2 January 2010
OpenDemocracy deputy editor David Hayes, asked openDemocracy writers to reflect on the decade that has passed and the one that lies ahead by considering three questions:
1) What was the most significant trend in the century"s first decade?
2) What do you most hope for, and most fear, about the decade to come?
3) What idea do you see fading and/or emerging in 2010 and beyond?
Gaby Oré Aguilar respond to these questions from an international law and justice approach:
1) What was the most significant trend in the century"s first decade?
The first decade of this century was meant to be one of consolidation of the great advances made in international justice and human rights in the 1990s, epitomised by the creation of the International Criminal Court in 1998. Instead, the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 triggered an international war that crushed this hope. The global security strategy pursued by the United States and others in the aftermath of 9/11 put immense strains on the relationship between a counter-terrorist definition of security and respect for people’s fundamental rights. This trend influenced international justice and human-rights agendas during the first part of the decade in particular, and rendered near-invisible other dimensions of international law and justice. The second half of the decade has seen efforts to refocus the attention and action of the international community, especially on the economic and social dimensions of justice which underlie crises and conflicts.
2) What do you most hope for, and most fear, about the decade to come?
In the next decade, it is very important that an international agenda on security, democracy and peace anchored in social and economic justice is consolidated. A series of interlocking crises -financial, food, energy and climate - threaten the lives of the most marginalised. There must be a huge investment of resources to address these crises and reduce their human cost. The pattern emerging from the Copenhagen conference on climate change - where a number of powerful states decided to exempt themselves from their obligations to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, while the less powerful were expected to assume the consequences of this conduct - must end. This “ neo-exceptionalist” approach undermines both the legitimacy of international institutions and the sense of transnational responsibility, both of which are vital to the search for rule-based and rights-protecting progress.
3) What idea do you see fading and/or emerging in 2010 and beyond?
Human-rights legal scholars and activists have proposed the creation of a World Court of Human Rights. To make this global mechanism a reality would be a great step towards realising justice for all. It would accomplish a number of welcome advances: generate a coherent body of human rights jurisprudence, further a holistic understanding of human-rights norms, hold non-state actors responsible for human-rights violations, provide justice to people in regions where neither regional nor domestic human-rights courts exist, and complement the work of existing bodies (for example, by looking at issues that cannot be dealt with by the International Criminal Court). The debate over the proposed body may be at an initial stage, but this is a project likely to concentrate the energy and attention of the human-rights movement and a number of states in the next decade and beyond.
Gaby Oré Aguilar, Human Rights Ahead
Published on openDemocracy (http://www.opendemocracy.net)
Also by Gaby Oré Aguilar on openDemocracy:
“Peru vs Fujimori: justice in the time of reason” (10 July 2008)