Andrew Kuper - Global Responsibilities: Who Must Deliver on Human Rights?

One moral discourse now dominates international law and politics: the language of rights. It is the basic normative currency for addressing political, social, and economic injustices and insecurity. There are many benefits to this common currency. On its own, however, it is prone to spirals of devaluation. When we call something a right, we are at least claiming that it is urgent and deserving of priority in reasoning and action; but when almost every personal and political demand is couched as a right, this sense of overriding importance is lost, and the meaning and value of rights-talk can be undermined. We care about human rights because we understand them to be more than careless rhetoric or gestures that are so vacuous as to be a bitter mockery to the poor and needy. Human rights must be practical entitlements that potentially make a difference to the people who hold them.

Why is the language of rights so vulnerable to profligacy and devaluation, and how can it be brought under control? Few questions are more important. A number of theorists have recently converged on a striking answer: The proliferating language and politics of rights has often obscured the need to specify who bears the counterpart obligations to deliver on those rights. In a world of severe deprivation, in which absolute poverty But it is not a task that can be responsibly avoided.

Unless a person or her representative can identify the agents against whom her right is held, her right may amount to little more than useless words. If, on the other hand, there is an identifiable agent or set of agents that has obligations to herand is failing to live up to those obligationsthen the situation and possibilities are quite different: There is someone at fault, someone against whom she or her representative could lay a complaint or approach with a complaint, and perhaps even an effective procedure through which to ensure enforcement of her rights and remedies for any rights violations. In this way, accounts of the concrete obligations of particular agents, which correlate with specific rights, could dramatically reduce the vagueness and idealization that beset our practical thinking about human rights.

The pressing conceptual and political task of this volume is to begin to consider, in a consistent and systematic way, the question: Who must do what for whom? This task must be understood in historical context. The discourse of rights achieved preeminence at a time when the state was generally assumed to be the only agent tasked with meeting rights-claims. This assumption is explicit in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. Yet it proved a notoriously simplistic assumption, out of kilter with messy realities. Because of what is bluntly called globalization, the political picture has become even more complex. Effective and legitimate power is no longer solely attributed to states, but is ascribed also to a variety of non-state actors such as non-governmental organizations (NGOs), corporations, and intergovernmental institutions. Intensified global communication, legal rules, economic interactions, networks, as well as multilateral institutions have contributed also to a dramatic rise in the number of groups claiming that they have certain rights and that those rights are being violated. The usefulness and resonance of the language of rights has led, moreover, to numerous other claimspreviously articulated in terms of needs or interestsbeing articulated or reformulated as rights-claims. In short, an unprecedented increase has occurred in the