International Legal Evangelism: Intelligence, Reconnaissance & Missions

equirements of human dignity—to communicate loudly and publicly to every
sovereign that these demands are not just the perverse contentions of impudent
troublemakers but a normative heritage that stands now, in the broad recognition
and solemn agreement of the whole world.
Some will say that, even if we accept this, it doesn’t follow that a global
consensus on the meaning of particular human rights is correct and that the law of
any individual nation is wrong to the extent that it is at odds with that. Considered
as moral propositions, human rights are universal. But universalism is not a
consensus notion; it is an objective truth notion; it says that the truth is the same
everywhere, whatever people happen to believe. Uniformity doesn’t guarantee that
we have all got the right answer; all it means is that we have the same answer.
Certainly this is something that humility compels us to recognize on questions like
(say) the juvenile death penalty. The outliers may be right and the consensus may
be wrong. If God or nature countenances the death penalty at all, it may be better
for it to be administered in the case of young murderers like Christopher Simmons
on the basis of case-by-case decision-making by juries rather than by the per se
rule that the international community seems to favour. At least for these cases
where good faith disagreement seems possible, it is not clear why, in the words of
the preamble to The Universal Declaration of Human Rights that “a common
understanding of these rights and freedoms is of the greatest importance for the full
realization” of the pledge that Member States have given to one another, to
promote universal respect for human rights.
You might think that is a culpably conservative position, selling short our
liberal convictions in the name of fallibility. So be it. There is more to be said
about the value of treating like cases alike in the world, in the realm of human
rights: I have tried to say some of it in a forthcoming book based on my 2007
Storrs Lecture at Yale, entitled Partly Laws Common to All Mankind.
Let me mitigate by saying this. One thing that I hope will not be
controversial is that whatever attitude we take towards fallibility and commonality
in this area, we cannot any longer accept the old-fashioned contention that respect
for sovereignty, in and of itself, requires us to mute or suppress our respect for the
individual victims of sovereignty—our respect for the people whose fundamental
rights we judge are clearly being violated by their government. We may counsel
“hands-off” for reasons of prudence, or out of respect for the differences revealed
as between democratic decision-making in our country and democratic decisionmaking
in another country on issues where we know there is room for good faith
disagreement. But we must not abandon our concern for the victims of tyranny —
our public and lawful concern—or deafen ourselves to the cries of the oppressed
simply on account of our respect for the tyrant’s sovereignty.
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