Genealogy of Human Rights and International Law in Global Contexts

Abstract

In the dominant legal discourse in the West (including Japan), human rights are described as a final truth, admitting of no fundamental critique. Standard textbooks on Constitutional and International Law present a single historiography of linear progress, delineating a series of epoch-making events solely within the boundaries of Europe. Human rights are considered to be the best because they are a product of the “Modern”, a historic era of human emancipation. However, colonialism is embedded in the Modern era as an expressive form of Modern Imperialism. Indeed, from a non-European viewpoint, it is colonial domination that may properly be posited as the origin of human rights and international law. Further, human rights and international law were born not in Westphalian Europe but within the global context of the “Conquest of New World” beginning in the fifteenth century, as described by vibrant recent academic work critiquing a geopolitics of knowledge and aimed at decolonizing legal discourse. Inspired by this discussion, this essay brings to the foreground non-European perspectives that have been made invisible in the dominant historiography of human rights and international law and thus helps to construct an alternative path for relativizing the dominant Euro-centric narrative celebrating linear progress. It also critically portrays the contemporary interplay of colonialism and human rights/international law in global and internal contexts. By doing so, this essay joins, in the words of leading Third World international lawyers Anthony Anghie and B.S. Chimni, a project fundamentally seeking to transform human rights and international law from being a language of oppression to a language of emancipation: a body of rules and practices that reflect and embody the struggle and aspirations of peoples and which, thereby, promote global justice truly.