Human Rights as War by Other Means. Jennifer Curtis
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subjects of rights also constrain recognition of other subjects of rights and political subjectivities—echoing another politically oppressive feature of the conflict.
Scholarship about the peace process, as much as conventional political wisdom, emphasizes guarantees of rights as a driver of the settlement and downplays the vulnerabilities outlined above. Harvey (2001) argues that due to the agreement’s “explicit basis in the progressive values of human rights, equality and democratic governance … the normative basis for a new beginning is clearly established.” Furthermore, he says, the new institutions aim to “construct a human rights culture” (113). Other legal scholars emphasize the centrality of human rights within the GFA (e.g., Bell 2000, 2006). Some work emphasizes the role of human rights nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in the peace process, supporting paramilitaries’ move to democratic politics and making human rights central in the negotiations themselves (e.g., Bell and Keenan 2004; McEvoy 1999, 2001; Mageean and O’Brien 1999). Whitaker (2010) asserts that human rights processes since the GFA, particularly the Bill of Rights debates, facilitated discussions of politics beyond the divisions of nationalism and unionism. Finlay (2010) offers a rare dissent, arguing that postconflict human rights processes have failed in their objective to create principles about which diverse political actors share consensus.
Furthermore, the logic implicating human rights specifically in the conflict’s resolution has been projected causally onto past rights mobilizations. For example, Bell (2006) characterizes the 1960s civil rights campaigns as “essentially demands for more human rights” (358). In contrast, Dickson (2010) contends that early mobilizations made few appeals to human rights principles (15–16). Indeed, he states that subsequent human rights discourse distorts causality, leading “some people” to believe the conflict “was totally focused around human rights and equality issues,” rather than stemming from the lack of consensual political institutions (22).
The facts of causality matter, as the diagnosis of causes determines remedies. In this instance, the solution of human rights and equality is not a completely post hoc rationalization. As both cause and solution, however, the role of rights in the conflict was contested well before the peace process. White (1989) is an earlier example of the argument that state repression in the face of peaceful demands for civil rights led to violent conflict. Heated academic debates have raged as to whether civil rights violations, such as institutionalized anti-Catholic discrimination, were the direct cause of the conflict, as in the six-year exchange between Denis O’Hearn (1983, 1985, 1987) and Christopher Hewitt (1981, 1983, 1985, 1987) in the British Journal of Sociology. This is not to argue that serious scholarship on rights and conflict in Northern Ireland are simply expressions of a zeitgeist; that would be disingenuous and dismissive. Rather, it is to underscore that both political rhetoric and academic analyses have changed over time.
One important change is in terminology. As Dickson (2010) notes, the 1960s protesters in Northern Ireland appealed to civil rights, not human rights. Yet no matter how rights have been designated over time, as civil, political, economic, or human, the discourse of rights has enduring puissance. Williams (1991) captures this quality: “For the historically disempowered, the conferring of rights is symbolic of all the denied aspects of their humanity” (153). This is evident in Northern Ireland, as, for example, when Gerry Adams spoke of “the days of humiliation” being over. Here, Adams evoked historical understandings of Irish Catholic experiences under British and unionist governance (see Cullen 1986). Such claims about how the GFA works indicate the cultural and political power of “rights” in the settlement. However, distinctions about types of rights are analytical as well as descriptive. Moyn (2010) argues that, as human rights became a utopian political project in the late twentieth century, clarity about their definition and legal basis was diminished. Over time in Northern Ireland, distinctions about different kinds of rights and the subjects or bearers of rights have been blurred in the service of the new narrative about the role of human rights in the conflict.
Human Rights in Law and Discourse
Philosophically and legally, human rights are fundamental liberties and entitlements people possess because of their humanity. In the aftermath of World War II, the newly created United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. In the 1960s, two covenants were negotiated and became effective in 1976: the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. Together, these three documents are the basis for international human rights law. This splitting of political and economic rights into separate documents, writes Ignatieff (1999), was a consequence of the Cold War, reflecting “philosophical disagreement between the legal and political rights tradition of Western liberalism and the predominantly social and economic rights tradition of the Marxist world” (317; emphasis original). Civil rights and political rights include principles such as freedom from torture and freedom of expression. Economic, social, and cultural rights are principles such as rights to subsistence and to housing. The covenants contain overlaps regarding rights to self-determination, privacy, and nondiscrimination; and, in practice, rights do not have simply political or economic consequences. For example, education provision (a social right) affects the capacity of citizens to exercise political as well as economic rights.
Both Ireland and the UK ratified the UN declaration and covenants.19 Additionally, the UK and Ireland are signatories to the European Convention on Human Rights. The convention is similar to the UN declaration but incorporates some basic social and economic rights. Postwar European states developed the convention, which also has enforcement powers. It established the European Court of Human Rights, a judicial body that allows individuals to seek redress from signatory states who violate these basic rights. The UK was an original signatory nation, ratifying the convention in 1951.20 Ireland ratified the convention in 1953. It was enacted in UK domestic law in 1998 and in Irish law in 2003. Both states also signed the European Social Charter, a complementary treaty expanding social and economic rights.21 The social charter was revised in 1996, and an enforcement procedure was established in 1998. The UK and Ireland are signatories.22
Anthropologist Richard Wilson (2006) explains that, in legal forms like the UN declaration and covenants or the European convention and charter, human rights “do not provide the basis for a fully worked out moral or political philosophy” (78). His point introduces another distinction, one between human rights activism, often called rights discourse, and law (see Wilson 2007: 350). NGOs and social movements do the political work of embedding human rights norms in social life, and the term “discourse” is frequently used to distinguish their activities from law and legal cases, as above in Dickson (2010). With increasing human rights advocacy during the late twentieth century, defining and securing rights became part of everyday politics. Yet appeals to fundamental human rights frequently mask this politicization. McEvoy (2011) writes that the primary weakness of human rights talk is “its tendency to deny the quintessentially political nature of its argumentation” (377). Even the most dedicated defenders of human rights as a project acknowledge its limitations and ambiguities. For example, Ignatieff (2001) recognizes contemporary human rights “idolatry” and states that “rights inflation—the tendency to define anything desirable as a right—ends up eroding the legitimacy of a defensible core of rights” (90).
Critics point out that the malleability of this discourse facilitates co-optation—for example, human rights have been invoked to justify less-than-liberatory projects, such as the substitution of truth commissions for retributive justice (e.g., Feher 1999; Wilson 2001) and as a rationale for military interventions like the Iraq war (e.g., Orford 2003). The ubiquity of human rights NGOs has allowed groups like the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute to enter UN consultation processes, bringing their politics to bear on the United Nations Population Fund’s contraception policies—politics that some see as diminishing economic and social rights for large numbers of humans (see Buss and Herman 2003). An even larger problem sketched by current critics of human rights discourse is that the ideology and rhetoric of human rights masks oppressive political-economic processes (e.g., Gledhill 2003). Some scholars such as Brown (2004) detect a profound disingenuousness whereby human rights politics disable other visions and promote “unchecked globalization of capital, postcolonial political deformations, and superpower imperialism”