Law, Cosmopolitan Law and the Protection of Human Rights

Journal of International Political Theory 4 (2):241-264 (2008)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

In Between Facts and Norms, Habermas articulates a system of rights, including human rights, within the democratic constitutional state. For Habermas, while human rights, like other subjective rights have moral content, they do not structurally belong to a moral system; nor should they be grounded in one. Instead, human rights belong to a positive and coercive legal order upon which individuals can make actionable legal claims. Habermas extends this argument to include international human rights, which are realised within the context of a cosmopolitan legal order. The aim of this paper is to assess the relevance of law as a mechanism for securing human rights protection. I argue that positive law does make a material difference to securing individual human rights and to cultivating and augmenting a general rights culture both nationally and globally. I suggest that Habermas' model of law presents the most viable way of negotiating the tensions that human rights discourse gives rise to: the tensions between morality and law, between legality and politics, and between the national and international contexts of human rights protection.

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,221

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Cosmopolitan Community and the Law of World Citizenship.Sharon Anderson-Gold - 2007 - The Proceedings of the Twenty-First World Congress of Philosophy 3:45-50.
Global Responsibility for Human Rights.Sigrun I. Skogly - 2009 - Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 29 (4):827-847.
The Ambiguity of the Term 'Culture' and its Consequences for the Protection of Human Rights.Nermin Gedik - 2007 - The Proceedings of the Twenty-First World Congress of Philosophy 7:33-36.

Analytics

Added to PP
2013-12-29

Downloads
38 (#363,527)

6 months
6 (#201,673)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations