Human Rights for the 21st Century: Sovereignty, Civil Society, Culture (Stanford Studies in Human Rights) - Softcover

Stacy, Helen M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804760950 ISBN 13: 9780804760959

Verlag: Stanford University Press, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

A new moral, ethical, and legal framework is needed for international human rights law. Never in human history has there been such an elaborate international system for human rights, yet from massive disasters, such as the Darfur genocide, to everyday tragedies, such as female genital mutilation, human rights abuses continue at an alarming rate. As the world population increases and global trade brings new wealth as well as new problems, international law can and should respond better to those who live in fear of violence, neglect, or harm.

Modern critiques global human rights fall into three categories: sovereignty, culture, and civil society. These are not new problems, but have long been debated as part of the legal philosophical tradition. Taking lessons from tradition and recasting them in contemporary light, Helen Stacy proposes new approaches to fill the gaps in current approaches: relational sovereignty, reciprocal adjudication, and regional human rights. She forcefully argues that law and courts must play a vital role in forging a better human rights vision in the future.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Helen M. Stacy is a Senior Fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University, and a Senior Lecturer at the Stanford Law School.

Helen M. Stacy is a Senior Fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University, and a Senior Lecturer at the Stanford Law School.

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Human Rights for the 21st Century

Sovereignty, Civil Society, CultureBy Helen M. Stacy

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2009 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-6095-9

Contents

Acknowledgments............................................................viiAbbreviations..............................................................ix1 The Human Rights Problem.................................................12 Institutionalizing International Human Rights............................373 Relational Sovereignty and Humanitarian Intervention.....................764 Reciprocal Judging.......................................................1095 Regional Human Rights Courts.............................................1416 Human Rights for the 21st Century........................................170Notes......................................................................183Bibliography...............................................................233Index......................................................................247

Chapter One

The Human Rights Problem

Introduction

When Pakistani politician Benazir Bhutto was killed in a suicide attack on December 27, 2007, she had been seeking a third term as prime minister after eight years in exile. Her election promise was that her Pakistan People's Party would implement the international standards of judicial independence that the president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, was persistently flouting. Even before Bhutto's assassination, public anger against President Musharraf had been running high, fueled by his crackdown on the judiciary after his reelection in October 2007. He had suspended the Constitution and dismissed dissenting members of the Supreme Court, including Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry, just three days before the court was expected to overturn his reelection. The legal profession's indignation with Musharraf 's flagrant violation of the independence of the judiciary erupted time and again into angry demonstrations, and when a second general election was held in February 2008, some six weeks after Bhutto's assassination, Musharraf 's political allies were trounced. Pakistan's new leaders-Bhutto's party and that of another former prime minister, Nawaz Sharif-vowed to restore the independence of the Supreme Court, called for the immediate restoration of the judges, and urged Musharraf to convene Parliament quickly so that the parties could begin the "gigantic task" of restoring the country's much-amended constitution. In the subsequent political turmoil, which included the resignation of President Sharif and the appointment of Asif Ali Zardari, Bhutto's widower, as the new president, the sacked judges were still not restored to their posts.

Pakistan's most serious political crisis since Musharraf had seized power in a coup in 1999 had in fact been brewing for quite a while. In March 2007, in a confrontation between modern Western-derived legal principles of judicial objectivity and unfettered military power, Musharraf had removed Chief Justice Chaudhry from his judicial post over allegations of misconduct. Yet instead of meekly resigning, the flamboyant judge had embarked on a nationwide campaign, traveling from city to city accompanied by a large and noisy group of thousands of supporters, including many black-suited lawyers, all shouting in unison for human rights and judicial independence. They claimed that the chief justice's sacking was motivated by Musharraf's wish to avoid legal scrutiny of his bid for a new presidential term. The independent-minded chief justice had also been raising awkward questions about "disappearances"-Pakistanis who were presumed to have been detained indefinitely by the intelligence service without access to either their families or lawyers.

There was violence: video footage showed round after round of gas shells being lobbed at the Supreme Court's white faade while lawyers scurry to avoid harm. At yet another demonstration government forces opened fire and killed more than forty people. A senior Supreme Court official who refused to bring evidence against the chief justice was shot dead at his home. Then, when Bhutto arrived in Pakistan in October 2007, her triumphant return was overshadowed by nearly two hundred deaths caused by a suicide bomber as her cavalcade traveled through the streets of Karachi. Bhutto was unharmed in this first round of deadly violence, only to die herself two months later.

A key plank in Bhutto's reelection campaign had been hard-hitting criticism of Musharraf's treatment of judges. Yet despite Musharraf's iron military rule over Pakistan, the Supreme Court had allowed Chief Justice Chaudhry to represent himself in his dismissal proceedings before the court in 2007. Shockingly for Musharraf, the Supreme Court reinstated Chadhury and he was given a platform to speak out about human rights: "If there is one lesson we could draw from our past history of sixty years, it is to adhere to the norms and principles of the constitution. It is to enforce the Constitution in its true spirit and letter [that] guarantees fundamental rights and freedoms to citizens.... These fundamental rights and freedoms are sacrosanct. They are sublime. Their violation or abridgment is a serious matter. These rights ... are fundamental issues and civilized societies take a stand on fundamental issues." According to Chief Justice Chaudhry, the job of the Pakistan courts is "to create and sustain an environment in which there is supremacy of the Constitution and rule of law.... The poor and the downtrodden sections of society must be given a stake and treated as equal citizens of the nation. This is how nations are formed and this is how societies move on to develop and progress."

A speech that might sound familiar in the democratic West was, in the eyes of Pakistan's military ruler, seen as something akin to treason. For much of its postindependence history, Pakistan's judiciary had been an apologist for military coups, interventions, and military interference. How is it then that in 2007 it was the Pakistani lawyers who galvanized the people into mass protests using the language of human rights and freedom and at the same time polarized the judiciary and radicalized large parts of political society?

Some of the answers to this question lie in Pakistan's colonial past and its confrontation with globalization and human rights. During all of Pakistan's turbulent sixty-year postindependence history, remnants of the British Raj have continuously reappeared in its political and legal systems. Since partition and independence in the 1940s, Victorian colonialism has continued as a ghostly default reference point for Pakistan's law, order, and probity. In the 1950s, almost without exception, lawyer-politicians making decisions perpetuated the courts and legal institutions they had inherited from the British, at least as far as the formal structure of the institutions is concerned. Even when the Islamist movement forced Pakistan's politicians to face the issue of Islamic identity-a question that had produced the 1962 Constitution that established sharia as Pakistan's basic law-the fundamental anglophone structure of the courts continued.

With each successive constitutional amendment, Pakistan's colonial past has cast a shadow, though increasingly refashioned over each decade as the international principle of the "rule of law." Each successive military government, including the present...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2009
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804760950
• ISBN 13: 9780804760959
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 280
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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