ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on the United Nations Declaration on the Right to Development, adopted by the General Assembly in 1986. It argues that the main deficiency of the Declaration is its statist bias and its neglect of the key issue of sustainability. Writing in 1961, Herbert Hart argued that, although international law had enough in common with municipal law to count as law, it lacked the crucial feature of being a union of primary and secondary rules, and was simply a set of primary rules. From a philosophical point of view, declaring a right is a form of justification that has all the advantages of theft over honest toil. The Declaration on the Right to Development is a recycling at a higher level of abstraction of the New International Economic Order promoted by the so-called 'Group of 77' and its organ within the United Nations, the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).