Preliminary Material
Preliminary Material
in Post-Backlash Human Rights LawSearch for other papers by Sanja Dragić in
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Relying on the scholarship analyzing the process of making states behave in compliance with international human rights law, the book provides for the definition of the political phenomenon in the background – the human rights backlash. According to this literature, international human rights norms taken by international organizations, Western states, and international and domestic non-governmental organizations – the “agents of norm internalization” are “internalized” in states. The final stage of this process is a stage where states act in compliance with human rights out of beliefs supporting it and not due to coercive action. This process is termed here the “norm internalization process”. Based on these insights, human rights backlash is defined as the states’ strong negative reaction against the agents and occasionally tools of human rights norm internalization. Although in most instances its impact does not result in the creation of the new norms, there are examples where this occurs. This study is dedicated to some of the new rules enacted as a reaction to the backlash. In order to explore “post-backlash human rights law”, I have selected three case studies. These are rules regulating reservations and withdrawals from human rights treaties, the right to foreign funding for civil society as part of the right to freedom of association, and the norm of immunities of senior state officials during their tenure of office. The principal focus of the book is on the processes that have preceded the rules. By process, I refer to the exchange of legal arguments before the new rules have appeared – justifications put forward by the opposing states and the arguments and the manner in which the international community has responded to them. The image of post-backlash human rights law emerging from this study is the one of a set of rules that reinforce the powers of the agents of norm internalization based on the moral authority of humanism and sometimes under the cover and legitimacy of substantive human rights while not taking into adequate consideration justifications invoked by backlashing states.
Preliminary Material