The Limits of Human Rights

The continuous expansion of human rights can often appear to be both positive and limitless. The limitation of classical State sovereignty, the transformation of the fundamental idea of State will, the emergence of an international community, the carrying out of humanitarian interventions, the idea of a 'responsibility to protect', the concepts of peremptory norms and obligations erga omnes, and a renewed concern for the unity of the international legal order would all not have the same prominent place in legal discussion if not for the centrality of human rights to the international order.

Yet the ubiquitous presence of human right has provoked critical voices. Concerns are uttered about the role of 'droits-de-l'hommistes' and humanitarians, the continued presence of a 'civilizing mission', and the assumption of the 'trans-civilizational' universality of human rights. Fassbender and Traisbach assemble a team of experts to examine the issue from multiple disciplinary perspectives, and to analyse the limits of our current discourse of human rights. Declaring that the validity of a human right should not be taken as self-evident but instead should be contested, defended, and reformulated, this volume disputes the notion that the internationalisation of human rights proves that the world is moving from bilateralism to community interests, stating that contentious processes of supervision, evaluation, and substitution are far more common than genuine cooperation.

Bardo Fassbender, Professor of Public International Law, European Law, and Public Law, University of St Gallen,Knut Traisbach, ^, Associate Professor of International Law (Adjunct), University of Barcelona

Bardo Fassbender is Professor of International Law at the Bundeswehr University in Munich. He studied at the University of Bonn and holds an LL.M from Yale Law School and a Doctor iuris from the Humboldt University in Berlin. Before joining the Bundeswehr University, he taught in Berlin, St Gallen, and Munich (Ludwig Maximilians University). His principal fields of research are international law, United Nations law, German constitutional law, comparative constitutional law and theory, and the history of international and constitutional law. Among his many publications are the books UN Security Council and the Right of Veto: A Constitutional Perspective (The Hague/London/Boston, 1998), Der offene Bundesstaat: Studien zur auswartigen Gewalt und zur Volkerrechtssubjektivitat bundesstaatlicher Teilstaaten in Europa (Tubingen, 2007), and The United Nations Charter as the Constitution of the International Community (Leiden/Boston, 2009).

Knut Traisbach is Associate Professor of International Law (Adjunct) at the University of Barcelona and tutor for three international postgraduate programmes in International Affairs and Diplomacy organized by UNITAR and UOC. He also teaches human rights at ESADE Law School in Barcelona. He holds degrees from Humboldt University Berlin, the European University Institute and was a visiting researcher at Yale Law School. He has held positions as lecturer, programme director, researcher and course convenor in the areas of international law, human rights and international relations at various higher education and research institutions in Berlin, Florence, Venice and Barcelona. His main research interests include meaningful interdisciplinary and critical approaches to international law, human rights and international relations theory.