Eric Posner on The Chimera of Human Rights

Over six years ago Eric Posner wrote a piece in The Guardian tilted The Case Against Human Rights. Not many folks come out against the moral bricolage that issues in human rights. Posner grounds his argument in realistic observations:

The truth is that human rights law has failed to accomplish its objectives. There is little evidence that human rights treaties, on the whole, have improved the wellbeing of people. The reason is that human rights were never as universal as people hoped, and the belief that they could be forced upon countries as a matter of international law was shot through with misguided assumptions from the very beginning.

To what "misguided assumptions" does Posner point? He begins with the granddaddy of human rights pronouncements, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. Not only did the Declaration not have the force of law, "the rights were described in vague, aspirational terms, which could be interpreted in multiple ways." I argued in Looking for Bedrock: Accounting for Human Rights in Classical Liberalism, Modern Secularism, and the Christian Religion (here or here), the fissiparous combination of rights as trumps and rights as claims to various goods proved an unstable foundation. Posner agrees:

The central problem with human rights law is that it is hopelessly ambiguous. The ambiguity, which allows governments to rationalise almost anything they do, is not a result of sloppy draftsmanship but of the deliberate choice to overload the treaties with hundreds of poorly defined obligations. In most countries people formally have as many as 400 international human rights – rights to work and leisure, to freedom of expression and religious worship, to nondiscrimination, to privacy, to pretty much anything you might think is worth protecting. The sheer quantity and variety of rights, which protect virtually all human interests, can provide no guidance to governments. Given that all governments have limited budgets, protecting one human right might prevent a government from protecting another.

Posner has many more insightful comments on the problem that a regime of unclear and unenforceable human rights has created. And he also has a thoughtful conclusion:

With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that the human rights treaties were not so much an act of idealism as an act of hubris, with more than a passing resemblance to the civilising efforts undertaken by western governments and missionary groups in the 19th century, which did little good for native populations while entangling European powers in the affairs of countries they did not understand. A humbler approach is long overdue.

It is regrettable that in the nearly seven years that have elapsed since Posner wrote, little has been learned. The notion of human rights remains captive in service to political and activist agendas with far less effect on the ground where they are needed most.