Posner and Stone Critique Human Rights Law

Legal Experts Posner and Stone Critique Human Rights Law

Eric Posner, an esteemed professor at the University of Chicago Law School, criticized human rights law as a largely ineffective tool for advancing global human rights in an event moderated by fellow law professor and constitutional law expert Geoffrey Stone on Tuesday evening. The talk was part of International House’s Global Voices Program and promoted Posner’s new book, The Twilight of Human Rights Law.

Posner began his talk with a refresher course in human rights history, noting the ever-evolving nature of human rights as a concept since the Enlightenment era. Quick to emphasize his support for global human rights themselves, Posner purposefully defined his distinction between human rights and human rights law.

“[Human rights] reflects the basic idea that people have certain interests that are powerful enough that governments should never be able to violate them,” he said.  Human rights law goes further to claim human rights are “so important that they should be embodied in international law,” leading to the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and numerous future treaties.

What Posner finds problematic about human rights law is the nature of international treaties, which comprise much of human rights law. “Countries [frequently] tend to enter into treaties because they want another country to do something,” he said. “These treaties aren’t actually enforced…they’re not forced by their own domestic institutions to comply with these treaties. So increasingly it looks like ratification of these treaties for most countries is purely symbolic.”

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