Human Rights GapFill

Human rights are a key area of institutional global governance. Human rights are intended to apply  generallynationallycontinent-wideuniversally to everyone, and a number of institutions are responsible for protecting and upholding such standards around the world. The 1948  Human Rights ActUN CharterInternational Bill of Human RightsDeclaration of Human Rights is regarded as a key development in the establishment of universal rights which paved the way to their protection under  tribunalsselective interventionisminternational lawinternational treaties. Since then,  tribunalsinternational lawinternational treatiesinstitutional bias have been proposed and ratified in order to further the legal basis for the protection of universal human rights. However, in practice, this status remains controversial and difficult to enforce for several reasons.

One reason is that the enforcement of universal human rights often tends to conflict with the principle of state sovereignty. This has become an increasing problem in recent years due to the method through which such rights have been increasingly enforced. The practice of  selective interventionisminstitutional biastribunalshumanitarian intervention - intervening militarily in a country's affairs in order to prevent human rights abuses - became commonplace in the 1990s after the end of the Cold War. This international practice is most notably represented through the doctrine of Responsibility to Protect, passed by the United Nations General Assembly in 2005, which states that intervention can be justified prior to human rights abuses taking place in order to prevent such abuses. This doctrine is controversial as some see it as a pretence for justifying military conflict with ulterior motives. The view that the international community takes an interest in only some countries where human rights abuses may occur, while overlooking other similar cases, is known as  selective interventionismhumanitarian interventioninternational treatiestribunals.

A second reason why universal human rights remain difficult to enforce is a perception that Western countries, primarily those in Europe and North America, have too much control over their definition and enforcement. Arguments to this effect may contend that the idea of universal rights ignores important cultural differences and that in their current form they are based too heavily on Western liberal democratic principles, thus undermining their credibility in parts of the world with different political cultures. A similar argument contends that there is   an institutional biasinternational treatiesselective interventionismtribunals towards the viewpoints of more powerful Western nations in which many international institutions are based and from which such institutions receive much of their funding, staffing and resources. Finally, nation states in Europe and North America are often accused of hypocrisy, demanding a higher standard of governance and rights protections from some nation states with which they have adversarial relations than they expect from their allies or enforce even within their own country, 

Finally, some landmark legal cases have undermined the legitimacy and primacy of international law. On such example is the 2004 case of Sosa v Álvarez-Machain, in which the United States Supreme Court ruled that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights cannot be cited solely as a document which binds the nation state to international law.