ABSTRACT
Scholars and practitioners of human rights will recognize the difficulty in bringing about consensus across academic disciplines and global and local communities on the exact content of human rights. Do human rights refer solely to those rights recognized in international human rights law or domestic law? Are they moral claims that individuals can make against the state even when they are not recognized legally? Are human rights a ‘discourse’ (or multiple discourses) employed by individuals and groups – local, global and transnational – to gain attention for or legitimize their claims or a ‘language’ used by states to pursue national security and economic interests? This book takes the view that human rights are moral claims accorded legal
recognition and states are legally obliged to ensure that they respect, protect and fulfil these claims. Human rights are ‘political norms dealing mainly with how people should be treated by their governments and institutions’ (Nickel 2006). These norms have become entrenched within international politics and, arguably, validate (or have been used to justify) the legitimacy of domestic regimes and the pursuit of national interests (Landman 2005a). By delineating the purely legal conception of human rights from its philosophical and socioanthropological perspectives, this book attempts to provide scholars and practitioners in the field a secure (although partial) basis from which to commence the task of monitoring and measurement. This chapter highlights the meaning of human rights as conceived in inter-
national law and the interpretations of these rights by institutions set up to monitor the implementation of the law by states. This is accompanied by a brief sketch of the international human rights mechanisms that are involved in standard setting and implementation. The chapter then maps out the content of human rights and draws attention to the principles, categories and dimensions as derived from the international law of human rights. These features are particularly important for measurement as they can be used to assess whether the legislation, policies and practices of states fulfil their international and domestic legal obligations. Individuals and human rights monitoring organizations can hold states to account for their acts of commission or
of the to assessment of states’ performance in the protection of these rights. By comparing frameworks of human rights measurement as developed from international law, the chapter assesses the key trade-off between complexity, validity and viability that arises in the application of these measures.
