Human Rights Positions HUMAN RIGHTS, UNCERTAIN BOUNDARIES Human ri

These contrasting positions embody the international dialogue regarding human rights, at least on the level that gets reported in the mass media. The essays in Human Rights: Concepts, Contests, Contingencies, edited by Austin Sarat and Thomas R. Kearns (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), all seek in various ways to go beyond this simple (and simplistic) dichotomy to address the more complex realities of what we mean in speaking of human rights, and what role the human-rights discourse plays in international affairs and in the evolution of law.

Whatever else can be said of human rights, the subject has become increasingly prominent in international affairs. Human-rights organizations figure prominently among the NGOs (non-governmental organizations) that have gained a sort of amicus curiae standing in the United Nations. The case for decolonization was posed largely in terms of human rights; if some Asian political leaders have criticized human rights standards as Eurocentric, none would accept that (say) the West had a right to express its distinctive cultural fo

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onceptions of what is right and just? Alongside this basic problem is another, the question of choice. The law (at least liberal law) deals with choice; we do not sanction actions whose consequences could not have been reasonably foreseen. Pigs are no longer convicted and hanged, as being incapable of making bad choices as well as any others. Bhabha's essay (by far the densest and most abstract in the book) deals primarily with this question of choice. He suggests for example (citing Doriane Coleman) that the "cultural defense" argument implicitly denies the defendant the ability to choose whether or not to adhere to those parts of a culture that violate the criminal law (p. 47). In fact, in a cosmopolitan and multicultural society we live in a sort of soup -- amniotic, in Bhabha's expression -- in which there are no either/ors, no clear boundaries of culture. In this culture, everyone has "the freedom to choose a cultural affiliation, the right to be free to constitute or preserve a culture, or indeed to oppose it by exercising the moral 'right to exit'" (p. 48). Choice itself exists in a fluid of time, and by its existence implies the possibility of making a different choice at some other time. The role of immigrant,
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Approximate Word count = 1990
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)