ABSTRACT
Introduction There has been a lot of political controversy over national implementation of the international human rights conventions. New questions are being posed as to the effects of the international human rights regime on nationally based political decision-making – questions which engage scholars of law and politics, politicians and human rights activists alike. A new critique of human rights, from within established liberal democracies, questions the legitimacy of such international restrictions on state power and sovereignty. This critique depicts an opposition between court-based human rights protection and democratic majority rule. It claims that inappropriate power shifts are brought about through the dynamic interpretation of state obligations by international supervision agencies such as human rights committees and courts. In a broad sense, the new critical discourse thus addresses the relationship of human rights to the concept of democracy, especially as this concerns the relationship between the legal protection of groups and individuals and democratic majority rule. How international human rights influence national political decision making also became important issues in two parallel, large-scale research investigations of ‘power and democracy’ commissioned by, respectively, the Norwegian cabinet and the Danish parliament towards the new millennium (1998-2003). Within the research group in charge of the Norwegian study, in which I also participated, controversy over the assessment of the human rights regime produced two formal diverging statements (majority and minority reports in NOU 2003:19). In the Danish context, no similar disagreement arose within the research group in charge. But otherwise, controversy over such assessments is easily identified also within Danish politics and scholarship (see for instance Vedsted-Hansen 2004, or Christoffersen 2006). In this chapter, I will briefly outline some major differences in the assessments of the international human rights regime as evident from these two Nordic power and democracy investigations. Mainly, however, I will relate the controversy to the lengthy policy debate about the ‘proper status’ in Norwegian law for the UN
convention which in particular protects women’s rights – that is, CEDAW. The starting point for this discussion is my own basic conviction that under no circumstances should human rights be represented as a threat to representative democracy. This claim also formed the basis for my own minority report to the Norwegian cabinet in 2003 as a member of the Norwegian Power and Democracy commission.
