Effectiveness and Legitimacy of International Human Rights Instruments

Excerpt

The recent pushback against global governance institutions is on the rise. The election of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States has raised suspicion on the benefits of global governance institutions and international cooperation. Meanwhile, the UK referendum on June 2016 generated Brexit, or the scheduled withdrawal of the UK from the European Union — an outcome that further casted doubts on the wisdom behind partially ceding a state’s sovereignty to a supranational organization. Remarkably, the emergence of far-right politicians mobilized discourses that seek to reclaim supposedly unconditional state sovereignty from international institutions, including instruments of public international law pertaining to human rights. Authoritarian and far-right politicians in a wide range of geographical territories — such as Modi in India, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Erdogan in Turkey, among many others — champion a politics of discrimination and exclusion, while disregarding systems of accountability that keep their power in check. For example, Filipino President Rodrigo Duterte has regularly criticized international opposition against his bloody ‘war on drugs’. Duterte’s dismissive attitude towards international human rights norms and standards eventually led to the withdrawal of the Philippines’ membership from the Rome Statute, which forms the legal basis for the establishment of the International Criminal Court. In countries such as Yemen, Venezuela, Syria, and South Sudan, mass atrocities have emerged while many rich and supposedly established democracies in the global North have been remarkably less committed in promoting human rights abroad. …