amartya Sen’s prerequisite attitude for the success of human rights: that of ‘tolerating heterodoxy.’[1] Brown’s chapter leads the reader through the multifarious historical and philosophical elements of human rights as well as delving valiantly into the intricacies of contemporary debates within the discourse. Given his experience in the area of human rights, it is not surprising that this ostensible thematic review is peppered with Brown’s own responses to the issues he addresses. The chapter is very clearly a segment in a larger piece of work, and at times there is a sense that material is being covered so as to form the basis of an argument in a later chapter. All the same, a remarkable amount of information is contained within the chapter and it expertly meets its own challenge, that of encapsulating ‘The Contemporary International Human Rights Regime’ in a single chapter.

It is an interesting characteristic of human rights discourse that its heterogeneous nature contains so many essentialist perspectives. Brown’s deft handling of these competing narratives is to his credit, even if it does strain the scope of the chapter somewhat. Nevertheless, as Brown’s work implies, the real issues in human rights talk lie at its fault lines. The most immediate of these is the ontological debate that asks whether rights are an inherent entitlement of human beings, or if they must in fact be earned through the fulfilment of correlative duties. This particular debate is one of the liveliest in human rights talk, and also comes under the rubric of a contractual legal conception of rights as against a moral, universal one. The two schools of thought are largely irreconcilable, and the culmination of Brown’s analysis is the conclusion that ‘the fiction that universal human rights exist is not harmfully misleading.’[2] Such a position indicates that Brown’s allegiance here is to the symbolic value of human rights rather than their practical application: an alternative argument would be that the fiction of universal human rights undermines its very premise.

Other cracks in the façade of a unitary human rights doctrine appear as the regime is tested by the shifting emphases of history. Brown highlights the Cold War distinction between the economic and social rights championed under Soviet communism and the political and civil rights associated with Western democracies. The jostling tensions and contradictions in these conceptions of rights are remarkable. As Brown notes, from the communist perspective, political rights are meaningless for those living in abject poverty (thereby denied supposed economic rights); on the other hand, from a post-Cold War perspective, political rights can be seen as a prerequisite for economic success.[3] That these two sets of rights can be simultaneously mutually dependent and mutually exclusive is a paradox that Brown does not dwell on.[4] Rather, throughout the chapter he allows such contradictions to remain unresolved on the page. This refusal to simplify an enduringly complex subject matter is one of the primary strengths of this chapter.

The feminist critique of existing human rights doctrine is also tackled in the chapter. Brown outlines the feminist objection to conventional human rights instruments that aim to protect individuals from dangers generally found in the public realm and therefore not from those of the private, or domestic, realm – that traditionally inhabited by women. Brown’s conclusion is that

rights seem a particularly appropriate response to one kind of oppression – that directed against active citizens… in public life – but not particularly appropriate to the equally damaging forms of oppression characteristically found within the private sphere.[5]

The limitation, therefore, is built into the structure of human rights. This argument is at odds with the majority opinion that existing inequalities will be remedied by broadening the tenets of rights doctrine. Brown makes a powerful case, and one that deserves more space in the text than he has allotted it. While the cultural critique of human rights is afforded a chapter of its own, women’s rights are relegated to a minor position apparently only worthy of an introductory review. Brown thus shows himself willing to reflect mainstream rights discourse’s relegation of women’s rights to a point of incidental concern.[6] All this suggests that Western society itself has not completely transcended the unconscious marginalisation of women in the category of ‘rights-bearer’.

Brown uses his analysis of the feminist critique as an unusual route to the challenging question in rights talk of universalism. This debate concerns the contested space between academic theorising and grassroots implementation of human rights. Is the UDHR a codification of basic standards of human dignity, or is it an imperialistic exercise in the global imposition of Western values? Vincent suggests that rights themselves ‘do note constitute a paradigm of moral thought but have their place and content determined by the ethical system in which they are embedded.’[7] This would imply alternative versions of rights according to culture – cultural relativism – and therefore no possibility of universal human rights.

It is difficult, in the collage of perspectives that makes up Brown’s chapter on human rights, to identify a consistent argumentative thread. Brown himself exacerbates this ambiguity by failing to clarify his own position on the role of human rights beyond academic discussion. In arguing for a limiting force on what may be considered a right, Brown would seem to be making a case for the enforceability of human rights:

[T]o think in terms of having a right to something that could not be achieved weakens the concept of a right in such a way as to undermine those more precise claims to rights which can, in fact, be achieved.[8

Later, however, he appears to contradict himself by suggesting that the real value of rights is symbolic, in that rights thinking ‘encourages the notion that we have obligations towards each other.’[9] If this is indeed the case, then surely we would opt to broaden, not constrain, our definition of human rights. This fluidity and uncertainty tends to heighten the chapter’s patchiness rather than unifying it with the coherence of a strong argument.

Brown’s approach to this chapter resembles in form that which it addresses in content. The discourse of human rights is a multifarious juxtaposition of tensions and irresolvable dilemmas. ‘The Contemporary Human Rights Regime’ presents these competing narratives untempered by a clear unifying argument. In the larger context of Brown’s book the chapter doubtless reveals a greater consistency, but as a stand-alone piece it functions more as an encyclopaedia entry than an article. The chapter’s internal arguments are original and even elegant, but they jostle against each other for space in the narrow scope of the chapter. What holds the piece together is not a unifying argument, then, but instead, Brown’s fidelity to the spirit of human rights: the moral foundations of rights transcend the clamour. The language of rights, Brown believes, is becoming ‘the way in which humanitarian impulses are expressed in the modern international system.’ That humanitarian impulses exist, and can find voice within international society is the ultimate unifying feature of the human rights system.

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[1] Amartya Sen, ‘Human Rights and Asian Values,’ Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs, New York, 1997. p.22

[2] Brown, p.119

[3] Brown, p.123

[4] The incompatibility of certain aspects of human rights must be treated as circumstantial. As R.J. Vincent argues, even during the Cold War, in areas such as Scandinavia where economic and social rights had been developed alongside political and civil rights, the paradox did not exist: in that part of the world, the notion of such a conflict ‘was itself the prisoner of a cold-war perception of world politics.’ R.J. Vincent, ‘The Idea of Rights in International Ethics,’ ch.12, in Terry Nardin and David R. Mapel (eds), Traditions of International Ethics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993, p.266

[5] Brown, p.130

[6] The tendency for the rights of the marginalised to be championed only by representatives of those groups shows unfortunate disregard for the selfless spirit of human rights that implies acting on behalf of the less powerful, rather than according to self-interest.

[7] R.J. Vincent, ‘The Idea of Rights in International Ethics,’ ch.12, in Terry Nardin and David R. Mapel (eds), Traditions of International Ethics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993, p.266

[8] Brown, p.123

[9] Brown, p.130