The Heart of Human Rights

Book excerpt: This book provides a moral assessment of the heart of the modern human rights enterprise: the system of international legal human rights. Any attempt to achieve a moral assessment of that enterprise must first evaluate the system of international legal human rights, which includes both legal norms and the institutions that create, interpret, and implement them. When philosophers have addressed the system of international legal human rights at all, they have tended to assume that international legal human rights, when they are morally justified, mirror, or at least help to realize, preexisting moral human rights. But international legal human rights, like many other legal rights, can be justified by appeal to several different types of moral considerations, of which the need to realize preexisting moral individual rights is only one. Justifying the system of international legal human rights requires not only advancing sound arguments for international legal human rights norms, but also an account of the legitimacy of the institutions of the international legal human rights system. It also requires showing that the legal rights in question should be part of a system of international law, rather than merely being included in domestic legal systems. Finally, justification also requires an account of the supremacy of international human rights law: a determination of whether and if so under what conditions, international human rights law should trump domestic law, including the constitutional law of the best existing liberal democratic states --