Human Rights and the Rule of Law: Achieving Universal Justice?

Abstract

The advocates of the extension of international legal norms and the establishment of new international tribunals argue that these measures are necessary to prevent political and military leaders escaping accountability for human rights abuses. They assert that the doctrines of sovereign immunity and long-standing international bars on external interference in domestic legal jurisdictions seek to defend the indefensible. They embellish their arguments with appeals to the natural and deep sense of outrage people feel when atrocities are committed, and by insisting that what they are trying to do is to bring law and justice into a legal and moral vacuum. Many leading lawyers and theoreticians call for the return to moral principles and an ‘international social idealism’, establishing universal norms of human rights legislation which can be ruled on by an international judiciary (for example, Allott, 1999; Booth et al., 2000).

Of course we’re non-political. The real power always is.

C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength