Can Human Rights Survive?

The Hamlyn Lectures

by Conor A. Gearty

In this set of three essays, originally presented as the 2005 Hamlyn Lectures, Conor Gearty considers whether human rights can survive the challenges of the war on terror, the revival of political religion, and the steady erosion of the world's natural resources. He also looks deeper than this to consider the fundamental question: How can we tell what human rights are? In his first essay, Gearty asks how the idea of human rights needs to be made to work in our age of relativism, uncertainty and anxiety. In the second, he assesses how the idea of human rights has coped with its incorporation in legal form in the UK Human Rights Act, arguing that the record is much better and more democratic than many human rights enthusiasts allow. In his final essay, Gearty confronts the challenges that may destroy the language of human rights for the generations that follow us.

Genres: Law

192 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2006

Reviews

[Jordan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This powerful and lucid work reframes human rights. Rights-talk, Gearty suggests, has become more common in everyday language, but without a coherent intellectual basis. This renders them vulnerable; to implosion or illiberal usurpation. With this in mind, Gearty sets about normatively justifying human rights, and identifying what presently threatens them.

Human rights, Gearty argues, respond to dignity possessed by each human being, qua human being. They demand acts of compassion; non-interference, sure, but also positive acts to secure well-being. That (familiar) dual framing of human rights is thus transformed into a rich and tenacious dedication to human flourishing. This is the human rights project. And they are important - particularly for the vulnerable, whose plights the privileged might otherwise be minded to overlook.

Threats to human rights, essentially, are two-fold. First, equating human rights with law alone risks stultifying their emancipatory power; rights become a means for this or that individual to acquire this or that end rather than a broader moral and political commitment to the flourishing of every human being across every society. Second, states' responses to terrorism - while nominally predicated on preserving democracy and the domestic populace's rights - fundamentally undermine the radical equality (of every person qua person) upon which the human-rights project is based, given how readily states brand non-national terrorists as 'evil', or hand-wringingly justify torturing them.

A lively, inspiring and beautifully written book. Highly recommended, particularly to students of the subject.

[Nick Sequeiros-Engel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gearty’s ‘Can Human Rights Survive?’ remains just as important and relevant to actors in the human rights space today as it was when written almost two decades ago.