Dustin N. Sharp: Re-Appraising The Significance of Third-Generation' Rights in A Globalized World
Dustin N. Sharp: Re-Appraising The Significance of Third-Generation' Rights in A Globalized World
Dustin N. Sharp: Re-Appraising The Significance of Third-Generation' Rights in A Globalized World
Dustin N. Sharp*
Writing in 1990, Louis Henkin triumphantly proclaimed human rights to be ‘the idea of
our time.’1 If such optimism was warranted twenty-five years ago, buoyed as it may have
been by a sense of the ‘end of history,’2 the continued relevance of that idea in an era
where globalization has radically altered the landscape in which it was created warrants
careful reflection.3 Not only have rights not always received the ‘universal acceptance’
that Henkin optimistically sounded,4 but the gap between the human rights regime and
some of the most pressing humanitarian issues of the twenty-first century appears to be
growing. Problems of radical poverty and inequality, economic violence5 and global
warming and ecological collapse often seem to elude protections of the dominant, liberal-
legalist human rights regime. At the same time, with a dramatic increase in the number
and power of transnational corporations, together with the influence wielded by
international organizations such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and
the World Trade Organization (WTO), power in a globalized world has become less
state-centric, less democratic and more diffuse. In many instances, this has served to
reduce the policy autonomy of governments, particularly in the Global South, to address
problems such as poverty.
*
Assistant Professor, Joan B. Kroc School of Peace Studies, University of San Diego,
USA. Email: dsharp@sandiego.edu
1
Louis Henkin, The Age of Rights (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), p. ix.
2
See generally Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York:
Avon Books, 1992).
3
See Tony Evans, ‘Universal Human Rights in the Global Political Economy’, in Human
Rights; The Hard Questions, Cindy Holder & David Reidy (eds.) (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 179.
4
Henkin, The Age of Rights, p. ix.
5
As used here, the term ‘economic violence’ clearly echoes Galtung’s notion of
‘structural violence,’ but with at least one very important distinction. Galtung conceived
of structural violence as being essentially impersonal, indirect, and unintentional as
compared with literal physical violence. See, Johan Galtung, ‘Violence, Peace, and Peace
Research’, Peace Research 6(3) (1969), 167-191. In contrast, economic violence—
ranging from corruption and plunder of natural resources to the lopsided trade rules that
underpin the international economic order and structural adjustment programs imposed
the International Financial Institutions—cannot be characterized in the same way, and is
in some ways more akin to direct physical violence than true structural violence.
For the most part, these changing dynamics have not been met with a
corresponding evolution in global normative and institutional accountability mechanisms.
We then end up with a global governance not entirely without governments, but without
the requisite checks and balances required to serve as a ‘gentle civilizer of
globalization.’6 With these challenges in mind, even if one does not believe, as has been
suggested, that Henkin’s ‘Age of Rights’ is entering into its twilight or ‘endtimes,’7 it is
nevertheless incumbent upon each generation to re-appraise the relevance of the human
rights regime to the thorny social justice issues of its own time, and to adapt things where
they are found wanting.
One of the problems with Henkin’s vision of human rights is that it appears to
assume a rather one-directional narrative of progress. Seen through these optics, rights
are a means by which the downtrodden use the power of law to curtail the various
pathologies of state power, re-negotiating the social contract to allow for ‘better
standards of life in larger freedom.’8 While the promise of human rights to tame power is
certainly an important part of the story, overlooked in this conception is the extent to
which human rights law is and always has been a terrain for moral, legal, political and
ideological struggle, representing both the ‘power of law’ as well as the ‘law of power.’9
Thus, if the law, including human rights law, may at times operate as a check on abuses
of power, it may also serve to legitimize the violence of the state—allowing, for example,
certain forms of state sanctioned killing and not others, certain forms of discrimination
and not others, etc.10 By focusing primarily on physical violence meted out by the state,
human rights law may also render largely invisible and legitimize other forms of violence,
including economic and structural violence, not easily captured within the four corners of
its legal cosmovision. Therefore, if human rights law is occasionally subversive, it is also
the product of dominant power relations. When the line between the law’s redemptive
power and its service to power becomes too thin, the perceived legitimacy of the human
rights regime and its ability to constrain power grows dimmer.11
6 See Marttii Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations; The Rise and Fall of
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Unlike real generations, generations of rights do not of course replace each other.
Moreover, to the extent they are associated with the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights (UDHR) or the subsequent Covenants, so-called first and second generations are
actually contemporaneous. There is also the problem of a potential hierarchy implied by
the first, second and third-generation terminology. On the other hand, abandoning the
term ‘third-generation’ entirely begs the question of suitable alternatives. While some
may prefer “solidarity rights,” one could object to this alternative on the grounds that all
generations of rights can be said to require a certain amount of solidarity for their
realization, not just the third generation. Thus, for example, the right to self-
determination, which can be seen as a collective, group or solidary right akin to other
third-generation rights, is actually set forth in both the ICCPR and ICESCR.
Yet if differences between the various generations are not as crisp as suggested by
Vasak’s typology, third-generation rights can nevertheless lay some claim to
distinctiveness in terms of their historical genesis and conceptualization. In addition, if
the hierarchy suggested by the generational terminology rubs partisans of second and
third-generation rights the wrong way, it may said to accurately reflect to comparative
marginalization of those rights in mainstream discourse and practice. In this light, one
might argue for retention of the “third-generation” label as a form of subversive
appropriation, akin to legal scholars from the Global South who have mobilized under
the banner of TWAIL (‘Third-World Approaches to International Law’).20 For these
reasons, and for want of suitable alternatives, the generational terminology is retained in
this chapter.
20
See Makau Mutua and Antony Anghie, ‘What is TWAIL?’, Proceedings of the Annual
Meeting (American Society of International Law) 94 (2000), 31-40.
21
See generally, Philip Alston, ‘Conjuring up New Rights: A Proposal for Quality
Control’, The American Journal of International Law 78(3) (1984). 607-621.
22
See Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2010), p. 3.
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surrounding the global trading order, loan conditionalities and debt relief suggest all too
well. In short, this is not the world that early proponents of the NIEO and the R2D were
looking for.
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Crosscutting Issues and Controversies with the R2D and the R2E
Human rights are part of a dynamic and adaptable tradition, and the existing treaties
express less monolithic coherence than a pluralistic and heterogeneous blend of values,
ideas and philosophies. It is perhaps then unsurprising that architects of the modern
international human rights system, including Eleanor Roosevelt, foresaw the inevitability
and importance of demands for new rights.38 Yet almost across the board, third-
generation rights have succeeded in generating more controversy and contentiousness
than consensus, and the R2D and the R2E are no exceptions.
34
Rio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, Outcome of the
Conference, The Future We Want, New York, 27 July 2012, GA Res. 66/288 (Annex),
UN Doc. A/RES/66/288, para. 39.
35
Dinah Shelton, ‘Environmental Rights’, 198-213.
36
See, e.g., Melissa Fung, ‘The Right to a Healthy Environment: Core Obligations Under
the International Covenant of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights’, Willamette Journal
of International Dispute Resolution 14 (2006), 97-131; Sumudu Atapattu, ‘The Right to a
Healthy Life or the Right to Die Polluted?: The Emergence of a Human Right to a
Healthy Environment Under International Law’, Tulane Environmental Law Journal 16
(2002-2003), 98-102.
37
Dinah Shelton, ‘Environmental Rights’, 236.
38
M. Glen Johnson, ‘The Contributions of Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt to the
Development of International Protection for Human Rights’, Human Rights Quarterly 9
(1987), 36.
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At one level, this is hardly surprising. Every generation of rights has produced
controversy, including the very civil and political rights that Jeremy Bentham famously
described as ‘nonsense upon stilts.’ Also unsurprising, much of the historic opposition in
each era has often come from the dominant power interests of the day. Examples of this
can be seen in the fierce debates surrounding the right to self-determination in the 1950s
and 1960s, which many western lawyers saw as incoherent and non-justiciable, and the
opposition of conservative and neoliberal political interests in the United States to the
concept of economic and social rights.
However, if human rights are not static, and if trying to create new rights should
not be viewed as akin to rewriting the Bible or Koran,39 one must also surely
acknowledge, as the critics of third-generation rights are wont to do, that not everything
good or desirable is a right.40 The proliferation of rights claiming and framing in the
1980s and 1990s caused some to wonder whether rights talk had not become the
‘hegemonic discourse of emancipation,’ with too many activists trying to fit round pegs
better suited for the political and economic marketplace into the square holes of human
rights.41 One might look to the example of the World Tourism Organization’s proposal
for an internationally recognized ‘right to tourism’ as a particularly silly example of this
phenomenon.42 However, while proposals for new rights undoubtedly need some ‘quality
control,’43 the R2D and the R2E can hardly be said to fall into the frivolous category.
Indeed, given the suffering inflicted by radical poverty, inequality and environmental
devastation, it would not be going too far to say that we are dealing with true survival
rights that likely would have long been understood as preemptory norms of international
law were the guardians at the international legal temple forced to walk a mile of the shoes
of those deprived of them.
Nevertheless, even if the gravity of the underlying threats to human security is
recognized, one must confront charges that have dogged the R2D and the R2E that they
are hopelessly vague, non-justiciable, and unenforceable.44 As regards charges of
vagueness, even its staunchest partisans would be hard pressed to argue that the
Declaration on the Right to Development is characterized by an exuberance of legal
precision. Like so many documents produced by the United Nations, it is the result of
compromise and legal sausage making, and in some ways merely encodes rather than
reconciles the heterogeneous and contradictory impulses and political goals of its drafters.
Yet if mere vagueness were the test of whether a right ought to be considered a ‘real
39
Alston, ‘Conjuring up New Rights’, 609.
40
Donnelly, ‘In Search of the Unicorn’, 483.
41
See David Kennedy, ‘The International Human Rights Movement: Part of the
Problem?’, Harvard Human Rights Journal 15 (2002), 108-109.
42
Philip Alston, ‘Peace as a Human Right’, Security Dialogue 11 (1980), 322.
43
See generally, Philip Alston, ‘Conjuring up New Rights’.
44
See, ‘In Search of the Unicorn’, 483.
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right,’ then one is forced to acknowledge that many recognized rights whose status as lex
lata is beyond dispute—ranging from the right to be free from cruel, inhuman and
degrading treatment, to the right to education, to the right to self-determination outside of
the colonial context—appear almost hopelessly vague based on the text, and often also in
practice. And indeed, the same is true for the national constitution of the United States,
where phrases like ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ and ‘unreasonable searches and
seizures’ are still being worked out well over 200 years after the rights in question were
first articulated.
Many such ‘vague’ rights might well have been regarded as ‘non-justiciable’ if
we had not given judiciaries the chance to work though their meaning and applicability in
the context of actual concrete cases and controversies. Where such rare opportunities
have been presented in the case of third-generation rights, such as the SERAC case where
the African Commission on Human and People’s Rights found that Nigeria had violated
the right to a healthy environment under Article 24 of the African Charter, or the
Endorois case where the same Commission found that the government of Kenya had
violated the right to development under Article 22 of the African Charter, judiciaries have
risen to the task.45 One can also look to claims of non-justiciability surrounding economic
and social rights that have been steadily undermined by the work of the Constitutional
Court of South Africa as well as many others.46 Thus, one might say that claims of ‘non-
justiciability’ are in many instances more of a political and ideological construct and
argument than an objective fact.47
If we confront the question of the ‘non-enforceability’ of the R2D and the R2E,
there too one must acknowledge that this is a defect of almost all international human
rights law, which lacks a centralized judiciary and executive body. And as Lauterpacht
observed long ago, ‘the existence of a right and the power to assert it by judicial process
are not identical.’48 Otherwise, governments could always argue that unenforceability
undercuts the existence of a right by simply denying formal means of enforcement,
thereby conjuring away the basis for claims to the existence of the right itself. Thus, as
Jeanne Woods has noted, one should be wary of legal dichotomies such as legal/moral,
justiciable/non-justiciable, and enforceable/non-enforceable as they often operate to mask
prevailing power relations, pushing some issues of concern into the legal foreground, and
45
Decision Regarding Communication 155/96 (Social and Economic Rights Action
Center/Center for Economic and Social Rights v. Nigeria), Case No.
ACHPR/COMM/A044/1, 27 May 2002; Decision Regarding Communication 276/03
(Centre for Minority Rights Development (Kenya) and Minority Rights Group
International (on behalf of Endorois Welfare Council)/Kenya), 25 November 2009.
46
See generally Malcolm Langford (ed.), Social Rights Jurisprudence: Emerging Trends
in International and Comparative Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
47
Woods, ‘Theorizing Peace’, 198.
48
H.P. Lauterpacht, ‘The Subjects of the Law of Nations’, L.Q.R. 63 (1947), 455.
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others into the background, while asking us to imagine that such distinctions are naturally
occurring.49
To be clear, if rights are to be more than paper promises, concerns about
vagueness, justiciability are enforceability are hardly irrelevant. But in the case of the
R2D, for example, the underlying problem appears to be less that it cannot be concretized
or is not susceptible to judicial determination than the fact that the ‘international
community’ simply does not agree on the content of the right that is to be enforced. In
other words, debates about vagueness, justiciability and enforceability are often debates
about substantive content and consensus in drag. As Bonny Ibhawoh has pointed out,
many leaders in the global South have sought to use the R2D as both a sword and a shield,
claiming a collective right to challenge a hegemonic international economic system
controlled by the Global North, while asserting national sovereignty to maintain the
status quo at home,50 including by denying other human rights in the name of
development.51 Yet for many in the Global North, the R2D is understood to require
change in national-level governance in the South, including various ‘good governance’
and economic liberalization reforms, even as suggestions that changes in the international
order might also be required are steadily resisted. Thus, in many ways the impasse in the
debate surrounding the R2D has served to insulate and legitimize status quo power in
both North and South.52
The problem, of course, is that change in both domestic and international orders is
required if the R2D is to be realized, and finger pointing in both North and South can
hardly move the needle forward. The Declaration on the Right to Development clearly
contemplates that the right has both collective and individual dimensions, with positive
and negative obligations for a range of actors at the micro, meso and macro levels. Thus,
lost in both interpretations is a more balanced, yet also radical and counter-hegemonic
view that would see in the R2D both a means of challenging international barriers to
development—rigged trade rules, neoliberal economic orthodoxy and many others—and
the right of individuals to demand things from multiple levels of governance—
participation, transparency, lack of corruption, equitable access to the fruits of
development, and so forth.53 As will be discussed in the following section, the
implications of a broader view of rights bearers and duty holders are revolutionary from
the standpoint of mainstream human rights thinking and practice, yet vital not only to the
goals inherent in the R2D, but to the future of human rights in a globalized world as well.
49
Woods, ‘Theorizing Peace’, 181.
50
Ibhawoh, ‘The Right to Development’, 78.
51
Anne Orford, ‘Globalization and the Right to Development’, in People’s Rights, Philip
Alston (ed.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 133.
52
Ibhawoh, ‘The Right to Development,’ 79.
53
See Balakrishnan Rajagopal, ‘Right to Development and Global Governance: Old and
New Challenges Twenty-Five Years On’, Human Rights Quarterly 35 (2013), 899-900.
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It has now been almost thirty years since the Declaration on the Right to Development
was adopted and sadly, the R2E does not even yet have a declaration of its own to debate.
Yet while the legal and political stalemate over the status of these rights has persisted, the
pace of globalization has accelerated, generating both winners and losers to be sure, but
also altering the frameworks and power structures under which the human rights regime
initially evolved. In this section, I set forth my argument that renewed engagement with
third-generation rights, including the R2D and the R2E, is critical to the future of human
rights because: (1) they can help to address grave threats to human security in the
changing landscape of the twenty-first century; (2) they challenge traditional conceptual
boundaries of human rights law that may help push the field forward in ways better
adapted to a globalized world; and (3) forging greater consensus around the meaning and
significance of third-generation rights would help further a sense of human rights as a
shared global project.
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forty years;57 and the parade of horribles seemingly goes on and on. It goes without
saying that environmental collapse would have (and in fact is having) catastrophic effects
on human beings—particularly the most poor and vulnerable, undermining all of the
rights to which they are entitled under international law. If we take the infamous example
of oil extraction in Ogoniland in Nigeria, we see that that the environment itself can
become so degraded as to threaten enjoyment of rights to life and health; aggressive,
profit-driven development at any cost can cause environmental problems; and all of this
creates a political powder keg in which civil and political rights abuses are likely to be
rampant. Thus, all generations of rights exist in a tight nexus, can rightly be seen as
indivisible and must be pursued in harmony with each other.
Even with this, one could still argue, as many have, that third-generation rights
like the R2D are essentially synthetic rights that simply compile existing first and second-
generation commitments. Under this view, third-generation rights have little new to offer
when it comes to facing the challenges of twenty-first century globalization since the
undying harms are sufficiently captured by earlier generations of rights. While a fuller
response to this argument is provided in the following section, as an initial response, one
should note that the re-framing offered by newly articulated rights is important. Just as
the Pope’s 2015 encyclical helped some constituencies to understand climate change as
not just a scientific or political but a moral and spiritual question,58 the R2D and the R2E
help to situate the broad issue of human rights in context of poverty and planetary
survival, and simultaneously help to frame those issues as questions of justice rather than
charity or open-ended policy.
The re-framing that comes with understanding questions of development and the
environment as human rights issues might thus underscore the imperative of actually
doing something about them. Rights framing also helps to provide important directive
principles to policy by emphasizing that when it comes to pursuing solutions to
environmental problems, for example, there are limits to the economic cost-benefit trade-
off analysis that may have helped to create part of the problem the first place.59 It is
intriguing to imagine, for example, what a future round of climate change talks might
look like if the bargaining took place in the shadow of an internationally recognized
human right to a healthy environment. Or what might a future round of WTO trade
negotiations look like if the R2D were accepted by all as a ‘real right,’ requiring that all
international barriers to development be removed? If these seem like idealistic
57
‘The Earth Has Lost Half of Its Wildlife in the Past 40 Years, Says WWF’, The
Guardian, 30 September 2014.
58
Encyclical Letter Laudato Si’ of the Holy Father Francis On Care for Our Common
Home, 24 May 2015.
59
Stephen Gardiner, ‘Human Rights in a Hostile Climate’, in Human Rights; The Hard
Questions, Cindy Holder & David Reidy (eds.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2013), 215.
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propositions, it is useful to recall that all human rights would have seemed equally
utopian as early as 70 years ago.
Finally, one should note that historically, giving meaningful content to rights has
depended more on the work of activists and their networks than government officials.
More explicitly articulated rights can be tremendously empowering to those suffering
deprivations, or advocating in these domains. Campaigners attempting to block action
based on violations of a freestanding R2E, for example, may be in a stronger position
than those today who are limited to trying to shoehorn environmental protections into
existing rights to life and privacy.
60
Rajagopal, ‘Right to Development and Global Governance’, 895.
61
Ibhawoh, ‘The Right to Development’, 100.
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non-state actors that impact their ability to effectively enjoy such rights. In renewing this
discussion, third-generation rights might serve as the crucible in which the dilemmas and
limitations of human rights in a globalized world might be reconciled, or at least
confronted more seriously.
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conceptions might, over time, help reconcile mainstream human rights with non-western
legal traditions because many of them contain a robust jurisprudence of rights and duties
unconstrained by the narrow western model.70 In this way, third-generation rights might
come to evoke notions of human rights as ‘hybridity,’71 and open the door to developing
a more heterogeneous, mosaic and cosmopolitan theory and praxis of human rights.
In the long run, a greater sense of shared authorship of the human rights corpus
has serious implications for human rights compliance across all generations of rights. As
Abdullahi An-Na’im has noted, ‘so long as there is a perception of exclusive western
authorship of the concept of human rights and its normative implications,’ the human
rights movement will not be effective.72 Similarly, if the human rights regime is not seen
as being relevant to the threats arising in a globalized world or otherwise less than fully
preoccupied with the concerns facing all of humanity, how should it be expected to
generate adequate ‘compliance pull’ and help create enthusiastic global ‘compliance
constituencies’? In this sense, re-appraising the significance of third-generation rights is
fundamentally about strengthening the legitimacy of the human rights regime as a global
project.
Many human rights lawyers appear to be stuck in a top-down, rights-as-law,
enforcement mind-set. From this perspective, the question of compliance becomes one of
strengthening formal human rights institutions and enforcement machinery with the aim
of endowing them with some teeth. While these are indeed important questions for the
future of human rights, we also have to think about how to create a sense of global
ownership and trans-civilizational legitimacy that may eventually lead to greater norm
internalization.73 As Jeanne Woods notes, maybe we should think less about enforcement
in a narrow legal sense, and more about holistic operationalization of human rights.74
While third-generation rights are no guarantee that any of this—whether enforcement or
70
See generally, Jason Morgan-Foster, ‘Third Generation Rights: What Islamic Law Can
Teach the International Human Rights Movement’, Yale Human Rights and Development
Journal 8(1) (2005), 67-116.
71
See generally, Rosa Freedman, ‘“Third Generation” Rights: Is There Room for Hybrid
Constructs within International Human Rights Law?’, Cambridge Journal of
International and Comparative Law 2(4) (2013), 935-959.
72
Abdullahi An-Na’im, ‘Human Rights and the Challenge of Relevance: The Case of
Collective Rights’, in The Role of the Nation-State in the 21st Century: Human Rights,
International Organizations, and Foreign Policy, Monique Castermans-Holleman et al
(eds.) (Leiden: Brill-Nijhoff, 1998), p. 7.
73
For a brief overview of the theory of transnational legal process and norm
internalization, see generally Harold Koh, ‘Transnational Legal Process After September
11th’, Berkeley Journal of International Law 22 (2003-2004), 337-354.
74
Woods, ‘Theorizing Peace’, 230.
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Greater engagement with third-generation rights, including the R2D and the R2E is
hardly a panacea, and can be expected to generate, at least in the short term, further
conflict and hard questions. As is painfully clear, adoption of the Declaration on the
Right to Development did not indicate that consensus was achieved as to the meaning and
scope of the right, myriad subsequent re-affirmations of the Declaration notwithstanding.
At the same time, progress on R2D cannot be made unless the right is acceptable in North
and South, or at least until a greater degree of consensus is achieved.75
This will be no easy task. Third-generation rights are informed by but also
challenge dominant ideologies. They have been used by those in power, North and South,
to preserve the status quo, and all governments might consider that they have something
to lose from more progressive interpretations of the R2D. Thus, greater engagement with
and even acceptance of third-generation rights will not change the fact that they have
been and will continue to be a terrain for moral, legal, political and ideological
contestation. If the power struggle starts with whether the right ‘exists,’ it then continues
into skirmishes over interpretation and whether such a right should be ensconced in ‘hard
law’ form.
Rights can be framed narrowly or broadly, and the law’s redemptive power and its
service to power play out in complex ways in and through them. For example, the
international community might forge consensus on the existence on the R2E, but in ways
that are so anthropocentric as to only capture the proverbial tip of the (melting) iceberg of
environmental harm. The Global North might come to accept the R2D in more genuine
fashion, but in ways that reduce it to a narrow individual entitlement more in keeping
with other human rights.76 While such an interpretation might be useful for advocates
fighting local development policies or corrupt practices that inhibit development, it might
nevertheless fail to capture the broader collective and trans-boundary harms. One should
not therefore assume that the R2D and R2E will necessarily be synonymous with
‘economic justice’ and ‘environmental justice.’ Even if greater consensus is forged, it
will always be important to ask ‘whose development’ and ‘whose environment’ is really
being protected by the rights in question.
Yet another reason for more sustained engagement with third-generation rights is
that in forging greater consensus as to their content and scope, such rights need to be
75
Atapattu, ‘The Right to a Healthy Life’, 122.
76
Philip Alston, ‘“Peoples” Rights: Their Rise and Fall’, in People’s Rights, Philip
Alston (ed.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2001), p. 292.
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considered in interaction with one another. This is particularly true of the R2D and the
R2E. As Balakrishnan Rajagopal has pointed out, to the extent that the R2D is conflated
with ceaseless accumulation, consumption and growth, it is quite simply unsustainable,
and would certainly appear to be in tension with the R2E.77 Thus, it is clear that the R2D
as articulated almost thirty years ago needs to be ‘rethought without being abandoned.’78
Some have pointed to the concept of ‘sustainable development’ as a way to bridge
tensions between the R2E and the R2D,79 yet it should also be said that more equitable
sharing of the environmental burdens of development, especially as regards climate
change, cannot be overlooked.80 Of course, conflict and balance between rights is
certainly nothing new. If ‘characterizing something as a human right elevates it above the
rank and file competing societal goals,’81 courts are nevertheless regularly called upon to
balance things like freedom of expression in view of other human rights commitments.
This is yet then another reason where the evolution of third-generation rights would
benefit from allowing judiciaries to develop a jurisprudence over time.
Conclusion
Even if its precise meaning proves confounding today, the right to self-determination was
one of the great organizing principles of the post-WWII decolonization process.82 It is
intriguing to imagine a century in which third-generation rights—including the R2D, the
R2E and, though it has not been discussed in this chapter for reasons of space, the right to
peace—operated as similar directive principles for national an international policy. Yet it
is hard to imagine them doing so if they are not firmly recognized as rights, even if such
recognition is hardly a sufficient condition for their fruition.
The need to check pathologies of power in the twenty-first century includes
torture and many classic human rights violations, as mass killings and the resurgence of
muscular authoritarianism make all too clear, yet must also be seen to include things like
pollution, climate change and an international trade and financial system that seems
systemically biased against the most poor and vulnerable. These are true forms of
77
Rajagopal, ‘Right to Development and Global Governance’, 908.
78
Ibid at 894.
79
Atapattu, ‘The Right to a Healthy Life’, 125.
80
United Nations Human Rights Council, Working Group on the Right to Development,
‘Report of the High-level Task Force on the Implementation of the Right to Development
on its Sixth Session,’ A/HRC/15/WG.2/TF/2/Add.2, 2 March 2010, p. 9.
81
Philip Alston, ‘Making Space for New Human Rights: The Case for the Right to
Development’, Human Rights Yearbook 1(1988), 4.
82
Roland Rich, ‘Solidarity Rights Give Way to Solidifying Rights’, Dialogue 21(3)
(2002), 28.
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DRAFT – NOT FOR CITATION WITOUT PERMISSION
violence legitimated by states, international organizations and the regulatory regimes that
they create and (selectively) enforce, not volcanoes, earthquakes or other forces of nature
beyond our control.83
In thinking about these challenges and the world that globalization is bringing into
existence, human rights advocates need to ask themselves whether the existing body and
theology of human rights is really up to the task of protecting human dignity and security,
of promoting true social justice in the twenty-first century. It may well be that
globalization cannot be ‘tamed’ by a paradigm that fails to capture and contest the deeper,
collective, economic and structural biases at play.84 Human rights were once seen as
subversive, a challenge to the dominant order of the day. Yet if rights are now both more
mainstream while remaining impotent, it must be asked whether they are not, in a sense,
constitutive of the dominant order.85 Any normative regime that helps to legitimize or
render invisible the violence inherent in such an order might well be considered ‘part of
the problem.’86 Now more than ever we need to renew and reinvigorate the global project
of human rights, providing activists with the means to challenge exploitation and
inequality in all its evolving forms.87 The time has come to take third-generation rights
seriously.
83
See note X regarding the directness and intentionality undergirding many forms of
economic violence.
84
Rajagopal, ‘Right to Development and Global Governance’, 896.
85
See generally Nicola Perguini and Neve Gordon, The Human Right to Dominate
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
86
See generally, Kennedy, ‘Part of the Problem?’.
87
Anne Orford, ‘Globalization and the Right to Development’, 183.
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