Human Rights for Martians

by Costas Douzinas • 3 May 2016

The human rights movement can be
seen as the ongoing but failing struggle
to close the gap between the abstract
man of the Declarations and the
empirical human being. Has it
succeeded? Yes and no.

Young migrants and refugees at a fence

in the Moria detention center on the
Greek island of Lesbos, on April 16,
2016 (AFP Photo/Aris Messinis) SRC
2015 and 2016 have been marked by the
heart-breaking images of a moving
humanity of refugees and immigrants
who leave the battlefronts of Syria,
Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya to come to
Europe, their imaginary Arcadia. More
than one million people have braved
the rough waters of the Aegean and
Libyan seas with the bulk landing on
the Greek islands of Lesbos, Chios, Kos,
Agathonissi, Farmakonissi and
Lemnos.
On the way to the islands, thousands
have lost their lives. Photographs of
drowned dead bodies lying on the
beaches of Greece and Turkey have
been published daily. The image of
dead three-year-old Aylan Kurdi on a
Turkish beach in early September went
around the world and became the
image of the refugee crisis.
Britain’s chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis
interviewed on radio stated that “for far
too long, we have related to these
suffering individuals as if they are
people who are living on Mars. Thanks
to that image, that desperately sad and
tragic image, it’s moved out hearts …
It’s an image of that boy that has
brought us to our senses and we must
respond adequately.”
Yet the first known refugee casualty of
2016 was an unnamed two-year-old boy
who drowned on January 1 when the
crowded dinghy he was travelling in
broke in the rocks off Greece’s
Agathonissi island. “Nothing can
prepare you for the horrific reality of
what is going on. Today we came face
to face with one of the youngest
victims of this ongoing refugee crisis. It
is a tragic reminder of the thousands of
people who have died trying to reach
safety in miserable conditions,” said
Christopher Catrambone a migrant
support NGO officer.
Between the first and the second dead
infant thousands braved the sea and
hundreds drowned. The island of
Lesbos has run out of burial space.
Many graves are unmarked as the
name and nationality of the buried are
unknown. Refugees are the unmourned
and ungrievable victims of the latest
humanitarian catastrophe.
As Antigone knew, the dead must be
honoured at all costs. Those who
cannot, who do not deserve to be
mourned, form the most extreme case
of bare life, life outside the protection
of law and state, as Judith Butler
reminded us.
The image of the little dead body
floating on the waves and then lying on
the beach was powerful. It was
published and copied again and again
around the world. Yet Aylan’s death
image did not have the same effect on
European politicians as on the Rabbi.
Greece is a transit place on the way to
Northern Europe for people fleeing the
wars of the Middle East.
Over a million refugees entered Europe
in 2015 with some 820,000 landing on
Greek islands and some 250,000 in
early 2016. Germany temporarily
opened its borders receiving a large
number of asylum seekers. But when
the political climate started turning the
borders were closed again. Hungary
built a fence on the border and
declared that it cannot accept the
moral blackmail of Germany which
initially welcomed immigrants. Croatia
and the Former Yugoslav Republic of
Macedonia built fences too.
Poland declared that it would only
accept Christian refugees. Finally and
after Austria stopped receiving refugees
the so-called Western Balkans route
was sealed with soldiers patrolling the
border between Greece and FYROM.
Unilaterally and against international
and European law duties, the European
Union declared itself closed to
outsiders.
The European Union has become
physically a ‘Fortress Europe’. It has
externalised migration control and
with the recent agreement with Turkey
it has delegated the control and
security of its borders to a third
country which, according to all
calculation, is not safe. .
An EU Summit meeting in September
2015 agreed that around 160,000
refugees would be relocated from
Greece and Italy to the 28 EU states in
numbers proportionate to their size
and population. At the time of writing
fewer than 1000 have been relocated.
Immediately after the agreement, a
number of states including Hungary
and Poland have and rejected
participation and refused to take any
refugees. Denmark, one of the most
wealthy nations of the European
Union, passed a law authorising the
confiscation of the pitiful valuables of
refugees to cover the cost of offering
basic services to them.
In September 2015, against wishes,
expectations and predictions, I was
elected a Syriza MP for the port of
Pireas. As the President of the Defence
and Foreign Relations committee of the
Hellenic Parliament, I have to attend
various inter-parliamentary
conferences and meetings.
In November, in a meeting at the
European Parliament to discuss
migration flows in the Western
Balkans, I explained that the Greek
position was to welcome the migrants,
register them, start the asylum
determination process for those who
do not wish to leave immediately and
let the others go while doing
everything possible to make their lives
bearable while in the country. The help
of ordinary citizens and the solidarity
of Greek and foreign NGOs has made
this huge task for a small and
economically devastated country
possible.
A Northern European MP retorted by
stating that the Greek port police
should “push back” the ramshackle
refugee dinghies. I explained that
“pushing back” could only work if these
vessels are rammed or sank, something
that the Greeks would not do. My
interlocutor response was that the
patrol boats should allow refugees to
reach the islands but should turn back
“illegal” migrants.
Again, I explained that the Greek
government is not prepared to tolerate
more deaths in the Aegean. Moreover
the separation of asylum-seekers from
economic migrants in rough waters is
impossible even if some inhumane
administration were to adopt the plan.
Jami and Barzo, two failed asylum
seekers living in the London shadows,
give a succinct answer to the Northern
European politician. In a video
accompanying coverage of a report by
the refugee charity Parfras, which
details the life of an underground
humanity without shelter, food or the
right to work and survives in our cities
on less that one-dollar a day, Jami who
sleeps in parks, quietly contrasts
himself to his friends who have
“papers” and implicitly to the rest of us.
“We both have two hands, two eyes,
two legs. They are human like me”.
Barzo ends his heart-rending
description of destitution,
homelessness and despair
quietly addressing people like us who,
from our comfortable houses, keep
proclaiming “human rights, human
rights. But where are the human rights
for the asylum seekers?”
In haunting and halting sentences
echoing suffering humanity from
Shylock to Primo Levi, these natural
philosophers state an indisputably
realistic truth: we may all be human
but humanity has always excluded,
despised and degraded some of its
parts.
Humanity is not one: it has always
been split between full and lesser
humans. The refugee crisis version
distinguishes between refugees and
migrants, placing the former in a
precarious position of rhetorical
protection while abandoning the
“illegals”, as if there is any human
being who is “illegal” because of who
they are.
Split humanity
How can we understand this paradox
that not all humans have humanity in a
human rights world? The inflation of
rights-talk has obscured the terms. To
understand what Jami and Barzo tell us
and Aylan proves we need to start
again.
“Human rights” is a term combining
law and morality. Legal rights have
been the building block of western law
since early modernity. As human rights
refer to a type of morality and to the
treatment individuals expect from
public and private powers. Human
rights are a hybrid category, which
introduces a number of paradoxes at
the heart of society by bringing
together law and morality.
Let me start with legal rights, the part
that really counts in power’s treatment
of people. Private property and
contractual rights were introduced in
early modernity. They were both the
result of the emergence of market
economy and contributed to its victory.
Culturally, rights were precipitated by
what Alasdair McIntyre has called a
“moral catastrophe”: the destruction of
premodern communities of virtue and
duty. Because the capitalist society of
individualism and free will lacks a
universal moral code, restraints on
private egotism must be external.
Crime, tort and legal rights achieve
precisely that. The law empowers
individuals to enforce their rights but
also limits their exercise so that in
theory we can all have an equal
amount of rights.
When disputes arise, it is the business
of lawyers and judges to resolve them.
These rule experts have propagated a
commonly held view that laws and
rights are like facts: they have
‘objective’ meaning, which can be
discovered by the professionals. Legal
rights turn social and political conflict
into a technical problem about the
meaning of rules.
Legal rules and rights however do not
come with their meaning on their
sleeve. Human rights provisions are
commonly general and abstract. They
must be interpreted to be applied.
Most rights disputes involve at least
two contradictory but plausible legal
and cultural meanings. This is where
the available discursive frameworks
analysed in this volume become all
important. Take the “right to life”,
which opens most bills of rights and
human rights treaties.
Its statement does not answer
questions about abortion, the death
penalty, and euthanasia or indeed
about whether this right protects the
necessary prerequisites for survival
such as food, shelter, health care or the
safe passage to a place of asylum. In
most cases, a human rights claim is the
beginning rather than the end of a
dispute about the meaning of the right
or its relative standing vis-à-vis
conflicting rights.
At this point, moral, political or
ideological considerations unavoidably
enter legal argumentation. Deciding
conflicts between liberty and security,
which have become so important after
the Paris terrorist attacks, involves
assumptions about the way a
democratic society works.
These depend in part on decision-
makers’ ideological, political or moral
views. Removing them from politicians
and giving them to lawyers (with their
usual homogeneous outlook) does not
change this basic fact. Rights and law
are supposed to use reason and
precedent to make the exercise of
power neutral and objective. But the
repressed “subjectivism” always
returns: rights adjudication is
ambiguous, open, and potentially
radical. We should not forget that law’s
main job is to provide order not to
support morality.
Secondly, whether recognised or not by
law “human rights” are moral claims. A
Chinese dissident who asserts the right
to free political activity or an asylum-
seeker who claims the right to secure
passage to a place of safety are both
right and wrong. The dissident’s “right”
does not refer to an existing legal
entitlement but to a claim about what
morality (or ideology, or international
law or some other higher source)
demands.
In this sense, the morality of human
rights is always in potential conflict
with their legal status. Human rights
confound the real and the ideal. Take
Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights: “All human beings are
born free and equal of right”. But as
Jeremy Bentham noted first, newly
born infants depend for survival on
their carers, while the statement that
people are born equal flies in the face
of huge disparities in the world.
Biological and social nature distribute
their wares unequally, an unavoidable
result of the accidents of birth and
history. Heredity, the standing and
economic (dis)advantage of family and
community largely determine our lives.
Equality on the other hand is unnatural
and must be fought for.
Similarly, the asylum-seeker’s claim to
the right to life, as argued above, does
not create an indefeasible expectation
of survival. Depending on the political,
legal or cultural discursive framework
adopted, ramming a dinghy may be
interpreted as a criminal act and a
violation of the refugees’ rights or a
necessary protection of national
interests.
Human rights statements are therefore
prescriptions: people are not free and
equal but they ought to become so;
people do not have a right to life, they
ought to be granted the necessary
means for their survival. Their success
depends on political will and the social
conditions within which the equality
and life maxims are to be fought for.
Equality is a call for action not a
description of a state of affairs. Moral
or legal philosophy no longer deserves
the adjective ‘moral’ when they forget
this simple fact.
Human rights are a subcategory of
legal rights protecting important goods
and activities. The standard claim is
they are given to people on account of
their humanity rather than
membership of narrower categories
such as nation, community or class.
And yet this assertion is disproved by
the history of natural and human
rights.
The French Declaration of the Rights of
Man and Citizen, the political and legal
foundation and manifesto of
modernity, opens with the statement
about free and equal rights which the
Universal Declaration repeated
replacing “men” with human beings.
The Declaration proceeds to bestow
these rights to French citizens only.
From that point on statehood,
sovereignty and territory follow
nationhood and its pathologies,
nationalism, ethnic wars and cleansing,
genocide. The gap between universal
“man” and national citizen is inhabited
by foreigners – they do not have rights
because they are not citizens and as a
result they are not fully human.
The “man” of the “rights of man” has
no concrete characteristics, except for
free will, reason and soul. These
universal elements secularised the
Christian belief in the sacredness of life
and endowed humanity with dignity
and respect. But this “man” is an
abstraction without body, colour,
gender or history, as Hegel, Burke and
Marx agreed.
Yet the empirical man who actually
enjoyed legal rights was literally a man
— a well-off, white, Christian, urban
male. He condenses the abstract
dignity of humanity and the privileges
of the powerful.
Ever since, full ‘humanity’ is
constructed against a background of
conditions of inhumanity (citizenship,
class, gender, race, religion, sexuality).
If rights are universal, refugees, sans
papiers immigrants or the Guantanamo
Bay detainees who have no country to
protect them should have humanity’s
entitlements.
But they have none – they are just bare,
unprotected life. Human rights do not
belong to humans, they construct a
graded “humanity”. Every historical age
has used its (philosophical or
empirical) definition of humanity to
separate between rulers, ruled and
excluded.
Those who don’t speak our language,
share our religion, belong to the wrong
class, gender, colour or sexuality have
always been left outside locally defined
“humanity”. These categories of
exclusion are still active. They have
been joined by the “bottom billion”, the
“human waste”, the rejects of global
neoliberal capitalism.
The human rights paradox
The human rights movement can be
seen as the ongoing but failing struggle
to close the gap between the abstract
man of the Declarations and the
empirical human being. Has it
succeeded? Yes and no. The concept of
a common “humanity” introduced the
vocation of universal dignity.
Jami, Barzo and Aylan teach us,
however, that there is nothing sacred
about any definition of humanity and
nothing eternal about its scope.
Refugees who have no state, nation or
law to protect them should be the
prime beneficiaries of human rights,
recipients of the consolations of
humanity.
Despite the claims of liberal
philosophers however bare humanity
offers no protections. Human rights,
we could conclude, do not belong to
humans. They help construct who and
how one becomes human. Jami, Barzo
and Aylan have no rights at all. In their
case, the paradoxical relationship
between law and morality has been
resolved through the elimination of the
moral command. While they bleed and
hurt like the rest of us, they are not
fully human.
The ideological power of human rights
lies precisely in their rhetorical
ambiguity, the oscillation between real
and ideal, between humanity and
national citizenship, the only provider
of legal rights. When human rights are
part of the law, as with the British
Human Rights Act which the
Conservative government has pledged
to repeal, the law includes a principle
of self-transcendence, which pushes
against the law’s settled state. A legal
system that includes human rights is
paradoxically not equal to itself, since
human rights call the whole of law to
account everywhere not just in
totalitarian states.
In this sense, human rights become the
latest expression of a human urge to
resist domination and oppression and
to dissent from the intolerance of
public opinion. This was the case in the
great revolutions of the
eighteenth century, in the post-WWII
“never again” declarations, in popular
uprisings against fascist and
communist rule.
They are part of a long and honourable
tradition, which started in the West
with Antigone’s defiance of unjust law
and surfaces in the struggles of the
despised, enslaved or exploited. Those
who defend Jami, Barzo and the
thousands who arrive daily in the
Greek islands belong to this tradition
and redeem the value of human rights.
Those who use human rights rhetoric
to defend the “human” rights of
powerful companies in the developing
world contribute to the banalisation
and eventual atrophy of rights. This
atrophy paradoxically follows the
triumph of rights. Human rights have
mutated, expanded and turned into a
vernacular touching every aspect of
social life.
Rights have become ubiquitous at the
cost of their specificity and
significance. They are seen as key
concept in morals, politics and
subjectivity. Claiming rights is the
main form of morality. Responsibility,
virtue and duty on the other hand have
been confined to backwardness and
fanaticism. Similarly, rights recognition
is the main tool and target of politics.
Group claims and ideological positions,
sectional interests and global
campaigns are routinely expressed in
the language of rights for individuals.
But when rights become a ‘trump card’
that defeats state policies and
collective priorities, allegedly to
support the liberty of the individual,
society starts breaking up into a
collection of atoms indifferent to the
common good. This way politics is
depoliticised. Both liberty and security
suffer.
In postmodern societies, rights are the
main tools of identity politics. “I want
X” or “X should be given to me” has
become synonymous with “I have a
right to X”. This linguistic inflation
weakens the association of rights with
significant human goods. A
government minister recently argued
that we have a human right to properly
functioning kitchen appliances.
The right to choose our kids’ school or
our mobile phone is as important as
the right to be free of torture or to have
food on the table. But this has nothing
to do with the Enlightenment tradition
of emancipation and self-development
or with the radical tradition of dissent
both represented in human rights.
When every desire can be turned into a
legal right nothing retains the dignity
of right.
There is more. Rights talk has become
an easy and simple way of describing
complex historical, social and political
situations, a type of “cognitive
mapping”: particularly useful for media
coverage. Take a workers’ strike. When
presented as a conflict between the
right to strike and the right to work (as
is often the case), a complicated set of
relations, histories, traditions and
communities is reduced to a simple
calculus of right versus right one of
which must be wrong. This translation
hinders both understanding and
resolving the conflict. As the scope of
rights increases their inherent
absolutism makes the antagonists
intransigent.
Finally, human rights have become the
last universal ideology globally. It
unites the North and the South,
globalising imperialists and anti-
globalisation protesters, first world
liberals and third world
revolutionaries. Human rights are used
as a symbol or synonym for liberalism,
capitalism or individualism by some
and for development, social justice or
peace by others.
In the South, rights are seen as
primarily collective rather than
individual, social and economic rather
than civil, associated with social justice
rather than liberty. Does the victory,
universality and ubiquity of rights
indicate that they transcend conflicts
of interests and the clash of ideas?
Have rights become a common horizon
uniting Cardiff and Kabul, London and
Lahore?
It is a comforting idea, daily denied in
news bulletins. If there is something
perpetual about our world, it is the
increasing wealth gap between the
metropolitan lands and the rest, the
yawning chasm in income and chances
between the rich and the poor, the ever
new and strictly policed walls which
divide the comfortable middle classes
from the “underclass” of immigrants,
refugees and undesirables, those
pockets of “third world” in the midst of
the first. If anything, our world looks
increasingly more hostile and
dangerous and the administration of
justified or imagined fears has become
a major and common tool of
governments.
Human rights introduce morality into
law and offer limited legal enforcement
to moral claims. But as morality is not
one and the law is not a simple exercise
in reasoning, moral conflict enters the
legal archive and legal strictures
regiment and control moral
responsibility. Jami, Barzo and Aylan
remind us what the purpose of human
rights is. Their sad soliloquies attest to
the fact that when seen as alien
Martians they are turned into sub-
human without humanity or rights.
Costas Douzinas is a Member of the
Hellenic Parliament, a Professor of
Law and the Director of the Birkbeck
Institute for the Humanities, University
of London.
Why we should worry about the
theoretical foundations of human
rights law and practice
by Bill Bowring • 11 February 2015
Human rights claims are always
scandalous, and were a scandal and an
affront to the law from the very start.
Eug ne elacroi : Liberty Leading the
People
Ivor Crewe, the former Essex Vice-
Chancellor, and a political scientist,
used to compare contemporary human
rights activists to 19th century
Christian missionaries, spreading the
gospel to less enlightened peoples.
There is more than a grain of truth to
this ironical jibe, aimed at his
colleagues in the Human Rights
Centre.
Late last year I was invited to make
presentations on behalf of the Council
of Europe in Bosnia and in Macedonia.
I have just been twice to Russia. I am
about to go and do human rights work
in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan for the
UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth
Office, and through my EHRAC project
I take many cases to the European
Court of Human Rights at Strasbourg
against Russia and other countries of
the Former Soviet Union.
What is the legitimacy of this practice
– what word is it precisely that I am
spreading or seeking to vindicate?
What right do I have to pass judgment
on the governments of states which
have such different culture and
histories from ours? In what way can
the people I meet benefit from what I
have to say as a human rights expert
and practitioner?
One “true believer” in human rights is
my LSE colleague Francesca Klug. The
titles of two of her books are Values for
a Godless Age (2000) and A Magna
Carta for All Humanity: Homing in on
Human Rights: Time for a New
Enlightenment? (2015).
On the other hand, there is a growing
literature expressing deep scepticism in
the human rights project, especially the
world of movements such as Amnesty
International – for example Stephen
Hopgood’s Keepers of the Flame:
Understanding Amnesty
International (2006) and The Endtimes
of Human Rights (2013). Hopgood says
that Amnesty is “much more like a Free
Church whose main product, thus far,
has been moral authority, not social
change.”
The controversial Chicago scholar Eric
Posner has recently published The
Twilight of Human Rights Law (2014),
in which he concludes that the
complex and growing structure of UN
human rights treaties, committees,
state reports, and individual
complaints actually makes very little
difference to suffering humanity.
And there is now a highly influential
‘revisionist’ account of human rights by
the Harvard historian Samuel Moyn, in
his The Last Utopia: Human Rights in
History (2010) and Human Rights and
the Uses of History(2014). He starts by
saying, not so unusually:
When people hear the phrase “human
rights,” they think of the highest moral
precepts and political ideals… The
phrase implies an agenda for improving
the world, and bringing about a new
one in which the dignity of each
individual will enjoy secure
international protection. It is a
recognisably utopian programme.
However, his most controversial claim
is that “The year of human rights, 1977,
began with Carter’s January 20
inauguration, which put ‘human rights’
in front of the viewing public for the
first time in American history.” Indeed,
he argues that “The drama of human
rights, then, is that they emerged in the
1970s seemingly from nowhere.”
For me, that is a puzzling claim, since I
th
would start in the late 18 century with
the American Bill of Rights, and in
particular in 1789, in the French
Revolution, with the Déclaration des
Droits de l’Homme et du
Citoyen (Declaration of the Rights of
Man and of the Citizen — Olympe de
Gouges drafted a Declaration of the
Rights of Woman and the Female
Citizen, but was guillotined). Moyn
argues that the Déclaration did not
really concern “human rights” as he
understands them, but are rather about
the “politics of the state” — the
creation of the nation of France. He
pours similar scorn on the Right to
Self-Determination and the national
liberation struggles after World War II.
Of course, Moyn is quite right to
identify the 1970s as the period of the
explosion in the use of human rights
language by world leaders, especially
President Jimmy Carter, and the rise to
prominence of Amnesty International,
Human Rights Watch, FIDH, and other
international human rights non-
governmental organisations. All of
them share a lack of internal
democracy and accountability. They
are answerable only to morality and
the grandiose structure of international
human rights law.
However, for me, human rights are
rather different from domestic law, and
do not have their origins in the
international treaties post WW II. That
is, they do not have their origins in
legislation. Human rights are not “the
command of the sovereign” (in the
words of the English positivist John
Austin) and cannot be ascertained by a
“rule of recognition” (H. L. A. Hart).
Nor are human rights part of the law as
a whole (law as integrity) on the basis
of which Judge Hercules always comes
to the right answer (Ronald Dworkin).
I argue that human rights claims are
always scandalous, and were a scandal
and an affront to the law from the very
start. I recommend to my students a
great collection: Jeremy
Waldron’s Nonsense upon Stilts:
Bentham, Burke and Marx on the Rights
of Man (2014). All three subjected
human rights as set out in the
French Déclaration to severe criticism.
Edmund Burke, the father of English
conservatism, saw the Déclaration as
embodying terrorist language which
would blow up all hard-won freedoms
and venerable institutions. “Natural
rights is simple nonsense: natural and
imprescriptible rights, rhetorical
nonsense — nonsense upon stilts,” said
Jeremy Bentham, one of the fathers of
English liberalism. And Karl Marx saw
these civil and political rights as the
rights of the egotist, who does not want
to participate in society.
In my 2008 book The Degradation of
the International Legal Order: The
Rehabilitation of Law and the Possibility
of Politics, I have sketched a materialist
and historicised account of the genesis
and significance of human rights. This
account focuses on the concretisation
and recognition of each “generation” of
human rights in the context of
revolutionary events — civil and
political rights in1789, social and
economic rights in the aftermath of
WWI I and the Bolshevik Revolution,
and third generation rights of
interdependence starting with the right
of peoples to self-determination.
Working this out in detail is my
current preoccupation.
Bill Bowring is Professor of Law at
Birkbeck College, Barrister, Fellow of the
Essex Human Rights centre, founder
and chair of the European Human
Rights Advocacy Centre (EHRAC),
author most recently of Law, Rights and
Ideology in Russia: Landmarks in the
Destiny of a Great Power(Routledge,
2013). Follow Bill on Twitter at
@BillBowring
On Human Rights: Two Simple
Remarks
by Jean-Luc Nancy • 10 April 2013
Key Concept

First remark
Today, political correctness demands
that we say in
French droitshumains [human rights]
when we used to say droits de
1
l’homme [rights of man]. This demand,
which also occurs in other areas, is
made because the French homme, like
‘man’ in English, does not distinguish
between the human race and the male
gender. German is better equipped,
differentiating
between Mensch and Mann. Latin
distinguishes between virand homo,
Greek between anèr and anthropos,
etc.
We could discuss the reasons for this.
However, it is also important to note
the introduction of another ambiguity.
The adjective ‘human’ in French has a
value that corresponds to the usual
meaning we now give to the term
‘humanist’ and, more generally, to the
moral qualities of ‘care’ (a word which
has recently been imported unchanged
from English into French),
‘compassion’ or ‘charity’. The English
language attributes this value to the
word ‘human’, further ascribing to it a
more specific term, ‘humane’. German
has introduced, along
with menschlish, the
words human, humanitär,
and Humanität as terms of ethical
evaluation. In other words, human
rights can be seen as rights basking in
the aura of humanity, since this term,
in its currently impoverished and
rather ridiculous sense, has taken on
the meaning of a ‘love of mankind’ or
‘friendship’ (in French, this is the
meaning frequently ascribed to philia).
Now philanthropy — which was
actually a secular displacement of the
ostensibly all too Christian charity — is
based upon a more or less hidden
axiom of condescension: it is the act of
the rich, cultivated and dominant, who
feel benevolence, compassion and pity
for the social misfortune of others. For
all that, philanthropists have never
sought to challenge the social order,
except in minor ways.
Philanthropy contains an implicit
negation of the respect for the
unconditional dignity of all human
beings, which appears at the beginning
of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights of 1948 (hereafter referred to as
‘ eclaration’) and is repeated further
on. It can even be said to represent an
interpretation of dignity that is
conservative, selfish and gushing with
sentimentality.
Without arguing against the use of the
term ‘human rights’, it is necessary to
draw attention to the extent of its
ambivalence. For whatever the term
used, human rights are marked by a
certain degree of philanthropy mixed
with a promise of ‘social progress’,
which is always linked to a ‘larger
freedom’. In this sense, freedom
prevails over social justice through the
resonance, tone and emphasis of the
text.
Moreover, the Declaration affirms that
‘the advent of a world in which human
beings shall enjoy freedom of speech
and belief and freedom from fear and
want has been proclaimed as the
highest aspiration of the common
people.’2 But what is proclaimed here
and cannot be challenged should not
be considered the ‘highest aspiration.’
One can and must think that freedom
(of speech and belief) does not limit
the aspirations of the common people
[hommes]. It would not be wrong to
say that the people can expect and
want different things — engagements,
collaborations, relations — things that
are larger, infinitely larger and more,
than freedoms. Being ‘free from fear
and want’ is not the only reality of
freedom; there are other stakes that lie
beyond any human freedom. Spinoza,
for example, who can hardly be
accused of being inhuman or an enemy
of freedom, considered ‘freedom’ to
only exist as the freedom of the entire
world (which he called ‘nature or god’).
The independence and autonomy of
persons has a long way to go before it
reaches its limits, if limits exist.
Autonomy should be conceived in
relation to the sense of existence, or
more exactly, in relation to existence
itself — of each, of all and of the world
as sense.
Some will object, ‘What do you e pect
from a declaration of rights? You’re not
considering the extent to which your
words go beyond the predetermined
sphere that constitutes a kind of
minimum necessary to free humanity
from oppression. You’re departing the
realm of right for philosophy, if not for
dreams or speculation.’
My response is that it is indeed
necessary to enter a philosophical
register since the text of the
Declaration — and the huge body of
texts inspired by it and by the defence
of ‘human’ rights — carry an implicit or
latent ideology that should be brought
to light. In fact, this is the price to be
paid in order to avoid the self-
righteous inanity of such ‘rights’. The
self-righteousness here is that of a
‘humanism’ of European origin, which
one must always remember ‘does not
think the humanitas of man high
enough’, as Heidegger wrote.
Pascal, another European, said the
same thing much earlier but in a
different way: ‘Man infinitely surpasses
man’. Pascal was a Christian.
Heidegger, on the contrary, believed
that he could find the force of re-
foundation in an anti-Christian
direction. Today, all these references
are written off, and human rights float
more or less on the surface of the ‘icy
3
water of egotistical calculation’.
Second remark
The Declaration is based — as a
declaration of rights, that is to say, as a
juridical production or juris-dictio —
on the following sentence:
Whereas it is essential, if man is not to
be compelled to have recourse, as a last
resort, to rebellion against tyranny and
oppression, that human rights should
be protected by the rule of law.
This is the third of seven ‘considérants’
(‘whereas’) after which the te t
proceeds with the actual declaration.
The French text reads:
Considérant qu’il est essentiel que les
droits de l’homme soient protégés par
un régime de droit pour que l’homme ne
soit pas contraint, en suprême recours,
à la révolte contre la tyrannie et
l’oppression.
We will pass quickly over the complex
and fragile character of a proposition
that seeks to avoid a resort to rebellion.
It is clear that this resort is seen as
something ‘compelled’ and that this
compulsion can engender ‘tyranny and
oppression.’ In 1948, in a te t drafted
by a committee of nine members
whose political and intellectual
composition calls for lengthy
4
analysis, tyranny and oppression
focused on the fascisms that had just
been defeated. In a sense, the
Declaration is part of the general
movement that, somehow nebulously,
fosters the condemnation of ‘fascism’
and what this word would, over a long
period, ignominiously signify.
However, any questioning of the
underlying reasons for the rise of
fascisms is relegated to the
background, if not even further. There
is no examination, from the perspective
of democracy and 20th century
capitalism, of what could have
facilitated or even caused the
emergence of fascisms. There is,
therefore, no opportunity to consider
other possibilities of oppression — and
consequently of rebellion — like those
represented by the abominable figure
of a Head of State or Leader flanked by
party apparatus, police and mythology.
Here, again, some will protest. The
preceding sentences will be criticised
for being unacceptably suspicious of
the virtuous words of the Declaration. I
was careful above to write, ‘in a sense’,
and to limit myself to pointing out the
absence of examination, nothing more.
In all sincerity, I am not trying to
construct a machinery of denunciation.
Yet it is difficult to dispute that the
question of ‘humanism’ has been
continually refined or deepened,
according to different views. This has
occurred along the road from the
defeat of fascism to the unbridled
expansion of capitalism, which is
undermining human rights in an
increasingly obvious way. It is a road
that passes through the other collapse
of so-called ‘socialisms’ and, today,
through the various tensions in
religious and/or communitarian
movements. ‘Humanism’ is strictly
coeval with mercantile civilization,
techno-scientific development and
democracy. ‘Human rights’ are not
absolutely pristine, as their prehistory
in Roman law [droit] after a certain
period already shows. They derive from
Roman legal culture, transported first
out of Roman civil religion and then
out of Christianity to fertilise the spirit
of modern law [droit] and especially so-
called ‘natural’ law [droit].
Now, it is here that we must consider
the other clause of this ‘whereas’. The
French version provides a striking
statement: Human rights must be
protected by the rule of law [régime de
droit]. The English distinguishes rights
and law, the Italian
distinguishes diritti and norme
giuridiche, whereas other languages
(e.g. Greek or German) repeat, like the
French, the same term. Perhaps the
Latin translation best clarifies the
distinction in stating that: hominum
jura civitatis forma quae justa est
tegi (human rights must be covered by
a just civil form).
This is much more than a linguistic
curiosity. Repeating a single term
(droit) or distinguishing two terms
(rights and law), indicates the same
difficulty: do rights [droits] exist that
have not been established by law
[droit]? Here the Declaration declares
its own necessity: it is not just a
formulation, words solemnly declared.
The Declaration is the legal institution
of the rights it declares. If we leave
aside the well-known American and
French antecedents that paved the
way, prior to the Declaration only
factual rights and not legal rights
[droits de droit] existed. At most, some
of these rights pre-existed as rights of
certain States, the United Kingdom,
the USA and France in particular. But
what are ‘factual’ rights or national
rights with regard to international law?
These two distinct questions are in part
intertwined.
These questions share a concern about
the foundation of a right in general.
The idea of ‘human rights’ brings to
light the extraordinary difficulty of
founding right, if not the impossibility
of such a foundation. We have sought
to dismiss the idea of ‘natural rights’,
which represents an internal
contradiction because their non-
positive (in the legal sense) character
prevents legal enforcement and
sanction. Yet we have invoked a
‘minimum norm’ (Rawls) which is
necessary for the constitution of a just
State or of the State under the rule of
‘law’ [Etat de ‘droit’] as it is popularly
5
called today. This is no less lacking in
foundations, in the fullest sense of the
word, than ‘natural’ rights. Hannah
Arendt also showed how the national
appropriation of ‘human rights’ gave
rise to categories of persons without
rights (refugees, displaced and stateless
persons). It follows from these analyses
that forms of non-right have not
stopped imposing their iron law within
positive rights, with the help of
economic, technical, and political
chaos.
Undoubtedly, the ‘right to have rights’,
as Arendt formulated it, is plain to see:
we can recognise neither the quality of
the human being, nor, perhaps, that of
the existent in general, without the
involvement of this right. However,
this again says nothing about the
nature of this singular ‘right’ or about
the possibility of its recognition, which
should be universal and prior — if not
superior — to any determined legal
institution.
It is well known that the powerlessness
of international law [droit] — of what
passes under this name — or perhaps
the basic impossibility of such a law
[droit] (yet called for, desired and
proclaimed by philosophical humanism
for more than two centuries and
formally declared in the 20th Century)
impedes its effective implementation.
But as Hegel says, what is well known
is not known at all. What remains here
unknown is nothing other than the
absence of foundation of right in
general. This absence is not temporary
or contingent: it is constitutive, I would
even say that it is ‘constituent’ of right.
Indeed, right can only exist or be
guaranteed by a divine authority,
whatever that may be. In such a case, it
is not a question of right, if something
worthy of this name requires the
continuing possibility of recovery,
transformation and re-creation in the
various practical circumstances —
technical, political, cultural and
spiritual — to which it must respond.
Both the history of legislated rights of
the Roman type as well as the
customary rights of the Anglo-Saxon
type clearly show that an essential
plasticity of right exists within the
fixity that the law, no less essentially,
requires.
Both the interminable ascent to the
‘basic norm’ in a pyramid of norms
(Kelsen) and the recourse to an
ultimate power to decide the exception
(Schmitt), the right to exceed right,
converge towards a passage to the
limit. Right can only be exposed to
such a passage; it is by nature the
institution of what cannot be
instituted, in other words of justice in
the non-legal sense of the word. And it
is not by seeking a categorical legal
imperative that we can hope to found
such a justice since the universal can
be found neither here nor in a Kantian
imperative, where it is reduced to the
representation of ‘nature’ as a ‘type’ or
nondeterministic model of morality.
In a sense, which itself passes on to the
limit of sense, justice consists
in rendering justice. This is not ‘to
render the justice’, which assumes a
determined or instituted justice. This is
rendering to someone or something
the justice that this person or thing —
event, work, any form of existent —
deserves.6 But what does each X
deserve? Each X deserves an infinite
recognition of its singularity. In other
words, the justice that must be
rendered to X is a justice whose nature
and extent or non-naturalness and
incommensurability only X can
determine.
This justice must be effectively
rendered, given back, returned to any
X. This justice must be recognised for
every X. Justice must be done to X and
yet it is not it — whatever it is, tree or
man [homme] — that can produce its
due and present it as ‘justice’ or as
‘right’. This justice rests on the
unfound-able certainty that it is just
that that exists. On the certainty,
therefore, that it is just that the world
exists even though nothing can justify
its existence.
7
Unjustifiable justice, far from
founding any kind of rights — as
extensive as these may be — opens up
instead an infinite perspective that
exceeds all possibility of right. From
this infinity and to this infinity, all
things and every singularity proceed
and return. This perspective must
remain present beyond the horizon of
right; for without an appeal or a sign
towards it, right can only fall back into
its inevitable fragility, whether of
impotence, arbitrariness, relativity or
rigidity. The greatest merit of ‘human
rights’ is to bring out all these
difficulties and all of these exigencies.
The aim of these two simple remarks
was, within their narrow limits, to draw
attention to this.
Jean-Luc Nancy
The Bias of Human Rights Watch
by Garry Leech • 21 March 2013
Human Rights Watch’s selective and
biased application of the human rights
norms enshrined in the UN Declaration
not only undermines its credibility, it
also promotes injustice.
Over the past thirty years, Human
Rights Watch has become one of the
most recognized non-governmental
organizations in the world due to its
global promotion of human rights. But
despite its claims to be an advocate of
international human rights law, the
reports issued by Human Rights Watch
over the past decade have increasingly
exhibited a bias towards certain rights
over others. More precisely, Human
Rights Watch repeatedly focuses on
political and civil rights while ignoring
social and economic rights. As a result,
it routinely judges nations throughout
the world in a manner that furthers
capitalist values and discredits
governments seeking socialist
alternatives. It is this bias that lies at
the root of Human Rights Watch’s
scathing attacks on the government of
Venezuela and its recently deceased
president Hugo Chávez. This bias was
also evident in comments made in 2012
by Ken Roth, executive director of
Human Rights Watch, when he
declared that Venezuela is “the most
abusive” nation in Latin America.
According to Human Rights Watch’s
mission statement, “Human Rights
Watch is dedicated to protecting the
human rights of people around the
world” and in order to achieve that
objective “We challenge governments
and those who hold power to end
abusive practices and respect
international human rights law.” The
international human rights law
referred to by Human Rights Watch is
rooted in the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights, which was passed by
the UN General Assembly in 1948. The
Declaration encompasses political,
civil, social, economic and cultural
rights.
Capitalist nations, particularly the
United States, have never been
comfortable with the articles of the UN
Declaration that require governments
to guarantee the social and economic
rights of their citizens. Among the
social and economic rights that
contravene capitalist values are the
right to “food, clothing, housing and
medical care and necessary social
services” (Article 25) as well as the right
“to share in scientific advancement and
its benefits” (Article 27). In a capitalist
society, responsibility for obtaining
food, clothing, housing and medical
care rests with the individual not the
state. Likewise, it is not the state’s
responsibility to ensure that all citizens
share equally in the benefits of
scientific advancements developed by,
for example, pharmaceutical
corporations.
The United States does support those
articles in the Declaration that
promote civil and political rights.
These rights ensure that “All are equal
before the law and are entitled without
any discrimination to equal protection
of the law” (Article 7) “Everyone has
the right to own property alone as well
as in association with others” (Article
17); “Everyone has the right to freedom
of thought, conscience and religion”
(Article 18); and “Everyone has the
right to freedom of opinion and
e pression” (Article 19). Basically, these
are the individual rights that are
enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and
that lie at the root of the liberal
democratic concept of the “rule of law.”
And while Human Rights Watch
professes to defend the human rights
enshrined in the UN Declaration, in
reality, its work focuses exclusively on
the civil and political rights recognized
by the U.S. government.
A vivid example of Human Rights
Watch’s bias against economic and
social rights is the report the
organization issued immediately
following the death of Venezuela’s
President Hugo Chávez. Human Rights
Watch had long had an antagonistic
relationship with the Venezuelan
leader, which was touched upon in the
report. The report clearly reflected the
view of the organization’s e ecutive
director Ken Roth that Venezuela
(along with Bolivia and Ecuador) is
“the most abusive nation” in Latin
America. One only need take a quick
look at Human Rights Watch’s reports
on Colombia to illustrate the
ludicrousness of such a statement.
Under the title, “Venezuela: Chávez’s
Authoritarian Legacy,” the report
contains a litany of violations of civil
and political rights and not a single
mention of the country’s impressive
achievements in economic, social and
cultural rights. The report opens by
stating, “Hugo Chávez’s presidency
(1999-2013) was characterized by a
dramatic concentration of power and
open disregard for basic human rights
guarantees.” The latter part implies a
basic disregard for all human rights,
but the report goes on to focus solely
on issues related to civil and political
rights. If the Chávez government had
indeed disregarded all basic human
rights as suggested by Human Rights
Watch, then how does one explain the
country’s remarkable successes
ensuring that all citizens receive
adequate food and housing as well as
free healthcare and education; all of
which constitute guarantees of
economic, social and cultural rights.
Not only does Venezuela now provide
free education—including at the
university level, where students can
learn the country’s various indigenous
languages—but its programs,
according to UNESCO, have resulted in
the country becoming an “illiteracy-
free” nation and post-secondary
enrolments doubling over the past
decade. And as for the basic right to
food, a recent report issued by the
Food and Agriculture Organization of
the United Nations (FAO) stated, “We
analyze hunger statistics all over the
world. There are 800 million people in
the world who suffer from hunger, 49
million in Latin America and the
Caribbean, but not one of them is
Venezuelan.” Perhaps the
government’s most impressive overall
achievement with regard to social and
economic rights has been the
astounding decline in the number of
Venezuelans living in poverty, from 55
percent of the population when Chávez
was first elected in 1998 to 18 percent in
2011.
These achievements have resulted from
state-funded projects, called
“missions,” that are devised,
implemented and evaluated at the
community level by more than 16,000
communal councils in what constitutes
an impressive example of participatory
democracy. But Human Rights Watch
does not make a single reference to any
of these achievements in social and
economic rights, or with regard to the
political rights enjoyed by the millions
of citizens participating in the
communal councils. All of these
examples contradict Human Rights
Watch’s claim that the Chávez
government was “characterized by a
dramatic concentration of power and
open disregard for basic human rights
guarantees.”
Venezuela is far from perfect and, as is
the case with all other nations,
violations of human rights do occur.
However, Human Rights Watch’s
selective highlighting of a handful of
cases related only to civil and political
rights implies widespread human
rights abuses perpetrated against the
population. This approach obscures the
fact that the overwhelming majority of
Venezuelans are now, for the first time,
enjoying economic, social and cultural
rights to a degree that few citizens in
the world have ever experienced.
Not only does Human Rights Watch
focus solely on civil and political rights,
but it does so by approaching human
rights from the perspective that all
things globally are equal. In other
words, it does not account for the
grossly unequal power dynamics that
exist in a global society dominated by
wealthy imperialist nations in the
global North. Among the alleged civil
and political rights violations in
Venezuela addressed in the Human
Rights Watch report are issues related
to the persecution of political
opponents, press freedom, judicial
independence and human rights
scrutiny.
One of the cases Human Rights Watch
highlights to illustrate the Chávez
government’s persecution of the
political opposition is that of Osvaldo
Alvarez Paz. In March 2010, Alvarez
Paz was arrested for statements he
made during an interview on one of the
country’s largest privately-owned
television networks. As Human Rights
Watch noted, Alvarez Paz stated that
“Venezuela has turned into a center of
operations that facilitates the business
of drug trafficking” and then accused
“Chavez of being a subversive element
and having direct links with FARC and
ETA [groups viewed as terrorists by
much of the international
community].” Alvarez Paz was charged
with conspiracy, spreading false
information, and publicly inciting
violation of the law.
While there are legitimate concerns
related to the arrest of Alvarez Paz,
Human Rights Watch’s biased
portrayal of the issue ignored the
broader context by failing to mention
that Alvarez Paz made his agenda clear
to all a couple of months after the
television interview in a column he
wrote in El Nacional, one of
Venezuela’s largest daily newspapers.
In his op-ed piece, Alvarez Paz called
on Venezuelans to oust the Chávez
government as soon as possible by
emphasizing the need “to be clear
about the indispensable objective. To
replace the current regime with as little
delay and as little trauma as possible.”
It was precisely this sort of incendiary
rhetoric disseminated through the
elite-owned private media that played
an instrumental role in the military
coup that temporarily overthrew
Chávez in April 2002.
Human Rights Watch’s depiction of the
Alvarez Paz case suggested that there
was little space for high-profile
political opponents to criticize the
government. However, the report failed
to mention that opposition presidential
candidates Manuel Rosales (2006) and
Henrique Capriles (2012) repeatedly
verbalized harsh criticisms of Chávez
during their electoral campaigns
without facing any repercussions.
Human Rights Watch also failed to
note that the opposition used Chávez’s
own constitution against him by
organizing a recall referendum in 2004
without being persecuted. And, in all of
these cases, most private media outlets,
both print and television, openly
backed the opposition.
Nevertheless, Human Rights Watch
also slammed the Chávez government
for restricting press freedom. The
organization’s report highlights the
case of the privately-owned television
channel RCTV because the government
refused to renew the network’s
broadcast license upon expiration. But
Human Rights Watch failed to point
out that RCTV was directly involved in
the military coup that temporarily
ousted Chávez in 2002 and that this act
of subversion was the reason the
station’s broadcast license was not
renewed. Furthermore, it is evident to
anyone who has spent any time in
Venezuela that there is no other
government in the world that endures
the intense criticism—and blatant
slander—that routinely emanates from
the private media in Venezuela.
Human Rights Watch views the
Venezuelan government’s refusal to
renew RCTV’s broadcast license as a
violation of the civil rights of the
private individuals who own the
station. And herein lies a fundamental
problem that illustrates how Human
Rights Watch’s approach is
incompatible with a socialist
alternative to capitalism. By
prioritizing civil and political liberties,
Human Rights Watch ensures that the
wealthy have the same rights as the
poor, which sounds rational and fair in
theory, but is seriously problematic in
reality.
From a socialist perspective, the
financial gains made by the wealthy
directly result from the exploitation of
the poor; in other words, they result
from violating the economic and social
rights of the poor. Therefore, the
defense of the civil and political rights
of a minority of elites is inextricably
linked to violations of the economic
and social rights of the poor majority.
And in the case of the wealthy owners
of RCTV, not only are they among the
wealthiest people in Venezuela, but
they were using their grossly
disproportionate degree of influence
over the population that resulted from
owning a major television network in
an effort to bring down the
government in order to preserve their
privileged status.
In capitalist nations, wealthy owners of
private media have little motivation to
challenge a government that defends
their privilege. But in a socialist nation,
such owners use their vast media
resources, not to inform the
population, but to defend their own
personal privilege by undermining the
government at every opportunity. And
this has been the modus operandi of
most private media outlets in
Venezuela—a context that Human
Rights Watch willfully ignores in its
condemnation of the Chávez
government. Furthermore, Human
Rights Watch’s report failed to note the
influence of powerful foreign
imperialist forces, which was revealed
in declassified U.S. State Department
documents showing that the U.S.
government provided $4 million in
funding to anti-Chávez journalists and
media outlets between 2007 and 2009.
Human Rights Watch argues that the
government’s crackdown on RCTV is
part of a pattern of behaviour that
undermines “pluralism” in media
coverage; a pattern that has also,
according to the report, “e panded the
number of government-run TV
channels from one to si .” But this
claim by Human Rights Watch is
disingenuous because most of those
state-owned channels have been made
available to community-based media
cooperatives so they have an outlet to
broadcast their perspectives on what is
happening in the country. One of these
television channels, Avila TV, regularly
broadcasts programs that address
issues related to gender, homophobia
and indigenous and Afro-Venezuelan
rights.
Apparently, Human Rights Watch only
views the individual “civil” rights of
wealthy Venezuelans who wish to
dominate broadcasting and, by
extension, the molding of public
opinion as relevant to media
“pluralism,” and not the “social” rights
enjoyed by Venezuelans throughout
the country whose voices can now be
heard through community-based
media. Ultimately, Human Rights
Watch’s prioritization of civil and
political rights means that everyone’s
human rights are not equally
protected. Such an approach to human
rights inevitably has the same
consequences as that of the “rule of
law” in a liberal democracy: it defends
an unjust status quo. As Anatole
France stated in reference to the rule of
law being equally applicable to all, “The
law, in its majestic equality, forbids the
rich as well as the poor to sleep under
bridges, to beg in the streets, and to
steal bread.”
Human Rights Watch also accuses
Chávez and his “followers” in the
National Assembly of “packing” the
Supreme Court with their allies. But
the decision to increase the number of
sitting Supreme Court justices in 2004
was implemented according to the
country’s constitution, which itself was
ratified by an overwhelming majority
of voters in a national referendum.
Furthermore, Chávez served two terms
in office and, as president, had the
rights to appoint Supreme Court
justices. Similarly, two-term presidents
in the United States appoint Supreme
Court justices that reflect their political
views, but Human Rights Watch does
not accuse them of “packing” the
Supreme Court for political gain.
With regard to human rights
monitoring in Venezuela, Human
Rights Watch slammed the Chávez
government for “preventing the Inter-
American Commission on Human
Rights from conducting in-country
monitoring of human rights problems.”
Again, Human Rights Watch ignores
the broader international context. The
Commission is part of the Organization
of American States (OAS), which has
longed served U.S. interests in Latin
America. The United States had Cuba
expelled from the OAS in 1962 because,
as the resolution stated, socialism “is
incompatible with the principles and
objectives of the inter-American
system.” Not surprisingly, Chávez, as
the leader of a nation that is
transitioning to socialism, viewed the
OAS as a tool of U.S. imperialism and
did not recognize its legitimacy to
judge a sovereign nation such as
Venezuela, which is precisely why the
country withdrew its membership from
the Inter-American Court and
Commission.
Human Rights Watch’s report went on
to criticize a ruling by Venezuela’s
Supreme Court restricting foreign
funding, particularly from the United
States and Europe, to Venezuelan Non-
Governmental Organizations (NGOs).
Once again, Human Rights Watch
willfully ignored the international
context in which the U.S. government
has a long history of funding only those
sectors of civil society opposed to
governments it does not like. In recent
years, such funding was provided by
the U.S. Agency for International
Development (USAID) and the
National Endowment for Democracy
(NED) to NGOs in Haiti that opposed
President Jean Bertrand Aristide,
whose democratically-elected
government was eventually overthrown
by the U.S. military in 2004.
The United States has a similar history
of funding Venezuelan NGOs, such as
Súmate, whose primary objective was
to remove Chávez from office. The
aforementioned declassified State
Department documents revealed that
Washington provided $40 million in
funding to Venezuelan opposition
groups between 2007 and 2009. Such
actions constitute blatant interference
in the internal politics of a sovereign
nation; an interference that is possible
only because of the unequal
distribution of global political power
that provides wealthy nations with
sufficient wealth and power to
intervene in the internal affairs of poor
nations under the guise of providing
“aid.”
Human Rights Watch’s report also
criticizes the Chávez government for
expelling from the country two Human
Rights Watch employees who had
flown in from the United States to
publicly launch the organization’s 2008
report, which constituted a particularly
harsh attack on Venezuela for
violations of human rights. Upon his
arrival in Venezuela, Jose Miguel
Vivanco, the lead author of the report
and one of the two expelled, stated,
“We did the report because we wanted
to demonstrate to the world that
Venezuela is not a model for anyone.”
While Human Rights Watch was busy
portraying itself as a victim of
repression, it remained oblivious to the
arrogance of its actions. Once again,
citizens of a country in the global
South were supposed to tolerate
representatives from an institution
based in a wealthy nation of the global
North entering their country to render
judgement on their government. It was
not only the Venezuelan government
that took issue with the Human Rights
Watch report, more than 100 scholars
from throughout the Americas,
including Noam Chomsky, signed a
letter criticizing the report’s blatantly
biased critique of Venezuela. The letter
stated that the report “does not meet
even the most minimal standards of
scholarship, impartiality, accuracy, or
credibility.”
Given Human Rights Watch’s emphasis
on civil and political rights and
willingness to completely ignore social
and economic rights, it is not
surprising that a socialist country like
Venezuela would view such an
organization as aligned with the
interests of the U.S. government, Wall
Street and corporate America. It is this
emphasis on political and civil rights
emphasized by many international
human rights organizations that leads
some leftists, Marxists in particular, to
dismiss the western human rights
paradigm as a promoter of capitalism’s
individualistic values—and as another
tool of imperialism.
The Human Rights Watch report on
Venezuela concludes by stating,
“Under Chávez, Venezuela’s closest ally
was Cuba, the only country in Latin
America that systematically represses
virtually all forms of political dissent.
Chávez identified Fidel Castro—who
headed Cuba’s repressive government
until his health deteriorated in 2006—
as his model and mentor.” Clearly,
Human Rights Watch attempted to
discredit Chávez by linking him to
Fidel Castro. In order to achieve this,
Human Rights Watch again had to
limit its definition of human rights to
civil and political rights. And again, the
degree of correlation between the U.S.
government’s emphasis on civil and
political rights in Cuba and that of
Human Rights Watch is uncanny.
Nowhere in its Cuba reports does
Human Rights Watch acknowledge the
country’s huge achievements in
guaranteeing economic and social
rights. In spite of being subjected to an
inhumane decades-long economic
blockade by the U.S. government, Cuba
has succeeded in providing free
healthcare and education to all of its
citizens as well as ensuring that
everyone’s basic housing and food
needs are met. But as with its analysis
of Venezuela, the provision of these
economic and social rights to all
Cubans is ignored by Human Rights
Watch.
Some may argue that Human Rights
Watch focuses primarily on violations
of human rights rather than on
achievements, and this is the reason
that its reports do not reflect the
remarkable successes of Venezuela and
Cuba in guaranteeing economic and
social rights. However, such an
argument does not hold up when the
organization’s reports on the United
States are analyzed. Nowhere in its
reports does Human Rights Watch
accuse the U.S. government of
e hibiting an “open disregard for basic
human rights guarantees” due to gross
violations of economic and social rights
resulting from not ensuring adequate
food, housing and healthcare for its
entire population.
According to a 2009 study published by
researchers from Harvard Medical
School, some 45,000 people die
annually in the United States due to a
lack of medical coverage. The study
also noted that people without health
coverage had a 40 percent greater
chance of dying than those with
medical insurance. Meanwhile, there
are more than half-a-million homeless
people and, according to the non-profit
Feeding America, 17 million hungry
children in the United States. The fact
that Human Rights Watch routinely
ignores these violations of the
economic and social rights enshrined
in the UN Declaration highlights the
blatant bias in the organization’s
approach.
In conclusion, the repeated failure of
Human Rights Watch to prioritize
economic, social and cultural rights on
par with civil and political rights, along
with its refusal to contextualize human
rights within the grossly unequal and
imperialist power structures that
dominate global politics, has reduced
the organization to little more than an
advocate of capitalist values. Human
Rights Watch refuses to recognize the
ways in which a human rights
paradigm rooted in capitalist values
(i.e. only civil and political rights) may
not be suited to countries searching for
a socialist alternative in their struggle
to liberate themselves from centuries
of imperialism. After all, countries such
as Venezuela and Cuba are forced to
exist in a global context in which the
most powerful nation on earth is using
all of its resources to undermine them,
not in the name of democracy or
human rights, but because they dare to
challenge the hegemony of the United
States by promoting alternative
models.
The point here is not to suggest that
Venezuela does not violate human
rights, obviously it does; as does every
government. The point is to illustrate
how Human Rights Watch’s bias
dramatically distorts the human rights
reality in Venezuela where every
Venezuelan enjoys economic and social
rights to a greater degree than virtually
everyone else on the planet. It is only
through the callous ignoring of these
particular rights that Human Rights
Watch can label Chávez as
“authoritarian” and accuse his
government of e hibiting an “open
disregard for basic human rights
guarantees.” In actuality, the Chávez
government’s focus on economic and
social rights has resulted in the
emergence of a thriving grassroots
democracy in Venezuela that is rooted
in the concepts of participation and
equality—in other words, a socialist
vision of political and civil rights.
Ultimately, Human Rights Watch’s
selective and biased application of the
human rights norms enshrined in the
UN Declaration not only undermines
its credibility, it also promotes
injustice.
Garry Leech is an independent journalist
and author of numerous books
including Capitalism: A Structural
Genocide (Zed Books, 2012); Beyond
Bogota: Diary of a Drug War Journalist
in Colombia (Beacon Press, 2009); and
Crude Interventions: The United States
Oil and the New World Disorder (Zed
Books, 2006). He is also a lecturer in the
Department of Political Science at Cape
Breton University.
Seven Theses on Human Rights: (1)
The Idea of Humanity
by Costas Douzinas • 16 May 2013
Thesis 1: The idea of ‘humanity’ has no
fixed meaning and cannot act as the
source of moral or legal rules.
Historically, the idea has been used to
classify people into the fully human, the
lesser human, and the inhuman.

If ‘humanity’ is the normative source of

moral and legal rules, do we know
what ‘humanity’ is? Important
philosophical and ontological
questions are involved here. Let me
have a brief look at its history.
Pre-modern societies did not develop a
comprehensive idea of the human
species. Free men were Athenians or
Spartans, Romans or Carthaginians,
but not members of humanity; they
were Greeks or barbarians, but not
humans. According to classical
philosophy, a teleologically determined
human nature distributes people across
social hierarchies and roles and endows
them with differentiated
characteristics. The
word humanitas appeared for the first
time in the Roman Republic as a
translation of the Greek
word paideia. It was defined as eruditio
et institutio in bonas artes (the closest
modern equivalent is the
German Bildung). The Romans
inherited the concept from Stoicism
and used it to distinguish between
the homo humanus, the educated
Roman who was conversant with Greek
culture and philosophy and was
subjected to the jus civile, and
the homines barbari, who included the
majority of the uneducated non-
Roman inhabitants of the Empire.
Humanity enters the western lexicon as
an attribute and predicate of homo, as
a term of separation and distinction.
For Cicero as well as the younger
Scipio, humanitas implies generosity,
politeness, civilization, and culture and
is opposed to barbarism and
1
animality. “Only those who conform to
certain standards are really men in the
full sense, and fully merit the adjective
‘human’ or the attribute
2
‘humanity.’” Hannah Arendt puts it
sarcastically: ‘a human being or homo
in the original meaning of the word
indicates someone outside the range of
law and the body politic of the citizens,
as for instance a slave – but certainly a
3
politically irrelevant being.’
If we now turn to the political and legal
uses of humanitas, a similar history
emerges. The concept ‘humanity’ has
been consistently used to separate,
distribute, and classify people into
rulers, ruled, and e cluded. ‘Humanity’
acts as a normative source for politics
and law against a background of
variable inhumanity. This strategy of
political separation curiously entered
the historical stage at the precise point
when the first proper universalist
conception of humanitas emerged in
Christian theology, captured in the St
Paul’s statement, that there is no Greek
or Jew, man or woman, free man or
slave (Epistle to the Galatians 3:28). All
people are equally part of humanity
because they can be saved in God’s
plan of salvation and, secondly,
because they share the attributes of
humanity now sharply differentiated
from a transcended divinity and a
subhuman animality. For classical
humanism, reason determines the
human: man is a zoon logon
echon or animale rationale. For
Christian metaphysics, on the other
hand, the immortal soul, both carried
and imprisoned by the body, is the
mark of humanity. The new idea of
universal equality, unknown to the
Greeks, entered the western world as a
combination of classical and Christian
metaphysics.
The divisive action of ‘humanity’
survived the invention of its spiritual
equality. Pope, Emperor, Prince, and
King, these representatives and
disciples of God on earth were absolute
rulers. Their subjects, the sub-
jecti or sub-diti, take the law and their
commands from their political
superiors. More importantly, people
will be saved in Christ only if they
accept the faith, since non-Christians
have no place in the providential plan.
This radical divide and exclusion
founded the ecumenical mission and
proselytizing drive of Church and
Empire. Christ’s spiritual law of love
turned into a battle cry: let us bring the
pagans to the grace of God, let us make
the singular event of Christ universal,
let us impose the message of truth and
love upon the whole world. The
classical separation between Greek (or
human) and barbarian was based on
clearly demarcated territorial and
linguistic frontiers. In the Christian
empire, the frontier was internalized
and split the known globe diagonally
between the faithful and the heathen.
The barbarians were no longer beyond
the city as the city expanded to include
the known world. They became
‘enemies within’ to be appropriately
corrected or eliminated if they
stubbornly refused spiritual or secular
salvation.
The meaning of humanity after the
conquest of the ‘New World’ was
vigorously contested in one of the most
important public debates in history. In
April 1550, Charles V of Spain called a
council of state in Valladolid to discuss
the Spanish attitude towards the
vanquished Indians of Mexico. The
philosopher Ginés de Sepulveda and
the Bishop Bartholomé de las Casas,
two major figures of the Spanish
Enlightenment, debated on opposite
sides. Sepulveda, who had just
translated Aristotle’s Politics into
Spanish, argued that “the Spaniards
rule with perfect right over the
barbarians who, in prudence, talent,
virtue, humanity are as inferior to the
Spaniards as children to adults, women
to men, the savage and cruel to the
mild and gentle, I might say as monkey
4
to men.” The Spanish crown should
feel no qualms in dealing with Indian
evil. The Indians could be enslaved and
treated as barbarian and savage slaves
in order to be civilized and
proselytized.
Las Casas disagreed. The Indians have
well-established customs and settled
ways of life, he argued, they value
prudence and have the ability to
govern and organize families and cities.
They have the Christian virtues of
gentleness, peacefulness, simplicity,
humility, generosity, and patience, and
are waiting to be converted. They look
like our father Adam before the Fall,
wrote las Casas in his Apologia, they
are ‘unwitting’ Christians. In an early
definition of humanism, las Casas
argued that “all the people of the world
are humans under the only one
definition of all humans and of each
one, that is that they are rational …
Thus all races of humankind are
5
one.” His arguments combined
Christian theology and political utility.
Respecting local customs is good
morality but also good politics: the
Indians would convert to Christianity
(las Casas’ main concern) but also
accept the authority of the Crown and
replenish its coffers, if they were made
to feel that their traditions, laws, and
cultures are respected. But las Casas’
Christian universalism was, like all
universalisms, exclusive. He repeatedly
condemned “Turks and Moors, the
veritable barbarian outcasts of the
nations” since they cannot be seen as
“unwitting” Christians. An “empirical”
universalism of superiority and
hierarchy (Sepulveda) and a normative
one of truth and love (las Casas) end
up being not very different. As Tzvetan
Todorov pithily remarks, there is
“violence in the conviction that one
possesses the truth oneself, whereas
this is not the case for others, and that
one must furthermore impose that
6
truth on those others.”
The conflicting interpretations of
humanity by Sepulveda and las Casas
capture the dominant ideologies of
Western empires, imperialisms, and
colonialisms. At one end, the (racial)
other is inhuman or subhuman. This
justifies enslavement, atrocities, and
even annihilation as strategies of the
civilizing mission. At the other end,
conquest, occupation, and forceful
conversion are strategies of spiritual or
material development, of progress and
integration of the innocent, naïve,
undeveloped others into the main body
of humanity.
These two definitions and strategies
towards otherness act as supports of
western subjectivity. The helplessness,
passivity, and inferiority of the
“undeveloped” others turns them into
our narcissistic mirror-image and
potential double. These unfortunates
are the infants of humanity. They are
victimized and sacrificed by their own
radical evildoers; they are rescued by
the West who helps them grow,
develop and become our likeness.
Because the victim is our mirror image,
we know what his interest is and
impose it “for his own good.” At the
other end, the irrational, cruel,
victimizing others are projections of
the Other of our unconscious. As Slavoj
Žižek puts it, “there is a kind of passive
exposure to an overwhelming
Otherness, which is the very basis of
being human … [the inhuman] is
marked by a terrifying excess which,
although it negates what we
understand as ‘humanity’ is inherent to
7
being human.” We have called this
abysmal other lurking in the psyche
and unsettling the ego various names:
God or Satan, barbarian or foreigner, in
psychoanalysis the death drive or the
Real. Today they have become the “a is
of evil,” the “rogue state,” the “bogus
refugee,” or the “illegal” migrant. They
are contemporary heirs to Sepulveda’s
“monkeys,” epochal representatives of
inhumanity.
A comparison of the cognitive
strategies associated with the
Latinate humanitas and the
Greek anthropos is instructive. The
humanity of humanism (and of the
8
academic Humanities) unites knowing
subject and known object following the
protocols of self-reflection.
The anthropos of physical and social
anthropology, on the other hand, is the
object only of cognition. Physical
anthropology examines bodies, senses,
and emotions, the material supports of
life. Social anthropology studies diverse
non-western peoples, societies, and
cultures, but not the human species in
its essence or totality. These peoples
emerged out of and became the object
of observation and study through
discovery, conquest, and colonization
in the new world, Africa, Asia, or in the
peripheries of Europe. As Nishitani
Osamu puts it, humanity
and anthropos signify two
asymmetrical regimes of knowledge.
Humanity is civilization, anthropos is
outside or before civilization. In our
globalized world, the minor literatures
of anthropos are examined by
comparative literature, which
compares “civilization” with lesser
cultures.
The gradual decline of Western
dominance is changing these
hierarchies. Similarly, the disquiet with
a normative universalism, based on a
false conception of humanity, indicates
the rise of local, concrete, and context-
bound normativities.
In conclusion, because ‘humanity’ has
no fixed meaning, it cannot act as a
source of norms. Its meaning and scope
keeps changing according to political
and ideological priorities. The
continuously changing conceptions of
humanity are the best manifestations
of the metaphysics of an age. Perhaps
the time has come for anthropos to
replace the human. Perhaps the rights
to come will be anthropic (to coin a
term) rather than human, expressing
and promoting singularities and
differences instead of the sameness and
equivalences of hitherto dominant
identities.
Costas Douzinas is Professor of Law
and Director of the Birkbeck Institute
for the Humanities, University of
London.
Seven Theses on Human Rights: (2)
Power, Morality & Structural
Exclusion
by Costas Douzinas • 21 May 2013

We will explore the strong internal

connection between these superficially
antagonistic principles, at the point of
their emergence in the late 18th
century here and in the post-1989 order
in the next part.
The religious grounding of humanity
was undermined by the liberal political
philosophies of early modernity. The
foundation of humanity was
transferred from God to (human)
nature. Human nature has been
interpreted as an empirical fact, a
normative value, or both. Science has
driven the first approach. The mark of
humanity has been variously sought in
language, reason or evolution. Man as
species existence emerged as a result of
legal and political innovations. The
idea of humanity is the creation of
humanism, with legal humanism at the
forefront. Indeed the great 18th century
revolutions and declarations
paradigmatically manifest and helped
construct modern universalism. And
yet, at the heart of humanism,
humanity remained a strategy of
division and classification.
We can follow briefly this
contradictory process, which both
proclaims the universal and excludes
the local in the text of the French
Declaration of the Rights of Man and
Citizen, the manifesto of modernity.
Article 1, the progenitor of normative
universalism, states that ‘men are born
and remain free and equal of right’ a
claim repeated in the inaugural article
of the 1948 Universal Declaration of
Human Rights. Equality and liberty are
declared natural entitlements and
independent of governments, epochal,
and local factors. And yet the
Declaration is categorically clear about
the real source of universal rights.
Article 2 states that ‘the aim of any
political association is to preserve the
natural and inalienable rights of man’
and Article 3 proceeds to define this
association: ‘The principle of all
Sovereignty lies essentially with the
nation.’
‘Natural’ and eternal rights are declared
on behalf of the universal “man.”
However these rights do not pre-exist
but were created by the Declaration. A
new type of political association, the
sovereign nation and its state and a
new type of ‘man’, the national citizen,
came into existence and became the
beneficiary of rights. In a paradoxical
fashion, the declaration of universal
principle established local sovereignty.
From that point, statehood and
territory follow a national principle and
belong to a dual time. If the declaration
inaugurated modernity, it also started
nationalism and its consequences:
genocide, ethnic and civil war, ethnic
cleansing, minorities, refugees, the
stateless. The spatial principle is clear:
every state and territory should have its
unique dominant nation and every
nation should have its own state – a
catastrophic development for peace as
its extreme application since 1989 has
shown.
The new temporal principle replaced
religious eschatology with a historical
teleology, which promised the future
suturing of humanity and nation. This
teleology has two possible variants:
either the nation imposes its rule on
humanity or universalism undermines
parochial divides and identities. Both
variants became apparent when the
Romans turned Stoic cosmopolitanism
into the imperial legal regulation of jus
gentium. In France, the first alternative
appeared in the Napoleonic war, which
allegedly spread the civilizing influence
through conquest and occupation
(according to Hegel, Napoleon was the
world spirit on horseback); while the
second was the beginning of a modern
cosmopolitanism, in which slavery was
abolished and colonial people were
given political rights for a limited time
after the Revolution. From the imperial
deformation of Stoic cosmopolitanism
to the current use of human rights to
legitimize Western global hegemony,
every normative universalism has
decayed into imperial globalism. The
split between normative and empirical
humanity resists its healing, precisely
because universal normativity has been
invariably defined by a part of
humanity.
The universal humanity of liberal
constitutions was the normative
ground of division and exclusion. A gap
was opened between universal “man,”
the ontological principle of modernity,
and national citizen, its political
instantiation and the real beneficiary of
rights. The nation-state came into
existence through the exclusion of
other people and nations. The modern
subject reaches her humanity by
acquiring political rights of citizenship,
which guarantee her admission to the
universal human nature by excluding
from that status others. The alien as a
non-citizen is the modern barbarian.
He does not have rights because he is
not part of the state and he is a lesser
human being because he is not a
citizen. One is a man to greater or
lesser degree because one is a citizen to
a greater or lesser degree. The alien is
the gap between man and citizen.
In our globalised world, not to have
citizenship, to be stateless or a refugee,
is the worst fate. Strictly speaking,
human rights do not exist: if they are
given to people on account of their
humanity and not of some lower level
group membership, then refugees,
the sans papiers migrants and prisoners
in Guantanamo Bay and similar
detention centers, who have little if any
legal protection, should be their main
beneficiaries. They have few, if any,
rights. They are legally abandoned,
bare life, the homines sacri of the new
world order.
The epochal move to the subject is
driven and exemplified by legal
personality. As species existence, the
“man” of the rights of man appears
without gender, color, history, or
tradition. He has no needs or desires,
he is an empty vessel united with all
others through three abstract traits:
free will, reason, and the soul (now the
mind) — the universal elements of
human essence. This minimum of
humanity allows “man” to claim
autonomy, moral responsibility, and
legal subjectivity. At the same time, the
empirical man who actually enjoys the
‘rights of man’ is a man all too man: a
well-off, heterosexual, white, urban
male who condenses in his person the
abstract dignity of humanity and the
real prerogatives of belonging to the
community of the powerful. A second
exclusion therefore conditions
humanism, humanity and its rights.
Mankind excludes improper men, that
is, men of no property or propriety,
humans without rhyme and reason,
women, racial, and ethnic sexual
minorities. Rights construct humans
against a variable inhumanity or
anthropology. Indeed these “inhuman
conditions of humanity,” as Pheng
Cheah has called them, act as quasi-
transcendental preconditions of
modern life.1
The contemporary history of human
rights can be seen as the ongoing and
always failing struggle to close the gap
between the abstract man and the
concrete citizen; to add flesh, blood
and sex to the pale outline of the
‘human’ and e tend the dignities and
privileges of the powerful (the
characteristics of normative humanity)
to empirical humanity. This has not
happened however and is unlikely to
be achieved through the action of
rights.
Costas Douzinas is Professor of Law
and Director of the Birkbeck Institute
for the Humanities, University of
London.
Seven Theses on Human Rights: (3)
Neoliberal Capitalism & Voluntary
Imperialism
by Costas Douzinas • 23 May 2013
Thesis 3: The post-1989 order combines
an economic system that generates
huge structural inequalities and
oppression with a juridico-political
ideology promising dignity and equality.
This major instability is contributing to
its demise.
Why and how did this combination of
neoliberal capitalism and
humanitarianism emerge? Capitalism
has always moralized the economy and
applied a gloss of righteousness to
profit-making and unregulated
competition precisely because it is so
hard to believe. From Adam Smith’s
‘hidden hand’ to the assertion that
unrestrained egotism promotes the
common good or that beneficial effects
‘trickle down’ if the rich get even bigger
tax breaks, capitalism has consistently
1
tried to claim the moral high ground.
Similarly, human rights and their
dissemination are not simply the result
of the liberal or charitable disposition
of the West. The predominantly
negative meaning of freedom as the
absence of external constraints — a
euphemism for keeping state
regulation of the economy at a
minimum – has dominated the
Western conception of human rights
and turned them into the perfect
companion of neoliberalism. Global
moral and civic rules are the necessary
companion of the globalization of
economic production and
consumption, of the completion of
world capitalism that follows neoliberal
dogmas. Over the last 30 years, we have
witnessed, without much comment,
the creation of global legal rules
regulating the world capitalist
economy, including rules on
investment, trade, aid, and intellectual
property. Robert Cooper has called it
the voluntary imperialism of the global
economy. “It is operated by an
international consortium of financial
Institutions such as the IMF and the
World Bank … These institutions …
make demands, which increasingly
emphasise good governance. If states
wish to benefit, they must open
themselves up to the interference of
international organisations and foreign
states.” Cooper concludes that “what is
needed then is a new kind of
imperialism, one acceptable to a world
of human rights and cosmopolitan
2
values.”
The (implicit) promise to the
developing world is that the violent or
voluntary adoption of the market-led,
neoliberal model of good governance
and limited rights will inexorably lead
to Western economic standards. This is
fraudulent. Historically, the Western
ability to turn the protection of formal
rights into a limited guarantee of
material, economic, and social rights
was partly based on huge transfers
from the colonies to the metropolis.
While universal morality militates in
favour of reverse flows, Western
policies on development aid and Third
World debt indicate that this is not
politically feasible. Indeed, the
successive crises and re-arrangements
of neoliberal capitalism lead to
dispossession and displacement of
family farming by agribusiness, to
forced migration and urbanization.
These processes expand the number of
people without skills, status, or the
basics for existence. They become
human debris, the waste-life, the
bottom billions. This neo-colonial
attitude has now been extended from
the periphery to the European core.
Greece, Portugal, Ireland, and Spain
have been subjected to the rigours of
the neoliberal “Washington
Consensus” of austerity and
destruction of the welfare state, despite
its failure in the developing world.
More than half the young people of
Spain and Greece are permanently
unemployed and a whole generation is
being destroyed. But this gene-cide, to
coin a term, has not generated a
human rights campaign.
As Immanuel Wallerstein put it, “if all
humans have equal rights, and all the
peoples have equal rights, then we
cannot maintain the kind of
inegalitarian system that the capitalist
world economy has always been and
3
always will be.” When the
unbridgeability of the gap between the
missionary statements on equality and
dignity and the bleak reality of obscene
inequality becomes apparent, human
rights will lead to new and
uncontrollable types of tension and
conflict. Spanish soldiers met the
advancing Napoleonic armies shouting
“ own with freedom!” Today people
meet the ‘peacekeepers’ of the new
world order with cries of “ own with
human rights!”
Social and political systems become
hegemonic by turning their ideological
priorities into universal principles and
values. In the new world order, human
rights are the perfect candidate for this
role. Their core principles, interpreted
negatively and economically, promote
neoliberal capitalist penetration. Under
a different construction, their abstract
provisions could subject the
inequalities and indignities of late
capitalism to withering attack. But this
cannot happen as long as they are used
by the dominant powers to spread the
‘values’ of an ideology based on the
nihilism and insatiability of desire.
Despite differences in content,
colonialism and the human rights
movement form a continuum, episodes
in the same drama, which started with
the great discoveries of the new world
and is now carried out in the streets of
Iraq and Afghanistan: bringing
civilization to the barbarians. The
claim to spread Reason and
Christianity gave western empires their
sense of superiority and their
universalizing impetus. The urge is still
there; the ideas have been redefined
but the belief in the universality of our
world-view remains as strong as that of
the colonialists. There is little
difference between imposing reason
and good governance and proselytizing
for Christianity and human rights.
They are both part of the cultural
package of the West, aggressive and
redemptive at the same time.
Costas Douzinas is Professor of Law
and Director of the Birkbeck Institute
for the Humanities, University of
London.
Seven Theses on Human Rights: (4)
Universalism & Communitarianism
are Interdependent
by Costas Douzinas • 30 May 2013
Thesis 4: Universalism and
communitarianism rather than being
opponents are two types of humanism
dependent on each other. They are
confronted by the ontology of singular
equality.
The debate about the meaning of
humanity as the ground normative
source is conducted between
universalists and communitarians. The
universalist claims that cultural values
and moral norms should pass a test of
universal applicability and logical
consistency and often concludes that, if
there is one moral truth but many
errors, it is incumbent upon its agents
to impose it on others.
Communitarians start from the
obvious observation that values are
context-bound and try to impose them
on those who disagree with the
oppressiveness of tradition. Both
principles, when they become absolute
essences and define the meaning and
value of humanity without remainder,
can find everything that resists them
expendable.
Kosovo is a good example. The proud
Serbians killed and ‘cleansed’ ethnic
Albanians in order to protect the
integrity of the ‘cradle’ of their nation
(interestingly, like most wild
nationalisms, celebrating a historic
defeat). NATO bombers killed people
in Belgrade and Kosovo from 35,000
feet in order to defend the rights of
humanity. Both positions exemplify,
perhaps in different ways, the
contemporary metaphysical urge: they
have made an axiomatic decision as to
what constitutes the essence of
humanity and follow it with a stubborn
disregard for alternatives. They are the
contemporary expressions of a
humanism that defines the ‘essence’ of
humanity all the way to its end, as telos
and finish. To paraphrase Emmanuel
Levinas, to save the human we must
defeat this type of humanism.
The individualism of universal
principles forgets that every person is a
world and comes into existence in
common with others, that we are all in
community. Every human is a singular
being, unique in her existence as an
unrepeatable concatenation of past
encounters, desires, and dreams with
future projections, expectations, and
plans. Every single person forms a
phenomenological cosmos of meaning
and intentionality, in relations of desire
conversation and recognition with
others. Being in common is an integral
part of being self: self is exposed to the
other, it is posed in exteriority, the
other is part of the intimacy of self. My
face is “always e posed to others,
always turned toward an other and
faced by him or her never facing
1
myself.”
Indeed being in community with
others is the opposite of common being
or of belonging to an essential
community. Communitarians, on the
other hand, define community through
the commonality of tradition, history,
and culture, the various past
crystallizations whose inescapable
weight determines present possibilities.
The essence of the communitarian
community is often to compel or
‘allow’ people to find their ‘essence’,
common ‘humanity’ now defined as the
spirit of the nation or of the people or
the leader. We have to follow
traditional values and exclude what is
alien and other. Community as
communion accepts human rights only
to the extent that they help submerge
the I into the We, all the way till death,
the point of ‘absolute communion’ with
2
dead tradition.
Both universal morality and cultural
identity express different aspects of
human experience. Their comparison
in the abstract is futile and their
differences are not pronounced. When
a state adopts ‘universal’ human rights,
it will interpret and apply them, if at
all, according to local legal procedures
and moral principles, making the
universal the handmaiden of the
particular. The reverse is also true:
even those legal systems that jealously
guard traditional rights and cultural
practices against the encroachment of
the universal are already contaminated
by it. All rights and principles, even if
parochial in their content, share the
universalizing impetus of their form. In
this sense, rights carry the seed of the
dissolution of community and the only
defence is to resist the idea of rights
altogether, something impossible in
global neoliberalism. The claims of
universality and tradition, rather than
standing opposed in mortal combat,
have become uneasy allies, whose
fragile liaison has been sanctioned by
the World Bank.
From our perspective, humanity
cannot act as a normative principle.
Humanity is not a property shared. It is
discernible in the incessant surprising
of the human condition and its
exposure to an undecided open future.
Its function lies not in a philosophical
essence but in its non-essence, in the
endless process of re-definition and the
necessary but impossible attempt to
escape external determination.
Humanity has no foundation and no
end; it is the definition of
groundlessness.
Costas Douzinas is Professor of Law
and Director of the Birkbeck Institute
for the Humanities, University of
London.
Seven Theses on Human Rights: (5)
Depoliticization
by Costas Douzinas • 31 May 2013
Thesis 5: In advanced capitalist
societies, human rights depoliticize
politics.

Rights form the terrain on which

people are distributed into rulers,
ruled, and excluded. Power’s mode of
operation is revealed, if we
observe which people are given or
deprived of which rights
at which particular place or point in
time. In this sense, human rights both
conceal and affirm the dominant
structure of a period and help combat
it. Marx was the first to realize the
paradoxical nature of rights. Natural
rights emerged as a symbol of universal
emancipation, but they were at the
same time a powerful weapon in the
hands of the rising capitalist class,
securing and naturalizing emerging
dominant economic and social
relations. They were used to take out of
political challenge the central
institutions of capitalism such as
religion, property, contractual relations
and the family, thus providing the best
protection possible. Ideologies, private
interests, and egotistical concerns
appear natural, normal, and for the
public good when they are glossed over
by rights vocabulary. As Marx
inimitably put it, “freedom, equality,
1
property and Bentham.”
Early human rights were historical
victories of groups and individuals
against state power while at the same
time promoting a new type of
domination. As Giorgio Agamben
argues, they “simultaneously prepared
a tacit but increasing inscription of
individuals’ lives within the state order,
thus offering a new and more dreadful
foundation for the very sovereign
power from which they wanted to
2
liberate themselves.” In late
capitalism, with its proliferating
biopolitical regulation, the endlessly
multiplying rights paradoxically
increase power’s investment on bodies.
If classical natural rights protected
property and religion by making them
‘apolitical’, the main effect of rights
today is to depoliticize politics itself.
Let us introduce a key distinction in
recent political philosophy between
politics (la politique) and the political
(le politique). According to Chantal
Mouffe, politics is the terrain of routine
political life, the activity of debating,
lobbying, and horse-trading that takes
places around Westminster and Capitol
Hill.3 The ‘political,’ on the other hand,
refers to the way in which the social
bond is instituted and concerns deep
rifts in society. The political is the
expression and articulation of the
irreducibility of social conflict. Politics
organizes the practices and institutions
through which order is created,
normalizing social co-existence in the
context of conflict provided by the
political.
This deep antagonism is the result of
the tension between the structured
social body, where every group has its
role, function, and place, and what
Jacques Ranci re calls “the part of no
part.” Groups that have been radically
excluded from the social order; they
are invisible, outside the established
sense of what exists and is acceptable.
Politics proper erupts only when an
excluded part demands to be included
and must change the rules of inclusion
to achieve that. When they succeed, a
new political subject is constituted, in
excess to the hierarchized and visible
group of groups and a division is put in
4
the pre-existing common sense.
What is the role of human rights in this
division between politics and the
political? Right claims reinforce rather
than challenge established
arrangements. The claimant accepts
the established power and distribution
orders and transforms the political
claim into a demand for admission to
the law. The role of law is to transform
social and political tensions into a set
of solvable problems regulated by rules
and hand them over to rule experts.
The rights claimant is the opposite of
the revolutionaries of the early
declarations, whose task was to change
the overall design of the law. To this
extent, his actions abandon the original
commitment of rights to resist and
oppose oppression and domination.
The ‘e cessive’ subjects, who stand for
the universal from a position of
exclusion, have been replaced by social
and identity groups seeking
recognition and limited redistribution.
In the new world order the right-claims
of the excluded are foreclosed by
political, legal, and military means.
Economic migrants, refugees, prisoners
of the war on terror, the sans papiers,
inhabitants of African camps, these
‘one use humans’ are the indispensable
precondition of human rights but, at
the same time, they are the living, or
rather dying, proof of their
impossibility. Successful human rights
struggles have undoubtedly improved
the lives of people by marginal
rearrangements of social hierarchies
and non-threatening redistributions of
the social product. But their effect is to
depoliticize conflict and remove the
possibility of radical change.
We can conclude that human rights
claims and struggles bring to the
surface the exclusion, domination and
exploitation, and inescapable strife that
permeates social and political life. But,
at the same time, they conceal the deep
roots of strife and domination by
framing struggle and resistance in the
terms of legal and individual remedies
which, if successful, lead to small
individual improvements and a
marginal rearrangement of the social
edifice.
Can human rights reactivate a politics
of resistance? The intrinsic link
between early natural rights, (religious)
transcendence, and political radicalism
opened the possibility. It is still active
in parts of the world not fully
incorporated in the biopolitical
operations of power. But only just. The
metaphysics of the age is that of the
deconstruction of essence and
meaning, the closing of the divide
between ideal and real, the subjection
of the universal to the dominant
particular. Economic globalization and
semiotic monolingualism are carrying
this task out in practice; its intellectual
apologists do it in theory. The political
and moral duty of the critic is to keep
the rift open and to discover and fight
for transcendence in immanence.
Costas Douzinas is Professor of Law
and Director of the Birkbeck Institute
for the Humanities, University of
London.
Seven Theses on Human Rights: (6)
Desire
by Costas Douzinas • 3 June 2013
Thesis 6: In advanced capitalist
societies, human rights become
strategies for the publicization and
legalization of (insatiable) individual
desire.
Liberal theories from Immanuel Kant
to John Rawls present the self as a
solitary and rational entity endowed
with natural characteristics and rights
and in full control of himself. Rights to
life, liberty, and property are presented
as integral to humanity’s well-being.
The social contract (or its heuristic
restatement through the “original
position”) creates society and
government but preserves these rights
and makes them binding on
government. Rights and today human
rights are pre-social, they belong to
humans precisely because they are
humans. We use this natural
patrimony as tools or instruments to
confront the outside world, to defend
our interests, and to pursue our life
plans.
This position is sharply contrasted by
Hegelian and Marxist dialectics,
hermeneutics and psychoanalysis. The
human self is not a stable and isolated
entity that, once formed, goes into the
world and acts according to pre-
arranged motives and intentions. Self is
created through constant interactions
with others, the subject is always inter-
subjective. My identity is constructed
in an ongoing dialogue and struggle for
recognition, in which others (both
people and institutions) acknowledge
certain characteristics, attributes, and
traits as mine, helping create my own
sense of self. Identity emerges out of
this conversation and struggle with
others which follows the dialectic of
desire. Law is a tool and effect of this
dialectic; human rights acknowledge
the constitutive role of desire.
Hegel’s basic idea can be put simply.
The self is both separate from and
dependent upon the external world.
Dependence on the not-I, both the
object and the other person, makes the
self realize that he is not complete but
lacking and that he is constantly driven
by desire. Life is a continuous struggle
to overcome the foreignness of the
other person or object. Survival
depends on overcoming this radical
split from the not-I, while maintaining
the sense of uniqueness of self.1
Identity is therefore dynamic, always
on the move. I am in ongoing dialogue
with others, a conversation that keeps
changing others and re-drawing my
own self-image. Human rights do not
belong to humans and do not follow
the dictates of humanity; they
construct humans. A human being is
someone who can successfully claim
human rights and the group of rights
we have determines how “human” we
are; our identity depends on the bunch
of rights we can successfully mobilize
in relations with others. If this is the
case, rights must be linked with deep-
seated psychological functions and
needs. From the heights of Hegelian
dialectics, we now move to the much
darker territory of Freudian
psychoanalysis.
Jus vitam institutare, the law
constitutes life, states a Roman maxim.
For psychoanalysis it remains true. We
become independent, speaking
subjects by entering the symbolic order
of language and law. But this first
‘symbolic castration’ must be
supplemented by a second that makes
us legal subjects. It introduces us into
the social contract leaving behind the
family life of protection, love, and care.
The symbolic order imposes upon us
the demands of social life. God, King,
or the Sovereign act as universal
fathers, representing an omnipotent
and unitary social power, which places
us in the social division of labor. If,
according to Jacques Lacan, the name
of the father makes us speaking
subjects, the name of the Sovereign
turns us into legal subjects and
citizens.
This second entry into the law denies,
like symbolic castration, the perceived
wholeness of family intimacy and
replaces it with partial recognitions
and incomplete entitlements. Rights by
their nature cannot treat the whole
person. In law, a person is never a
complete being but a persona, ritual or
theatrical mask, that hides his or her
face under a combination of partial
rights. The legal subject is a
combination of overlapping and
conflicting rights and duties; they are
law’s blessing and curse. Rights are
manifestations of individual desire as
well as tools of societal bonding.
Following the standard Lacanian
division, rights have ‘symbolic’,
‘imaginary’, and ‘real’ aspects. Their
symbolic function places us in the
social division of labour, hierarchy, and
exclusion, the imaginary gives us a
(false) sense of wholeness while the
real disrupts the pleasures of the
symbolic and the falsifications of the
imaginary. Psychoanalysis offers the
most advanced explanation of the
constitutive and contradictory work of
rights.
The symbolic function of rights
bestows legal personality and
introduces people to independence
away from the intimacy of family. Law
and rights construct a formal structure,
which allocates us to a place in a
matrix of relations strictly indifferent
to the needs or desires of flesh and
blood people. Legal rights offer the
minimum recognition of abstract
humanity, formal equivalence and
moral responsibility, irrespective of
individual characteristics. At the same
time, they place people on a grid of
distinct and hierarchical roles and
functions, of prohibitions, entitlements
and exclusions. Social and economic
rights add a layer of difference to
abstract similarity; they recognize
gender, race, religion, and sexuality, in
part moving recognition from the
abstract equality of humanity to
differentiated qualities, characteristics,
and predications. Human rights may
promise universal happiness but their
empirical existence and enforcement
depends on genealogies, hierarchies of
power and contingencies that allocate
the necessary resources ignoring and
dismissing expectations or needs. The
legal person that rights and duties
construct resembles a caricature of the
actual human self. The face has been
replaced by an image in the cubist
style; the nose comes out of the mouth,
eyes protrude on the sides, forehead
and chin are reversed. It projects a
three-dimensional object onto a flat
canvas.
The integrity of self denied by the
symbolic order of rights returns in the
imaginary. Human rights promise an
end to conflict, social peace and well-
being (the pursuit of happiness was an
early promise in the American
Declaration of Independence). A
society of rights offers an ideal place, a
stage and supplement for the ideal ego.
As a man of rights, I see myself as
someone with dignity, respect, and
self-respect, at peace with the world. A
society that guarantees rights is a good
place, peaceful and affluent, a social
order made for and fitting the
individual who stands at its centre. A
legal system that protects rights is
rationally coherent and closed (Ronald
workin calls it a “seamless web”),
morally good (it has principles and the
consequent “right” answers to all
“hard” problems), pragmatically
efficient.
The imaginary domain of rights creates
an immediate, imaged and imagined
bond, between the subject, her ideal
ego, and the world. Human rights
project a fantasy of wholeness, which
unites body and soul into an integrated
self. It is a beautiful self that fits in a
good world, a society made for the
subject. The anticipated completeness,
the projected future integrity that
underpins present identity is non-
existent and impossible however and,
moreover, differs from person to
person and from community to
community. Our imaginary
identification with a good society
accepts too easily that the language,
signs and images of human rights are
(or can become) our reality. The right
to work, people assert, exists since it is
written in the Universal Declaration,
the international Covenants, the
Constitution, the law, the statements
of politicians. Billions of people have
no food, no employment, no education,
or health care — but this brutal fact
does not weaken the assertion of the
ideal. The necessary replacement of
materiality by signs, of needs and
desires by words and images makes
people believe that the mere existence
of legal texts and institutions, with
little performance or action, affects and
completes bodies.
The imaginary promoted by human
rights enthusiasts presents a world
made for my sake, in which the law
meets (or ought to and will meet) my
desires. This happy identification with
the social and legal system is based on
misrecognition. The world is
indifferent to my being, happiness or
travails. The law is not coherent or just.
Morality is not law’s business and
peace is always temporary and
precarious, never perpetual. The state
of eu zein or well-being, the terminal
point of human rights, is always
deferred, its promise postponed its
performance impossible. For the
middle classes, to be sure, human
rights are birth-right and patrimony.
For the unfortunates of the world, on
the other hand, they are only vague
promises, fake supports for offering
obedience, with their delivery
permanently frustrated. Like the
heaven of Christianity, human rights
form a receding horizon that allows
people to endure daily humiliations
and subjugations.
The imaginary of rights is gradually
replacing social justice. The
decolonization struggles, the civil
rights and counter-cultural movements
fought for an ideal society based on
justice and equality. In the human
rights age, the pursuit of collective
material welfare has given way to
individual gratification and the
avoidance of evil. The rights imaginary
goes into overdrive when it turns
images into “reality,” when legal
clauses and terms replace food and
shelter, when weasel words become the
garb and grab of power. Rights
emphasize the individual, his
autonomy, and his place in the world.
Like all imaginary identifications, they
repress the recognition that the subject
is inter-subjective and that the
economic and social order is strictly
indifferent to the fate of any particular
individual. According to Louis
Althusser, ideology is not “false
consciousness” but is made up of ways
of living, practices, and experiences
that misrecognize our place in the
world. It is “the imaginary relationship
of individuals to their real conditions of
e istence.” In this sense, human rights
are ideology at its strongest but one
very different from that of Michael
2
Ignatieff.
Finally, the symbolic and imaginary
operation of rights finds its limit in the
real. We hover around the vortex of the
real: the lack at the core of subjectivity
both causes our projects to fail and
creates the drive to continue the effort.
When we make a demand, we not only
ask the other to fulfill a need but also
to offer us unreserved love. An infant,
who asks for his mother’s breast, needs
food but also asks for his mother’s
attention and love. Desire is always the
desire of the other and signifies
precisely the excess of demand over
need. Each time my need for an object
enters language and addresses the
other, it is the request for recognition
and love. But this demand for
wholeness and unqualified recognition
cannot be met by the big Other
(language, law, the state) or the other
person. The big Other is the cause and
symbol of lack. The other person
cannot offer what the subject lacks
because he is also lacking. In our
appeal to the other, we confront lack, a
lack that can neither be filled nor fully
symbolized.
Rights allow us to express our needs in
language by formulating them as a
demand. A human rights claim
involves two demands addressed to the
other: a specific request in relation to
one aspect of the claimant’s personality
or status (such as to be left alone, not
to suffer in one’s bodily integrity, and
to be treated equally), but, in addition,
a much wider demand to have one’s
whole identity recognized in its specific
characteristics. When a person of
colour claims, for example, that the
rejection of a job application amounted
to a denial of her human right to non-
discrimination, she makes two related
but relatively independent claims. The
rejection is both to an unfair denial of
the applicant’s need for a job but also it
denigrates her wider identity. Every
right therefore links a need of a part of
the body or personality with what
exceeds need, the desire that the
claimant be recognized and loved as a
whole and complete person.
The subject of rights tries to find the
missing object that will fill lack and
turn him into a complete integral being
in the desire of the other. But this
object does not exist and cannot be
possessed. Rights offer the hope that
subject and society can become whole:
‘if only my attributes and
characteristics were given legal
recognition, I would be happy’; ‘if only
the demands of human dignity and
equality were fully enforced, society
would be just.’ But desire cannot be
fulfilled. Rights become a fantastic
supplement that arouses but never
satiates the subject’s desire. Rights
always agitate for more rights. They
lead to new areas of claim and
entitlement that again and again prove
insufficient.
Today human rights have become the
mark of civility. But their success is
limited. No right can earn me the full
recognition and love of the other. No
bill of rights can complete the struggle
for a just society. Indeed the more
rights we introduce, the greater the
pressure is to legislate for more, to
enforce them better, to turn the person
into an infinite collector of rights, and
to turn humanity into an endlessly
proliferating mosaic of laws. The law
keeps colonizing life and the social
world, while the endless spiral of more
rights, acquisitions, and possessions
fuels the subject’s imagination and
dominates the symbolic world. Rights
become the reward for psychological
lack and political impotence. Fully
positivized rights and legalized desire
extinguish the self-creating potential of
human rights. They become the
symptom of all-devouring desire—a
sign of the Sovereign or the
individual—and at the same time its
partial cure. In a strange and
paradoxical twist, the more rights we
have the more insecure we feel.
But there is one right that is closely
linked with the real of radical desire:
the right to resistance and revolt. This
right is close to the death drive, to the
repressed call to transcend the
distributions of the symbolic order and
the genteel pleasures of the imaginary
for something closer to our destructive
and creative inner kernel. Taking risks
and not giving up on your desire is the
ethical call of psychoanalysis.
Resistance and revolution is their social
equivalent. In the same way that the
impossible and disavowed real
organizes the psyche, the right to
resistance forms the void at the heart
of the system of law, which protects it
3
from sclerosis and ossification.
We can conclude that rights are about
recognition (symbolic) and distribution
(imaginary); except that there is a right
to resistance/revolt.
Costas Douzinas is Professor of Law
and Director of the Birkbeck Institute
for the Humanities, University of
London.
Seven Theses on Human Rights: (7)
Cosmopolitanism, Equality &
Resistance
by Costas Douzinas • 13 June 2013
Thesis 7: For a cosmopolitanism to
come (or the idea of communism).
Against imperial arrogance and
cosmopolitan naivety, we must insist
that global neoliberal capitalism and
human-rights-for-export are part of the
same project. The two must be
uncoupled; human rights can
contribute little to the struggle against
capitalist exploitation and political
domination. Their promotion by
western states and humanitarians turns
them into a palliative: it is useful for a
limited protection of individuals but it
can blunt political resistance. Human
rights can re-claim their redemptive
role in the hands and imagination of
those who return them to the tradition
of resistance and struggle against the
advice of the preachers of moralism,
suffering humanity, and humanitarian
philanthropy.
Liberal equality as a regulative
principle has failed to close the gap
between rich and poor. Equality must
become an axiomatic presupposition:
People are free and equal; equality is
not the effect but the premise of
action. Whatever denies this simple
truth creates a right and duty of
resistance. The equality of legal rights
has consistently supported inequality;
axiomatic equality (each counts as one
in all relevant groups) is the impossible
boundary of rights culture. It means
that healthcare is due to everyone who
needs it, irrespective of means; that
rights to residence and work belong to
all who find themselves in a part of the
world irrespective of nationality; that
political activities can be freely
engaged by all irrespective of
citizenship and against the explicit
prohibitions of human rights law.
The combination of the right to
resistance and axiomatic equality
projects a humanity opposed both to
universal individualism and
communitarian closure. In the age of
globalization, of mondialization we
suffer from a poverty of world. Each
one is a cosmos but we no longer have
a world, only a series of disconnected
situations. Everyone a world: a knot of
past events and stories, people and
encounters, desires and dreams. This is
also the point of ekstasis, of opening
up and moving away, immortals in our
mortality, symbolically finite but
imaginatively infinite. The
cosmopolitan capitalists promise to
make us citizens of the world under a
global sovereign and a well-defined and
terminal humanity. This is the
universalization of the lack of world,
the imperialism and empiricism to
which every cosmopolitanism falls.
But we should not give up the
universalizing impetus of the
imaginary, the cosmos that uproots
every polis, disturbs every filiation,
contests all sovereignty and hegemony.
Resistance and radical equality map
out an imaginary domain of rights
which is uncannily close to utopia.
According to Ernst Bloch, the present
foreshadows a future not yet and, one
should add, not ever possible. The
future projection of an order in which
man is no longer a “degraded, enslaved,
abandoned or, despised being” links
the best traditions of the past with a
powerful “reminiscence of the
1
future.” It disturbs the linear concept
of time and, like psychoanalysis, it
imagines the present in the image of a
prefigured beautiful future, which
however will never come to be. In this
sense, the imaginary domain is
necessarily utopian, non-existing. And
yet, this non-place or nothingness
grounds our sense of identity, in the
same way that utopia helps create a
sense of social identity. We have re-
discovered in Tunisia and Tahrir
Square, in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol and
Athens’ Syntagma Square what goes
beyond and against liberal
cosmopolitanism, the principle of its
excess. This is the promise of the
cosmopolitanism to come – or the idea
2
of communism.
The cosmopolitanism to come is
neither the terrain of nations nor an
alliance of classes, although it draws
from the treasure of solidarity.
Dissatisfaction with the nation, state,
and the inter-national comes from a
bond between singularities, which
cannot be turned into essential
humanity, nation, or state. The cosmos
to come is the world of each unique
one, of whoever or anyone; the polis,
the infinite encounters of singularities.
What binds me to a Palestinian, a sans
papiers migrant, or an unemployed
youth is not membership of humanity,
nation, state, or community but a bond
that cannot be contained in the
dominant interpretations of humanity
and cosmos or of polis and state.
Law, the principle of the polis,
prescribes what constitutes a
reasonable order by accepting and
validating some parts of collective life,
while banning, excluding others,
making them invisible. Law and rights
link language with things or beings;
they nominate what exists and
condemn the rest to invisibility and
marginality. As the formal and
dominant decision about existence, law
carries huge ontological power. Radical
desire, on the other hand is the longing
for what has been banned and declared
impossible by the law; what confronts
past catastrophes and incorporates the
promise of the future.
The axiom of equality and the right to
resistance prepare militant subjects in
the ongoing struggle between justice
and injustice. This being together of
singularities in resistance is
constructed here and now with friends
and strangers in acts of hospitality, in
cities of resistance, Cairo, Madrid,
Athens.
Costas Douzinas is Professor of Law
and Director of the Birkbeck Institute
for the Humanities, University of
London.