Unpacking the Relationship Between Sovereignty, Democracy, and Human Rights

Excerpt

Jamie Mayerfeld’s The Promise of Human Rights is a timely corrective to persistent misconceptions about international human rights law’s relationship to United States sovereignty and democracy. At a moment when “American Exceptionalism” has re-emerged, in a new and crasser form, as a normative challenge to compliance with international legal constraints, Mayerfeld reminds us of American democracy’s roots in a Madisonian tradition that emphasizes the complex challenges of self-government and the need for checks on the concentration of power. Mayerfeld correctly notes that national sovereignty, far from precluding international legal obligations, is precisely what is exercised in the undertaking of such obligations (Mayerfeld 2016, p. 219), and that the George W. Bush Administration’s evasion of international standards in its prosecution of the Global War on Terrorism – most blatantly, in regard to detainee treatment – represented a betrayal rather an affirmation of foundational American political principles. In addition to fulfilling this essential debunking function, Mayerfeld’s book masterfully exposes the ways in which U.S. resistance to international law – reflected not only in the idiosyncratic (and patently disingenuous) assertions of the Office of Legal Counsel’s “torture memos,” but also in the prevalent U.S. doctrines governing the interface between the international and domestic legal orders – facilitated the resort to violations of standards that Americans have consistently espoused (even if not so consistently observed). …