Human Rights as Demands for Communicative Action

Journal of Political Philosophy

Volumn 20, Issue 4, 2012, Pages 407-431

  Gauri, Varun ^a   Brinks, Daniel M ^b  

^a WORLD BANK   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84869095711     PISSN: 09638016     EISSN: 14679760     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9760.2012.00421.x     Document Type: Article

References (136)

1. For their comments and suggestions, the authors would like to thank Bob Goodin, three anonymous reviewers working for this journal, Charles Beitz, Michael Goodhart, Aaron James, Thomas Pogge, Jorn Sonderholm, and the participants in panels and seminars at the Law and Society Association Meetings (Chicago, September 2010), the University of Bergen (March 2011), and a Central European University conference on the right to health (Budapest, June 2011). Nevertheless, the views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors alone. They do not necessarily represent the views of the World Bank or its Executive Directors.
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37. O'Neill, O. 2000. Bounds of Justice. Cambridge: Cambrdige University Press.
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39. Rajamani, L. 2007. Public interest environmental litigation in India: exploring issues of access, participation, equity, effectiveness and sustainability. Journal of Environmental Law, 19, 293-321.
40. Rawls, J. 1996. Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press.
41. Rodríguez Garavito, C. 2011. Beyond the courtroom: the impact of judicial activism on socioeconomic rights in Latin America. Texas Law Review, 89, 1669-977.
42. Rodríguez Garavito, C. and D. Rodríguez-Franco 2010. Cortes y Cambio Social: Cómo la Corte Constitucional Transformó el Desplazamiento Forzado en Colombia. Bogotá: Dejusticia.
43. Roux, T. 2009. Principle and pragmatism on the Constitutional Court of South Africa. International Journal of Constitutional Law, 7, 106-38.
44. Sabel, C. F. and W. H. Simon 2003. Destabilization rights: how public law litigation succeeds. Harvard Law Review, 117, 1015-101.
45. Sathe, S. 2002. Judicial Activism in India. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
46. Saxena, D. N. C. 2002. First Report of the Commissioner, In the matter of: PUCL v Union of India and Others. New Delhi. Available at .
47. Schelling, T. C. 1980. The Strategy of Conflict. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
48. Sen, A. 2004. Elements of a theory of human rights. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 32, 315-56.
49. Shankar, S. and P. B. Mehta 2008. Courts and socioeconomic rights in India. Pp. 146-182 in V. Gauri and D. M. Brinks (eds), Courting Social Justice: Judicial Enforcement of Social and Economic Rights in the Developing World. New York: Cambridge University Press.
50. Shue, H. 1988. Mediating duties. Ethics, 98, 687-704.
51. Shue, H. 1996. Basic Rights. Second edition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
52. Singer, P. 1972. Famine, affluence, and morality. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 1, 229-43.
53. Sunstein, C. 2004. The Second Bill of Rights. New York: Basic Books.
54. Susanti, B. 2008. The implementation of the rights to health care and education in Indonesia. Pp. 224-267 in V. Gauri and D. M. Brinks (eds), Courting Social Justice: Judicial Enforcement of Social and Economic Rights in the Developing World. New York: Cambridge University Press.
55. Tate, C. N. and T. Vallinder 1995. The global expansion of judicial power: the judicialization of politics. Pp. 1-24 in C. N. Tate and T. Vallinder (eds), The Global Expansion of Judicial Power. New York: New York University Press.
56. Tushnet, M. 2009. Weak Courts, Strong Rights: Judicial Review and Social Welfare Rights in Comparative Constitutional Law. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
57. Wilson, B., R. Cordero and J. Carlos 2006. Legal opportunity structures and social movements: the effects of institutional change on Costa Rican politics. Comparative Political Studies, 39, 325-51.
58. Yamin, A. E. and S. Gloppen, eds. 2011. Litigating Health Rights: Can Courts Bring More Justice to Health? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
59. Yamin, A. E. and O. Parra-Vera 2010. Judicial protection of the right to health in Colombia: from social demands to individual claims to public debates. Hastings International and Comparative Law Review, 33 (#2), 101-29.
60. We use "indeterminate" rather than the more fraught term "imperfect."Goodin (2011) attempts to show, on the assumption that the content of the duty has been specified, that the establishment of institutions that consolidate imperfect duties can solve the problem of allocating duties.
61. Schelling 1980, p. 54.
62. Rawls 1996, pp. 236-7.
63. Shue 1996. For instance, the right to life entails not only the perfect duty not to murder but also the imperfect duty to rescue those whose life security is threatened. So the secondary and tertiary duties associated with the right to life are indeterminate. For Shue, the primary duty relating to basic rights consists in the (mostly negative) duty to "respect" or refrain from harming; but, because many will predictably fail to meet this duty, there are also "secondary" duties to "protect" people from harm done by third parties, and to "assist" people whose basic rights have been violated.
64. Lichtenberg (2010) analyzes, for instance, the complexity of indeterminate primary duties associated with the rights to life and political self-determination (e.g., don't buy "blood diamonds" from conflict zones).
65. On human rights, see for example: Beitz 2009; O'Neill 2000; Pogge 2002; Shue 1988, 1996. On judicial remedies, see for example: Fredman 2008; Liu 2008; Sabel and Simon 2003; Sunstein 2004; Tushnet 2009.
66. Shue 1996, pp. 41-6. This example is typical of social and economic rights claims, in which the standard problem involves a surplus of eligible candidates, rather than a shortage. For this reason, the example is, for present purposes, more illustrative than Singer's (1972) famous example involving a person who was passing a child drowning in a pond but refused to dive in because he did not want to get his clothes muddy. The moral demand on Singer's stranger was more specific because there was only one causally effective action-diving in and rescuing the child.
67. Fruttero and Gauri 2005.
68. O'Neill 2000, p. 105.
69. For example, Chaudhury and Devarajan 2006; Garman etal. 2001; Jan 2003; Keefer and Khemani 2005.
70. Beitz and Goodin 2009, p. 16.
71. Note that courts have already devised tools to deal with such arguments, sometimes giving them credence and sometimes not, under theories of joint and several liability, for example.
72. Sen 2004, pp. 339, 340-1.
73. Shue 1988, p. 703.
74. Beitz 2009. These two grounds for duties related to human rights are, potentially, activated in different circumstances. Sen's understanding of reasonable consideration might apply to situations in which the interests are not "maximally urgent." For instance, if a whistle blower in a rich country unjustly loses a government job under a set of procedures that do not involve anything like "due process of law, " his human rights may have been violated, and I may perhaps be under some obligation to give reasonable consideration to assisting him-if I am in a position to help-but it is not a situation in which interests are maximally urgent. But for present purposes, the situation does look like a claim involving beneficence, even if it is not "strong beneficence" as Beitz defines it.
75. Gauri and Lieberman 2006.
76. Leclerc-Madlala 2006.
77. Sen 2004, p. 347.
78. Sen 2004, p. 348.
79. Beitz 2009.
80. Beitz and Goodin 2009, pp. 15, 17.
81. Shue 1988, p. 703.
82. Shue 1996, p. 170.
83. Pogge 2002.
84. Pogge 2002, pp. 64, 245.
85. Beitz 2009, p. 171.
86. In this respect social and economic rights are no different from civil and political rights. Beitz notes that the right to free speech, for instance, summarizes a variety of obligations that several different actors might have for supporting freedom of expression. Beitz does not offer these examples, but one can see that the reasons for a government not to limit speech might differ from those underlying academic freedom in a university, which in turn differ from the openness to communication and reciprocity necessary for a good marriage. The reasons are different, but the moral right to free speech summarizes them and points to, using Sen's phrase, the same underlying freedom implicated in each instance.
87. Beitz 2009.
88. Gilabert 2011.
89. James 2005.
90. And perhaps because Beitz' model does not examine domestic human rights practice in detail, his account of how best to allocate duties to respond is insufficiently normative. Indeed, his account of anti-poverty rights (Beitz 2009, pp. 161-174), in which the discussion of how to allocate duties is included, consists largely of a critique of the philosophical literature, rather than an examination of the options available to participants in the practice of human rights when they propose and allocate the duties correlative to human rights claims.
91. If human dignity is a cornerstone concept for contemporary human rights, that virtue found its first explicit political expression in eighteenth century constitutions. The writing of the UDHR drew significant inspiration from the domestic constitutions of key states. As Habermas (2010, p. 479) puts it, "[t]he investment of the law with a moral charge is a legacy of the constitutional revolutions of the eighteenth century."
92. The great majority of national constitutions, especially recent ones, include some account of basic social and economic rights. In many countries, social movements against caste, landlessness, hunger, illiteracy, ethnic exclusion, and poverty increasingly use the discourse and framing of human rights.
93. Hirschl 2008. Tate and Vallinder 1995.
94. Bergallo 2005. Hoffman and Bentes 2008. Wilson etal. 2006. Yamin and Parra-Vera 2010.
95. Berger 2008. Roux 2009.
96. Khosla 2010. Sathe 2002. Shankar and Mehta 2008.
97. Summary assessments include Gauri and Brinks 2008a; Langford 2009; Tushnet 2009; Yamin and Gloppen 2011.
98. Pogge 2002, p. 45.
99. Indian Medical Association v. VP Shantha AIR (1995) 6 SC 651, India.
100. Juggankhan v. State of MP AIR 1965 SC 831, India.
101. New Clicks South Africa (Pty) Limited v. Dr Manto Tshabalala-Msimang NO and Another (2004), South Africa.
102. Pharmaceutical Society of South Africa and others v. Ministers of Health and Another, South Africa.
103. Among many in Brazil, Acordão no. 2002.001.26562, Rio de Janeiro.
104. Ojuwe v. Federal Government of Nigeria 3 Nig. Weekly L. Reps. 913, 2005, Nigeria.
105. Suo Moto v. State of Rajasthan and Others, Rajasthan High Court 2004, India.
106. In previous work, we summarize these kinds of cases in a typology we call a social and economic rights triangle. See Gauri and Brinks (2008b).
107. Mashavha v. President of the RSA, 2004 (12) BLCR (CC), South Africa.
108. M.C. Mehta v. Union Of India & Others, 2 April, 2003, Writ Petition (civil) 4677 of 1985.
109. Sabel and Simon 2003, pp. 1056, 1062.
110. 2001 (1) SA 46 (CC).
111. Langford 2011.
112. Liebenberg 2010. Tushnet 2009.
113. Susanti 2008.
114. Desai and Muralidhar 2000.
115. Arango 2009, p. 117.
116. Decision T-025. 2004. Constitutional Court of Colombia, Third Review Chamber.
117. Cepeda 2009, pp. 21, 27.
118. Arango 2009, p. 138.
119. Rodríguez Garavito 2011, p. 16.
120. Rodríguez Garavito and Rodríguez-Franco 2010, p. 102.
121. Fredman 2008. Gauri 2011.
122. Gauri 2011.
123. Banik 2010. People's Union of Civil Liberties versus Union of India and others, Writ Petition (Civil) No. 196 of 2001. Supreme Court of India 2002.
124. Links to these reports, along with court orders related to the case, are on the website of the Right to Food Campaign, available at .
125. Saxena 2002.
126. Rajamani 2007. Courts can also fail, of course, for other reasons. In any given jurisdiction, important human rights claims may not be justiciable, needy rights holders may not be able to access courts, and it may be that important duty bearers can not be compelled to appear (e.g., foreign citizens). But what interests us here are the modes through which successful courts allocate duties, rather than design of particular legal and judicial institutions. These modes of structuring communication need not be specific to courts.
127. Transcripts are available at .
128. Habermas 1984, p. 137.
129. Habermas 1996, p. 18.
130. Habermas 1984, pp. 85-6.
131. Habermas 1996, p. 4.
132. Habermas 1984, p. 100.
133. Shue 1988, p. 702.
134. Johnson 1991.
135. Brinks and Gauri 2008.
136. Habermas 1996, p. 5.