She is not arguing to make forward-looking responsibilities legally binding. Although necessary, backward-looking responsibilities “cannot address many of the complex, decentralized issues that characterize human rights today,” she contends.įor Sikkink, forward-looking responsibility is ethical and political, not legal. Sikkink seeks to supplement rather than supplant the liability model, describing it as appropriate in some contexts but not others. It stands in contrast to backward-looking responsibilities, which are based on a “liability model” that asks who is responsible for a violation of human rights and how that person or institution can be held accountable-or responsible. Moreover, Sikkink is concerned with what she terms “forward-looking” rather than “backward-looking” responsibilities.įorward-looking responsibility turns largely on the development of norms, the voluntary acceptance of mutual responsibilities about appropriate behavior. Although “duties,” “obligations,” and “responsibilities” are nearly functional equivalents, “responsibilities” is Sikkink’s preferred term.
In her most recent work, The Hidden Face of Rights: Toward a Politics of Responsibilities, portions of which were originally delivered as lectures at Yale University’s Program in Ethics, Politics and Economics, Sikkink argues that we need to increase our focus on the duties, obligations, and responsibilities undergirding human rights. Now, Sikkink asks us to look at human rights, and especially how we can best implement those rights, through a different lens. Before Evidence for Hope, she was the author of the highly acclaimed Justice Cascade: How Human Rights Prosecutions Are Changing World Politics, where she argued forcefully for holding individual state officials, including heads of state, accountable for human rights violations. In that work, Sikkink took on a host of critics of the current state of international human rights law who had challenged both its legitimacy and its effectiveness. Recently, I reviewed her work Evidence for Hope: Making Human Rights Work in the 21 st Century on my personal blog.
THE HIDDEN FACE SERIES
Kathryn Sikkink, Professor at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, is one of the leading academic experts on international human rights law-the body of principles arising out of a series of post-World War II human rights treaties, conventions, and other international instruments. Kathryn Sikkink, The Hidden Face of Rights: Toward a Politics of Responsibilities (Yale University Press, 2020) Share the post "Kathryn Sikkink’s “The Hidden Face of Rights”"
0 kommentar(er)
