Safe Spaces Human Rights Education in Diverse Contexts

DISCOURSE, BETRAYAL, CRITIQUE
As noted, these critiques are not new. Bentham (Schultz, 2004:44) in the 1700s
referred to rights as “nonsense on stilts”. Marx (Verma, 2000:69) had his own
critical ideas on the rights of man whilst Critical Legal Studies (Ward, 2004) has
consistently challenged human rights jurisprudence within legal theory over many
decades. Critiques emanating from within the human rights field suggest a longstanding
productive endeavor which has overtaken the HRE field. Over the past
two decades these critiques grew more industrious. When Derrida delivered the
Oxford Amnesty International Lecture in 1992 11 , human rights scholars and
practitioners anxiously awaited the resurrection of the human subject in whose
name Amnesty International is doing human rights work. The subject, ostensibly,
had been ‘deconstructed’, and given Derrida’s status, the human rights sector
experienced a palpable crisis. Not surprisingly, Derrida did not disappoint since, as
he argued, deconstruction never had an interest in cancelling out anything. Rather,
deconstruction is a de-layering affirmation. The human rights sector thus received
a deconstructing affirmation that suggested a disposition of permanent selfreflexive
critique. But, instead of working with this critical lens, it opted for a
conservative reading in the form of a declarationist affirmation. As Derrida noted
in the lecture, since and before the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human
rights in 1948, human rights are continually transmuted into divergent functional
forms. Informing geo-political arrangements and relations amongst nations,
inspiring social movements, challenging violations, and holding governments
accountable, are some of these functional forms. Others include functioning as a
protection mechanism, a monitoring and evaluation tool, adjudicatory frames,
minimum standards, normative ideals, legislative principles and philosophies of
education. Cardinally, human rights are also the surrogate of new or post-conflict
states such as Sierra Leone, Rwanda, South Africa, Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia. It is
also driving the logic of the political intervention in Sudan and the creation of a
new Southern Sudanese state. Moreover, it is the central constitutive element of
what Derrida and Habermas view as the ‘new international’ 12 and the popular
protest in the North African and Middle Eastern states that started in January 2011.
The inscription of human rights into international law and United Nations
resolutions is also demonstrated by the ongoing investigation into the war on terror
and the invasion of Iraq in 2003 13 . This follows on from special tribunals on
massive human rights violations and war crimes and the prosecutions administered
by the International Criminal Court in The Hague. The plight of the Somalis,
Palestinians, Kurds, Chechens, Tibetans and many other ‘peoples across the world
and the African continent are framed in human rights terms without the
concomitant action to challenge these conditions. This is, according to Habermas
(2006:27), the consequence of the “under-institutionalization of cosmopolitan law”
which compels the “politics of human rights […] to become a mere anticipation
(original emphasis) of the future cosmopolitan condition which it simultaneously
seeks to realize”. The language of rights is constitutive of this future cosmopolitan
condition.
With Derrida’s deconstructive critique on the one hand, and Habermas’s
reconstructive critique on the other, human rights thinking were already deepened.
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