Global Institutions and Human Rights: A Critical Essay on Thomas Pogge, and the Attribution of Remedial Responsibility in Cases of Human Rights Violations

Thomas Pogge has famously argued that the present arrangement of international institutions that allows for human rights violations to occur on an ongoing basis is unjust, and further, that powerful states that create and maintain these institutions are responsible for the resulting human rights violations. Pogge concludes that this implication of responsibility creates a moral requirement for powerful nations to take immediate steps to reform the global institutional order in such a way as to minimize the number of foreseeable human rights violations that occur within it. I believe that Pogge is only partly correct in his analysis. In this book, I outline my argument that the global institutional order is not "unjust" as Pogge suggests. However, even if the maintenance of these institutions does not constitute an injustice, I conclude that that there remains an important sense in which powerful states that support the present arrangement of international institutions are responsible for ongoing subsistence rights violations, and thus have a strong moral responsibility to support institutional remedies for systematic human rights violations.

Jordan Shaw-Young is a graduate of Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada with an M.A. specializing in Political Theory. Jordan also holds a B.A. from the University of Toronto specializing in Philosophy.