Suchergebnisse

Introduction -- The excesses of human rights : beginning to think of a futural future for human rights -- (Re)Doing rights : the performativity of human rights to come -- Universality as universalisation : the universality off human rights to come -- Beyond consensus : the agonism of human rights to come -- Rethinking paradoxical sovereignty : the on tology of human rights to come -- On translation : the practice of human rights to come -- Rereading feminist engagements with rights via human rights to come -- Conclusion as non-conclusion

Abstract
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is familiar to international human rights lawyers worldwide. Celebrations of its adoption have included commemorative sessions held in the United Nations (UN) General Assembly during milestone anniversary years. Scholarship has not yet considered these sessions together, exploring what may be learned about the UDHR in this UN body as a result. This is the work that the present article undertakes. It finds that, when considered collectively, anniversary days in the General Assembly assist in creating a picture of the UDHR as a legal text in time. This reveals how commemorative activity has engaged with the UDHR in fluid ways and also in ways that stress or demonstrate aspects of continuity. From this analysis, it is possible to deepen understanding of engagements with the UDHR throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and anniversary days emerge as an under-utilized resource for international human rights lawyers.

ABSTRACT
This article explores the relationship between the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) of the United Nations Human Rights Council and temporality. In contrast to dominant understandings that view time as an external constraint or pressure acting on the system—the UPR existing in time—I argue that internal temporal logics underpin the UPR in important and constitutive ways. In other words, time is an ontological feature of the UPR. This internal temporal ontology is multiple, complex and often paradoxical. It includes cyclicality, linearity, discontinuity and duration. Rather than threatening to undermine the UPR process, I argue that the tensions and paradoxes of these coexisting temporalities actually work to maintain its operation. This way of apprehending time and the UPR facilitates fresh insights for scholars and practitioners who wish to understand this monitoring mechanism more deeply as a phenomenon. It offers a new lens through which to read the UPR's identity and operation.

Human rights were a defining discourse of the 20th century. The opening decades of the twenty-first, however, have witnessed increasing claims that the time of this discourse as an emancipatory tool is up. Focusing on international human rights law, I offer a response to these claims. Drawing from Elizabeth Grosz, Drucilla Cornell and Judith Butler, I propose that a productive future for this area of law in facilitating radical social change can be envisaged by considering more closely the relationship between human rights and temporality and by thinking through a conception of rights which is untimely. This involves abandoning commitment to linearity, progression and predictability in understanding international human rights law and its development and viewing such as based on a conception of the future that is unknown and uncontrollable, that does not progressively follow from the present, and that is open to embrace of the new.

The critique of human rights has proliferated in critical legal thinking over recent years, making it clear that we can no longer uncritically approach human rights in their liberal form. In this article I assert that after the critique of rights one way human rights may be productively re-engaged in radical politics is by drawing from the radical democratic tradition. Radical democratic thought provides plausible resources to rework the shortcomings of liberal human rights, and allows human rights to be brought within the purview of a wider political project adopting a critical approach to current relations of power. Building upon previous re-engagements with rights using radical democratic thought, I return to the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe to explore how human rights may be thought as an antagonistic hegemonic activity within a critical relation to power, a concept which is fundamentally futural, and may emerge as one site for work towards radical and plural democracy. I also assert, via Judith Butler's model of cultural translation, that a radical democratic practice of human rights may be advanced which resonates with and builds upon already existing activism, thereby holding possibilities to persuade those who remain sceptical as to radical re-engagements with rights.

The universality of human rights has been a fiercely contested issue throughout their history. This article contributes to scholarly engagements with the universality of human rights by proposing a re-engagement with this concept in a way that is compatible with the aims of radical politics. Instead of a static attribute or characteristic of rights this article proposes that universality can be thought of as, drawing from Judith Butler, an ongoing process of universalisation. Universality accordingly emerges as a site of powerful contest between competing ideas of what human rights should mean, do or say, and universal concepts are continually reworked through political activity. This leads to a differing conception of rights politics than traditional liberal approaches but, moreover, challenges such approaches. This understanding of universality allows human rights to come into view as potentially of use in interrupting liberal regimes and, crucially, opens possibilities to reclaim the radical in rights.