Criminalizing Human Rights

Abstract

The priorities reflected in the overarching system that includes the regimes dealing with international human rights law, international humanitarian law, and international criminal law are currently undergoing a gradual but highly significant transformation. The cause is a growing preoccupation with ‘atrocity crimes’ in each of the three fields, along with the imposition of criminal sanctions in response to an ever increasing range of violations, the recasting of other violations as crimes (ecocide), and the urge to describe a great many situations as involving genocide. These developments have diminished the attention given to non-criminal violations and to techniques other than prosecution, and facilitated continuing neglect of the structural dimensions underpinning violations. In the foreign policies of key western states, sanctions against individuals now attract more attention than other human rights responses. The risk is that these trends will entrench an atrocity-centred normative hierarchy, empower judges and criminal lawyers at the expense of social movements, shine a spotlight on individual rather than collective responsibility, reinforce problematic North-South dynamics, and distort resource allocations at the international level.