ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that Immanuel Kant’s paradoxical commitment to human autonomy and dignity, and the notion of punishment as a categorical imperative, and presents the contemporary discourse of human rights where justice is equated with retributive punishment. The history of human rights and penal philosophy is marked by jagged edges rather than clean breaks. Human rights bodies and non-governmental organizations imultaneously seek to counter the punitive reach of the law in some areas and call for its expansion in others. In temporal terms, retributivism has gained added currency within human rights circles since the post-Cold War diffusion of neoliberal ideology and the renaissance of international criminal justice in the 1990s. The principle of proportionality of punishment to crime, as employed in human rights literature, turns on the abstract individual of classical penal theory, and the split between criminal justice and social justice.
