International Human Rights Law: Cases, Materials, Commentary
Olivier De SchutterThis course book offers a trajectory through the regime of international human rights law – its rules, institutions, and processes. It does not confine itself to the international dimension, however. Although human rights have migrated to international law since the Second World War, they live in a permanent nostalgia for where they come from: the liberal constitutions of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when they emerged as the Enlightenment’s most visible response to the tyranny of monarchs and to the weight of tradition and prejudice. And, as we shall see, the colonization of international law by human rights perfectly illustrates the formation of a ‘self-contained regime’ – one of those regimes that international lawyers are sometimes tempted to ignore, because they know they cannot be domesticated entirely.